Lens advice!

[divinemadness]

mine pretty darn sharp at 300mm, jsut remember to stop oit down to about f8 and you should see a good improvement. also there is an older version of the apo, the new one is the DG super II i think and its optically far superior apparently, you can tell which one it is as the finish is matte and slightly textured with a red ring near the end of the lens. you probebly still got a good price at £140 for the new one, i wouldnt worry about it

There are loads about, the older ones were the Super Macro II DL and the Super Macro II APO - The DL retailed for around £99 generally and the APO for £180.

I have the APO version.

Now they have the Super Macro II DG and Super Macro II DG APO. Having read up on the lenses a fair amount, I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing significantly different about the new APO, compared to the old APO, except some marketing speil from Sigma about how it is well suited to Digital SLR. In my opinion all that has happened is they have added the DG label for an excuse to bump prices by £20-£30 and shift more units to less clued up people because it is 'ideal for digital'

Still, I'm perfectly happy with mine, it is soft over 200mm, even at F8, and this is immediately noticeable next to more expensive glass, but as the saying goes - you get what you pay for.

if you shoot in raw you can recover huge amounts of sharpness (16bit files tolerate sharpening far greater than your average 8bit jpeg)

RAW (NEF RAW anyhow) is 12bit. Jpeg is 8Bit and TIFF is 16bit (although you can select lower if you want) - technicalities aside - the point still stands. I don't understand why anyone would want to shoot JPeg primarily anyway.

[hoodmeister]

the sensor in a dSLR (unless you're loaded and bought a canon 1ds/1d mkII or 5D) is smaller than the 35mm frame - as a result the sensor takes its image from the central region of the lens. manufacturers have difficulty maintaining image quality towards the edges of their lenses but the centres are almost aways consistent. as a result dSLRs - despite no using the entire lens itself do use [what I like to call] the sweet spot in the centre.

Not so much the case with lenses like the Sigma 18-200... It's a digital crop lens only, use it on a film or 35mm equiv. and you'll get major vignetting... To cut back on size / costs / weight the lens is designed to only project an image circle of APS-C size. AFAIK, the Nikkor 18-70 ED is the same. What you say definitely tends to apply to most lenses, though

Secondly, cheers for the advice, but i'm not really in the market for an all-in-one lens anymore. I've decided that, although it's a bit more hassle, i'm better off getting a few lenses. So my kit bag now looks like this :

Nikkor 28-80 (Will become my "all purpose" lens. Only intend to use it when I really don't want to carry any more than one lens, and I know i'll want a decent zoom range)
Sigma Macro 50 (For "proper" macro work, and also when I want a lens around 50mm and have it with me ~ as it's very sharp)
Nikkor 70-210 (Telescopic. For those longer throw shots. Not received this lens yet, but have ordered one)

Sooooo that still leaves me with a defficiency in the wide angle range. So that's what i'm looking for at the moment, either a wide angle prime (<19mm) Or a wide angle zoom without much throw (18-35, 18-50). The Nikkor 18-70 ED looks very nice, but I can't justify the outlay for what is 90% a range I don't need, not at least when I have a kit bag with me.

[divinemadness]

Not so much the case with lenses like the Sigma 18-200... It's a digital crop lens only, use it on a film or 35mm equiv. and you'll get major vignetting... To cut back on size / costs / weight the lens is designed to only project an image circle of APS-C size. AFAIK, the Nikkor 18-70 ED is the same. What you say definitely tends to apply to most lenses, though

Anything Labelled DX by Nikon, EF-S by Canon and DC (not DG) by Sigma will only work on APS-C sensors. I am unsure as to how Tamron/Olympus/Minolta mark them.

[shiato storm]

Anything Labelled DX by Nikon, EF-S by Canon and DC (not DG) by Sigma will only work on APS-C sensors. I am unsure as to how Tamron/Olympus/Minolta mark them.

tamron = di II
olympus use the 4/3's system...
minolta = havent got a clue, sorry!

[hoodmeister]

The 70-210 arrived today...

I've been playing with it for all of ten minutes... But first impressions are... Great!

Here's a quick (very quick) comparison shot. Both images were taken on a tripod, F22, 5" exp. I should point out that by this point it was nearly dark... I should also apologise for the screwy colours... The colour profile on my cam was set for something very different, and I forgot to change it

Top shot ~ Nikkor 28-80 3.3-5.6 @ 28mm
Bottom shot ~ Nikkor 70-210 4-5.6 @210mm

[shiato storm]

nice...looks like you've got a good lens there

[hoodmeister]

Right, after much farting around, the second part of this two-peice affair arrived today ~ The sigma 15-30.

Insanely overcast, misty, dreary day, but I just went out for five minutes to get some test shots. All were captured in RAW, converted to JPEG (Nikon Capture) Then resized and compressed (Irfanview) That's it. These shots were also all taken @ 15mm... I have every intention of using the full range of focal lengths, but the novelty of wide angle meant I didn't take the lens off 15mm when I went out

Super boring landscape of a field. Wooo. Edit : I should point out that the horizon on this field really is that curve, it's not distortion. I took some shots of guttering and stuff, and they came out nice n' straight.


It's me! I like the way the distortion makes my nose look the size of a small continent. Complete with volcano.


More fun with distortion, this time an exciting [genuine] petrol can.


Aaand one last one of me... This time not holding the lens mere centimetres from my nose.


So first impressions... Very nice. IQ is really rather good, 100% crops still have a lot of detail. Lens has a very nice feel about it, too... Will post some pics of it on the body later. I'm interested to see how sharpness compares to my 50mm sigma, too... So i'll compare those later, aswell