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Sigma 500mm F5.6 DN OS Sport Review

Dustin Abbott

February 22nd, 2024

I was very interested in the premise of this lens when Sigma let me know about it, as this is just the kind of lens that people on all camera platforms routinely ask for – a long distance, high performing telephoto prime that isn’t ridiculously big or ridiculously expensive. The Sigma 500mm F5.6 DG DN OS | Sport is (at least on paper), the perfect telephoto option for those looking for a reasonably compact and lightweight long telephoto prime. The maximum aperture of F5.6 provides a nice balance between being large enough to be useful while small enough to keep the size (and the price!) of the lens down. Even F4 lenses at 500mm are very expensive: prices can range anywhere from $6000 (Sigma’s own 500mm F4 for DSLR mounts) to nearly $12,000 (Canon EF 500mm F4L II). The Sigma 500mm DN is much more approachable at $3000 USD; but is it worth buying? Explore my thoughts either in my video review below or by reading on.

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Thanks to Sigma Canada (Gentec) for sending me a review loaner of this lens. As always, this is a completely independent review. *The tests and most of the photos that I share as a part of my review cycle have been done with the Sony a7RV along with the Sony Alpha 1 that serve as my benchmark cameras for Sony lenses.

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The Sigma 500mm DN Sport is being released on Sony E-mount (reviewed here) and on the Leica L-mount consortium where it will function as a first party lens. Leica users (as usual) will have a few advantages due to restrictions put in place by Sony for third party telephoto lenses. We will detail the reality of those in this review.

There are relatively few ways to reach 500mm on Sony in a native lens. Sigma provides the most options now, as there is this new prime lens along with their 60-600mm Sport (my review here) and 150-600mm Sport (my review here) lenses. Sony has a the 200-600mm G lens (my review here) that I will reference some in this review as I happen to own it. Tamron makes a 150-500mm VC lens for Sony (my review here), and there is a recent inexpensive TTArtisan 500mm F6.3 manual focus prime that I haven’t reviewed. The Sigma 500mm DN Sport immediately has one advantage going for it – it’s maximum aperture of F5.6 at 500mm is faster than any of the alternatives, most of which are F6.3 at 500mm and one (the Tamron) has a maximum aperture of F6.7. That does come with some advantages, both in the ability to get slightly faster shutter speeds as well as providing more shallow depth of field.

Sigma made significant strides forward in some key elements of lens design (particularly for telephotos) in their release of the 60-600mm DN Sport lens. The two most important areas were in the area of autofocus (high powered HLA autofocus motor) and optical stabilizer (OS2 algorithm). Those lessons learned are on display here, as Sigma has used these technologies to make for a better, more complete telephoto prime.

Does all of this add up a telephoto prime lens that is worth investing in over the alternative zoom lenses? That’s the question of the hour…and one we’ll explore here.

Build and Handling

Typically one chooses a prime lens over a zoom lens covering the same focal length for one of three reasons (or some combination of the three). These include:

  1. Faster maximum aperture
  2. Superior image quality
  3. Smaller size and/or lighter weight.

We’ve already determined that the Sigma 500mm DN has a very slight maximum aperture advantage, though few would argue that the one third stop aperture advantage the prime has over the zoom lenses is meaningful. We’ll break down if the image quality favors the prime in the IQ section below, but there’s no question that the size and weight favors this prime lens. Sigma is touting it as a handholdable lens. In Sony E-mount the 500mm DN weighs 1365g (48oz) with the L-mount version slightly heavier at 1370g. The 150-600 Sport weighs 2100g (53% heavier) and the 60-600 Sport weighs 2500g (nearly 59% heavier).

The length is 236.6mm, with the 60-600mm Sport being nearly 280mm in length while the 150-600mm is 267mm long. The lens is slightly narrower at its widest point (107.6mm/4.2″), but the difference is that the prime lens only swells out to that width near the front element, while the zoom lenses are consistently thicker throughout the barrel. I happen to own the Sony 200-600mm G lens, and you can see that the 200-600mm dwarfs the size of the 500mm DN.

That final flare to the front element means that the front filter size is fairly large. It is 95mm, which is the same as the 150-600mm and slightly smaller than the 105mm of the 60-600mm.

Sigma divides its lenses into three different categories: Contemporary, Art, and Sport.  The Contemporary lineup gets the lowest level of build and weather sealing, while the lines are a little more blurred with the Art and Sport lenses.  Typically, however, the Sport lenses do have the highest grade of weather sealing because they are the most likely to be used in inclement conditions.  Many sporting events will take place regardless of weather conditions, and, surprisingly enough, most wildlife is waterproof!  With that in mind, the Sigma 500mm DN Sport has Sigma’s highest grade of weather sealing.  While I haven’t seen a diagram yet (I’m doing this review before the public release of the lens and before any such diagrams are available), Sigma says this of the weather sealing, “The mount connection, manual focus ring, zoom ring, switches, switch panel and exterior connection are all dust and splash resistant to prevent dust and dirt from entering the lens. Further, the front element of the lens features a water and oil repellent coating to facilitate maintenance when water droplets or dust adhere to the lens.”  That sounds like a very thorough weather sealing to me.

Sigma likes to mix materials on these Sport telephoto lens to try to find a balance between toughness and weight. They’ve mixed magnesium alloy metal bits with their high end plastics, which they call TSC, or “Thermally Stable Composites”. You will probably have a hard time telling which is which.

Sigma has really improved the feature set of their telephoto lenses, and they are currently as feature rich as anything out there. The 500mm DN employs a Focus Hold/Custom button in three different positions near the front of the lens, meaning that you have easy access to one regardless of how the lens is rotated. The function of that button can be set in the camera body.

There are two switches in that same section of the lens. On the left hand is the option to click/declick the aperture ring. That’s a feature video shooters value for the ability to rack smoothly through the various aperture values. On the right hand is an iris lock that can either lock you into the manual aperture ring (if that’s your preference) or lock you OUT of it if you happen to be someone who detests aperture rings.

The aperture ring has markings for each one third stop detent between F5.6 and F32, though there will be no detents if you select the declicked mode. This is the only the second Sigma telephoto to include an aperture ring after the 70-200mm F2.8 Sport (my review here).

Next comes the manual focus ring, which is fairly wide (27mm), has rubberized ribs, and has a nice bevel mid ring that makes it more ergonomic.

There’s a fairly standard (for Sigma) bank of switches along the left side of the lens about halfway up the lens.  The top switch (AF/MF) is larger than the other three, but the other three switches are smaller and flusher to the lens barrel.  The first of these is a focus limiter with three options, including Full, 10m to infinity, and minimum focus (3.2m) to 10m.  You can obviously increase focus speed by employing this and eliminating part of the focus range, though I did find that focus was fast enough that I never reached for it.  The third switch down is a three position switch for different OS (optical stabilizer) modes.  Mode 1 is the Standard mode, while Mode 2 should be utilized while panning, as one axis of stabilization will be turned off to provide for smoother side to side panning.   Sigma says of Mode 2 that, “In Mode 2, SIGMA’s Intelligent OS, an algorithm specially designed for panning shots, enables effective image stabilization even when the camera is moved vertically or diagonally, irrespective of the horizontal and vertical orientation.”  In other words, a smarter stabilizer that helps stabilize panning shots without getting in the way. The third position is an OFF switch for the stabilizer. 

Where things get a little confusing is that the final switch is dedicated to custom modes (OFF | C1 | C2).  On DSLRs you could buy the Sigma USB dock and use the Sigma Optimization Pro software to tweak some functionality (including the function of custom buttons), and, while that same functionality is available to Leica L mount customers, it isn’t for the Sony shooters who still make up the lion’s share of Sigma’s market).  That means that function of these switch positions is fixed, and they are really just more OS options.  C1 prioritizes stabilizing the viewfinder (probably a good option if you’re shooting video or just have shaky hands), while C2 is called “Moderate View” and seems to focus more on stabilizing the image at capture and less on stabilizing the viewfinder (a good option when panning, for example).  This final option option gives you the most stable results on your shots, but in most situations having a shaky viewfinder image at 500mm just complicates things.  C1 does a nice job of really keeping the viewfinder steady, though, and is a nice option for video capture.

If you are using the Leica L version of the lens and the USB dock, you’ll be able to also tweak the distance employed on the focus limiter and assign a new value to the custom buttons.

Sigma has employed their new and improved OS2 which gives a nice rating of 5 rated stops. That’s not quite the 6 stops touted on the 60-600mm, but Sigma’s OS is very nice here. A good stabilizer is hugely important in a long telephoto like this even in properly composing your shots. I was able to get this stable shot at 1/8th of a second (I got about 35% keepers at this shutter speed).

That breaks down as 6 stops of stabilization, which is pretty impressive. As before, you can’t turn off the lens’ OS without turning off the camera’s IBIS, so I can’t tell you whether the two systems work in conjunction or not.  The end result is effective, and that’s what matters most.

No for some bad news.

Sony has limited teleconverter compatibility to first party Sony lenses, so unfortunately you won’t be able to use teleconverters with the 60-600DN on Sony.  L-mount users can use either the TC-1411 (1.4x) or TC-2011 (2.0x) teleconverters with the lens.  There are obviously a couple of advantages for Leica L-mount owners due to Sigma being part of the L-mount consortium; it is a first party lens on L-mount. These continued limitations by Sony have become more grating to me as other platforms (like Fuji and Nikon) have started to open up.

Sigma employs a tripod foot that is Arca-Swiss compatible, meaning that it can be directly mounted onto a tripod without the need for a quick release plate.  For some reason Sony (and Canon) do not employ this Arca design…and I’ve never understood why.  Sigma’s tripod collar is not removable (a downside), but on the upside it does employ very nice detents at the four cardinal positions, which does make it easier to rotate quickly and to find the proper position.  The tripod foot itself is removable and replaceable, though this is not a tool-less operation. 

There’s also a significant lens hood here (about 84mm long) that will add a significant amount of length to the lens.  The large hood is actually fairly lightweight.  It attached via a tension knob on the bottom (it doesn’t bayonet on), and there is a nylon cover that goes over the lens hood when you have that attached or reversed for storage.  Sigma also includes a traditional pinch cap in the box, though that is hard to access if you have the lens hood mounted (it’s quite a ways in there!).  The lens hood is ribbed inside and, as is common with long telephotos, has a rubberized rim that will allow you to stand the lens on the lens hood (which is much more stable a position than standing it up on the rear lens cap).

A large nylon padded case with a carrying strap is also included.  Sigma does go the extra mile in the presentation of their lenses, and they are proud that their products continue to be fully assembled in Japan.  

Autofocus and Video

Last year Sigma developed and launched a new high performance focus motor called HLA (High-response Linear Actuator). It was a definite improvement over the stepping motors Sigma had used in the past, and it’s not surprising that Sigma has put their best into what becomes their most expensive and highest performing telephoto lens on E-mount and L-mount to date.  Here’s how Sigma describes the focus system, “A linear motor is a linear actuator that controls electromagnetic forces and can be driven freely, enabling high-speed AF.”  This high powered linear motor ensures that autofocus is fast enough to back up the “Sport” claim on the lens barrel.

Autofocus speed in my focus tests was nice and snappy, as expected. The only real delay you might run into will be due to the very long focal length. Sometimes when everything is out of focus it can take a moment to grab a contrast edge to focus on because you may not be “aimed” quite right, but that’s pretty typical across the board for long telephotos.

It’s always a little frustrating to me when I get telephoto lenses for testing in the dead of winter…which seems to be Sigma’s guaranteed release window!  Many of my typical wildlife subjects are either in hibernation, have limited movement, or have just headed to warmer climes for the winter!  It’s difficult to find active subjects, so it is not unusual to trudge though heavy snow for hours carrying a big telephoto lens and come back with ten shots of dead leaves because I saw no living thing out there…though here’s a lovely shot of some frost covered ground coverings!

The same limitation applies to outdoor sports, as there is just not much going on outdoors in the extreme cold. I took the lens to the fieldhouse to capture some basketball, but I was quickly reminded why an F5.6 lens is not ideal for capturing sports in typical gym lighting. I was shooting at ISO 5000-6400 on my Alpha 1 and still getting shutter speeds of just 1/125th-1/200th of a second – not nearly fast enough to consistently stop action. That means that not every shot was a keeper, but my primary purpose was to test how well the lens could track action.

A 500mm prime lens is also just too long for that kind of setting. I had my back against the wall about 10m (30 feet) away from the court, and even with my subject on the far end of the basketball court I couldn’t fit their whole body in the frame. This is a “Sport” lens, but the focal length is going to be too long for a number of sports. It is better served for field type sports where the lighting is brighter (preferentially sunlight) and there is more space. In the right setting 500mm is an asset; in a typical basketball gym it is a liability.

Bottom line: this is far from ideal from testing tracking accuracy for a lot of reasons. There’s definitely some motion blur at times. That being said, even with the tight framing of a subject dribbling at high speed toward the camera, I mostly had accurately focused results. There was one minor section of about five frames (out of nearly 80, in this burst), where focus dipped away for a moment, but picked up again right after.

You can see in the sequence above the momentary lost focus (middle frame).

I found this sequence interesting, as I was trying to get a different angle on the action to see if I could mitigate the length of the lens a bit. My subject was dribbling up the court for a layup, but when he turned the corner to drive to the basket, a screen/divider that is used to separate off spaces obscured the view of the camera. What’s interesting, however, is that while the material largely blocked my view, it was just transparent enough of me to be able to very slightly see the subject. You can see from the third shot in this sequence that the camera/lens did continue to accurately track the subject – a good sign!

Random shots of action over a few minutes were easy to grab, telling me that autofocus is definitely fast enough for action…even in less than ideal conditions.

Bursts of Ferrari moving over the top of the snow were virtually flawless. He was moving continually (but not running) and tracking didn’t lose him over the nearly 90 shots in the sequence.

Eye detection worked well and delivered well focused results even where the depth of field is TINY from the very long focal length.

I stopped by a farm and managed to get a wide variety of beautifully focused results of the horses in their shaggy winter coats.

My video focus pull test showed smooth, confident pulls with some apparent focus breathing. I had to change my test design to accommodate this very long focal length, but I’m confident this lens will work fine for those attempting to snap focus between two subjects. Obviously tracking a subject for video shots at 500mm takes some serious skill, but that has always been the case. Most important is that the autofocus is fast and accurate enough to keep up. Sigma’s HLA autofocus system is great.

Unfortunately I have to point out a second negative reality here on Sony. The Sigma is artificially limited on Sony’s sport cameras (the a9 or Alpha 1 series) to 15FPS in burst speed, as this is another area where Sony has put its finger on the scale in favor of its own lenses.  You can only get a maximum of 15FPS with any third party lens on Sony. That means that even on the new a9III where you can theoretically get up to 120FPS with a Sony lens, you will still only get 15FPS with the Sigma 500mm DN. With many cameras that’s not an issue (on my a7RV, for example), but I can get twice as many frames with my Alpha 1 and my 200-600 G than I can with the Sigma on the Alpha 1. That’s not Sigma’s fault, but it would be irresponsible of me not to mention it. This won’t be an issue on Leica L mount, though unfortunately there aren’t really any serious L-mount sports cameras that are the equivalent of the a9 or Alpha 1.

Image Quality Breakdown

The new Sigma 500mm DN “sports” (see what I did there?) an optical design of 20 elements in 14 groups, including 3 FLD elements and 2 SLD elements. As noted earlier, this is a lens that needs to perform well optically to justify its existence. Does it manage to pull it off?

That large front element means that this is a lens that has plenty of room to operate without the heavier vignette common to zoom lenses at their telephoto ends. Most zooms show some pincushion distortion and at least several stops of vignette by 500mm, but that’s far from the case here. There is no distortion to see, and what little vignette I saw was easily correctible with just a +25 (about one stop). That’s a definite advantage over zooms.

Also extremely well corrected is longitudinal chromatic aberrations (LoCA) that show up as fringing before and after the plane of focus. The Sigma 500mm DN shows essentially perfection correction here, with no fringing showing up even in this high contrast scene of sunlight coming through frost crystals on dark contrast branches. Perfect!

I also noted that I saw zero lateral chromatic aberrations near the edges of images. That typically shows up as fringing on both sides of things like tree branches.

The test chart that I’ll be taking crops from can be seen in the vignette and distortion comparison above. Crops are near 200% magnification, while the comparison images below will all be shown at 200% magnification. The test camera is a 61MP a7RV, which represents the highest full frame resolution currently available. Here are F5.6 crops from across the frame:

This is an essentially flawless performance, with very high levels of contrast and resolution consistently across the frame. How about some perspective on how good that is?

I mentioned earlier that one of the ways a prime lens should distinguish itself from equivalent zoom lenses is through its optical performance. Often prime lenses can be less expensive than an equivalent zoom, but that’s not the case here. I’ll do some comparisons to both the Sony 200-600mm G lens and Sigma’s own 60-600mm (which I found slightly better than the 150-600mm Sport). Both of those lenses cost around $2000, or about $1000 less than the 500mm DN. On paper, one would expect the prime lens to outperform these zooms that cover many other focal lengths. Is that in fact the case?

Let’s start with Sigma’s own 60-600mm DN, which I consider to be the best of the long telephoto zooms that they have produced.

We can see that in the center of the frame the prime lens has a clear advantage over the zoom, with more detail and contrast. The prime will have a minor 1/3rd stop advantage of light gathering (F5.6 vs F6.3), but the amount of detail here shows the superior optical performance of the 500mm DN.

That superiority is, if anything, even more pronounced in the mid-frame. The 500mm DN is incredibly sharp there, delivering perfect levels of contrast and detail. The zoom lens is good, but looks soft and low contrast in comparison.

That advantage extends to the corners, which also look excellent on the prime lens. I actually think the zoom competes best here, but the contrast in particular really pops for the prime.

I’ve compared the Sony 200-600 G to at least five other competitors since its release, and I’ve felt like it won every one of the optical comparisons. It has a smaller zoom ratio than many competitors and Sony didn’t skimp on the size; they definitely went for performance. Can it compete with the Sigma 500mm DN?

The gap is a little closer here, but the Sigma prime still shows a clear advantage in the amount of detail captured in the center of the frame. Textures have more micro-contrast and “pop” more.

The advantage is again most obvious in the important mid-frame (where photos are often composed), with much more detail and contrast for the prime lens.

I would say the Sony corners are softer than the Sigma zoom, and so the advantage for the 500mm DN is even more pronounced here. It delivers a much stronger performance in detail and contrast.

By the way, when performing these tests I found I had to zoom the Sony to 518mm to equal the framing of the Sigma 500mm DN. The Sony zoom must focus breathe a bit, so the advantage between the Sony’s 600mm and the Sigma’s 500mm isn’t huge at closer focus distances (these tests were done at roughly 5 meters/16 feet).

My conclusion is that this is as good of image quality as you’re going to get at this focal length and price point…not that there are a lot of prime competitors on either Sony or Leica.

So that’s a lot of perspective on wide open performance, but is there more in the tank if you stop the lens down?

A little, but not much for a couple of reasons.

  1. There is more room for improvement on lenses that aren’t optimized for wide open performance. This lens is already excellent, so there isn’t much room to get better.
  2. A lens with a smaller maximum aperture like this has very little room for improving by stopping down because diffraction starts to offset any gains. On my a7RV, diffraction starts at roughly F6.3, which means that even at F8 there is a little diffraction effect that will intensify with each stop that the aperture is closed.

That being said, there’s a mild gain at F8 which can be seen a bit in the center:

There is a little bit more improvement (mostly to contrast) in the corners at F8:

F11 largely stays the same, but there will be increased softness after that due to diffraction. By the minimum aperture of F32 contrast is significantly reduced.

This is an incredibly sharp lens, and essentially 100% of that performance is available wide open at F5.6, though you can get similar results at F8 and very slightly less at F11. Beyond that diffraction will soften the image. That tells me that L-mount shooters should be able to get excellent results with an 1.4x Teleconverter and slightly softer results (but still very good) with a 2.0x TC.

This is a traditional telephoto prime lens, and as such (unlike some of the zoom lenses), it is not optimized for close focus performance. The minimum focus distance is 320cm (126″), which means you’ll always be working at some distance, and the maximum magnification is just 0.166x, which looks like this:

The 60-600mm Sport will allow you to achieve a very high 0.42x magnification at 200mm, so that’s obviously going to radically more flexible for up close work.

One advantage the prime lens will have over any of the competing zooms is that the slightly larger maximum aperture combined with Sigma’s ability to engineer for just one focal length means nicer looking bokeh. This is a lens capable of producing beautifully blurred out backgrounds even working at some distance.

Near minimum focus you will be able to completely blur out backgrounds, creating a very soft end result.

But even at a further distance and with a more complex background, the out of focus blur is pleasing. This is particularly impact for wildlife work, as this shot represents a more typical working distance than the closer shots above:

You will probably rarely use this lens for landscape work, but it is very capable of compressing scenes and bring distant vistas much closer.

It’s also interesting for compressing elements together, like in this industrial scene:

This is the type of focal length that means that the sun will rarely be in the frame, but, if it is, the Sigma 500mm DN shows a solid amount of flare resistance.

Colors look nice and rich, with good accuracy.

There’s not really anything to complain about here optically. There’s not really any optical flaws that I can point to. It’s a fantastically sharp, has great contrast, nice bokeh, and no fringing. You couldn’t really ask for more. Check out the image galleries through this link to see more photos.

Conclusion

The Sigma 500mm F5.6 DN OS | Sport is a very welcome addition to their lineup. This is the very type of lens that I’ve heard many, many photographers ask for over the years. Relatively small and lightweight, high performing, good autofocus and image stabilization, and a relatively affordable price. On paper, it is pretty much perfect.

And, for Leica L-mount shooters, it may just be that. It’s compatible with extenders, there’s a full range of customization options, and there are no artificial limits to performance. On Sony (by far the largest market for the lens) there are some very unfortunate limitations that are not Sigma’s fault. No teleconverters is a big one, as it means one can’t grab 700mm at a very manageable F8 (1.4x TC) or a whopping 1000mm at F11 (2.0x TC). You can activate APS-C mode on Sony cameras, which jumps you to a 750mm equivalent, though at a lower resolution point (26MP on my a7RV, but lower on lower resolution bodies). Those using Sony’s sport bodies like the Alpha 1 or a9 series will also find the burst rate artificially capped at 15FPS (which is still fast, but not nearly as fast as some of these bodies are capable of). Sony’s arbitrary limitations on third party lenses are starting to sting, and this otherwise excellent lens is hurt by these limitations perhaps more intensely than any other third party lens to date.

If you are willing to accept those limitations, however, then this is a unique telephoto prime that checks a lot of boxes. Well built, fast autofocus, feature rich, awesome optical performance, and light enough to carry around without need a monopod or a bodybuilder’s arms. And, while it isn’t cheap at roughly $3000 USD, that is half the price of what their older 500mm F4 lens for DSLRs was, so, considering inflation, that’s a reasonable price. It takes skill to use a 500mm prime well, but this is a lens that can reward you with great images for that money!

Pros:

  • Very nice build quality
  • Excellent weather sealing
  • Rich feature set
  • Much lighter than zoom lenses that cover the equivalent focal length
  • Fast autofocus motor
  • Very effective Optical Stabilizer
  • Clearly sharper than zoom lenses that cover 500mm
  • Less vignette and distortion than zoom lenses
  • No fringing of any kind
  • Nice bokeh
  • Good flare resistance

Cons:

  • About 50% more expensive than Sigma’s own 60-600mm Sport lens
  • On Sony no teleconverter compatability
  • On Sony burst rate limited to 15FPS on sport cameras

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Keywords: Sigma, 500mm, F5.6, Sport, DG, DN, OS, Sigma 500mm DN Review, Sigma 500 F5.6, f/5.6, Sigma 500mm Sport Review, Full Frame, Review, Sony Alpha 1, Sony a7RV, Review, Hands On, Dustin Abbott, Real World, Comparison, Sharpness, Bokeh, Flare Resistance, Autofocus, Image Quality, Sample Images, Video, Photography, let the light in, weathersealing, #letthelightin, DA, #SIGMA, #SIGMA500mmSports, #SIGMASports, #SIGMADGDN

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Sigma 500mm F5.6 DG DN OS | SPORT Gallery

Dustin Abbott

February 22nd, 2024

I was very interested in the premise of this lens when Sigma let me know about it, as this is just the kind of lens that people on all camera platforms routinely ask for – a long distance, high performing telephoto prime that isn’t ridiculously big or ridiculously expensive. The Sigma 500mm F5.6 DG DN OS | Sport is (at least on paper), the perfect telephoto option for those looking for a reasonably compact and lightweight long telephoto prime. The maximum aperture of F5.6 provides a nice balance between being large enough to be useful while small enough to keep the size (and the price!) of the lens down. Even F4 lenses at 500mm are very expensive: prices can range anywhere from $6000 (Sigma’s own 500mm F4 for DSLR mounts) to nearly $12,000 (Canon EF 500mm F4L II). The Sigma 500mm DN is much more approachable at $3000 USD; but is it worth buying? Explore my thoughts either in my video review below or by reading my text review here.

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Thanks to Sigma Canada (Gentec) for sending me a review loaner of this lens. As always, this is a completely independent review. *The tests and most of the photos that I share as a part of my review cycle have been done with the Sony a7RV along with the Sony Alpha 1 that serve as my benchmark cameras for Sony lenses.

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The Sigma 500mm DN Sport is being released on Sony E-mount (reviewed here) and on the Leica L-mount consortium where it will function as a first party lens. Leica users (as usual) will have a few advantages due to restrictions put in place by Sony for third party telephoto lenses. We will detail the reality of those in this review.

There are relatively few ways to reach 500mm on Sony in a native lens. Sigma provides the most options now, as there is this new prime lens along with their 60-600mm Sport (my review here) and 150-600mm Sport (my review here) lenses. Sony has a the 200-600mm G lens (my review here) that I will reference some in this review as I happen to own it. Tamron makes a 150-500mm VC lens for Sony (my review here), and there is a recent inexpensive TTArtisan 500mm F6.3 manual focus prime that I haven’t reviewed. The Sigma 500mm DN Sport immediately has one advantage going for it – it’s maximum aperture of F5.6 at 500mm is faster than any of the alternatives, most of which are F6.3 at 500mm and one (the Tamron) has a maximum aperture of F6.7. That does come with some advantages, both in the ability to get slightly faster shutter speeds as well as providing more shallow depth of field.

Sigma made significant strides forward in some key elements of lens design (particularly for telephotos) in their release of the 60-600mm DN Sport lens. The two most important areas were in the area of autofocus (high powered HLA autofocus motor) and optical stabilizer (OS2 algorithm). Those lessons learned are on display here, as Sigma has used these technologies to make for a better, more complete telephoto prime.

Enjoy photos of the new lens along with a gallery of images taken with it below.

Photos of the Sigma 500mm F5.6 DN OS | SPORT

Photos Taken with the Sigma 500mm F5.6 DN OS | SPORT

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GEAR USED:

Purchase the Sigma 500mm F5.6 DN Sport @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

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Keywords: Sigma, 500mm, F5.6, Sport, DG, DN, OS, Sigma 500mm DN Review, Sigma 500 F5.6, f/5.6, Sigma 500mm Sport Review, Full Frame, Review, Sony Alpha 1, Sony a7RV, Review, Hands On, Dustin Abbott, Real World, Comparison, Sharpness, Bokeh, Flare Resistance, Autofocus, Image Quality, Sample Images, Video, Photography, let the light in, weathersealing, #letthelightin, DA, #SIGMA, #SIGMA500mmSports, #SIGMASports, #SIGMADGDN

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Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DN X-Mount (40MP) Review

Dustin Abbott

December 5th, 2023

When I reviewed the Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DN a few months ago I expressed an interest in revisiting it on Fuji. Fuji’s cameras with the 40MP X-Trans sensors are serious disruptors in this space, and, while I own and love the Fujifilm X-H2, I’m still not decided as to whether they haven’t taken resolution on APS-C a bit too far, as everything but the most of elite of lenses struggle to resolve it. Thus a lens that performs well on Sony (at 26MP) may not look nearly as good at 40MP on Fuji. In fact, I have yet to see a zoom lens yet that really excels at 40MP on APS-C; I have a short list of lenses that keep up with the sensor, and they are all primes. This review of the 10-18X is not a whole new review, as there are elements that are identical to the E-mount version of the lens I’ve already tested, but rather an update on autofocus and image quality relative to Fujifilm X-Mount. You can see my thoughts in the video review here…or read on.

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Thanks to Gentec (Sigma’ distributer in Canada) for sending me a review loaner of this lens. As always, this is a completely independent review. *The tests and most of the photos that I share as a part of my review cycle have been done on the 40MP Fujifilm X-H2 that I reviewed here.

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This year we’ve seen two important DC DN lenses, including the excellent 23mm F1.4 DC DN and this new 10-18mm DN, a wide angle zoom lens with a fast maximum aperture of F2.8. This will certainly be a welcome addition to Fuji shooters as there are relatively few wide angle zooms to choose from, and none that quite match the combination of compact size, price, and performance of the 10-18X.

The Sigma 10-18mm DN is the sixth lens in this series. Here’s a look at the DC (APS-C) DN (mirrorless) lineup thus far.

  1. Sigma 16mm F1.4
  2. Sigma 23mm F1.4
  3. Sigma 30mm F1.4
  4. Sigma 56mm F1.4
  5. Sigma 10-18mm F2.8
  6. Sigma 18-50mm F2.8

Sigma’s DC DN lenses have all fallen under the umbrella of their Contemporary lineup, and while Sigma has proven willing to experiment with new features and design elements within the ART and Sport lineups, the Contemporary lenses have all stuck to a fairly rigid design formula. That continues to be the case here, so this little lens mostly looks and handles pretty similarly to other lenses in the lineup.

There’s some good and bad with this, but what certainly isn’t bad is that you can capture some absolutely amazing images with this little lens.

Yes, the colors were just that rich; the Sigma has captured them accurately.

This is a useful zoom range, allowing you to go from extremely wide at 10mm (15mm full frame equivalent) through the various steps to 18mm (27mm full frame equivalent).

The Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DC DN carries a price tag of $599 USD. Should this lens jump to the top of your list when you are looking for a wide angle zoom lens for your camera? Here’s the original review for more information.

Sigma 10-18mm DN Build and Handling

Though Sigma has released a LOT of lenses over the past few years, this is (surprisingly) only the second APS-C specific zoom lens released for mirrorless cameras. The first was the 18-50mm F2.8 DN that I reviewed almost exactly two years ago. I quite liked that little zoom, and am currently working on an updated Fuji X-mount review like this one. The 10-18mm provides an obvious compliment to that lens, allowing for coverage from 10-50mm between the two lenses, or the equivalent of 15-75mm on full frame. This is all with a maximum aperture of F2.8, which is obviously very useful. What’s more, both of these lenses are extremely compact and light, making them very easy to travel with as a kit. The new 10-18mm DN weighs just 250g in Fuji X-mount, or 8.8 oz. It is 72.2mm in diameter and 64.3mm in length (2.8 x 2.5″). That’s about 5g lighter than the E-mount version I tested, largely because X-mount is slightly narrower than E-mount (2mm).

Up front we have the ability to use traditional filters in a very standard 67mm size.

The 10-18mm and 18-50mm make for a very compact pairing.

The closest competitor to the Sigma 10-18mm DN will be the Tamron 11-20mm F2.8 RXD; it has a bit more zoom range, but, importantly, it is not as wide. It’s easier to crop in enough to account for that 2mm on the telephoto end, but you can’t always step back to get more in the frame. Native Fuji options include the 10-24mm F4 OIS WR, and the premium option is the huge XF 8-16mm F2.8 LM WR. The Sigma is easily the least expensive of these options, running $230 cheaper than the Tamron and $400-600 cheaper than the Fuji options.

The Sigma is not the cheapest of their four lenses at $599 USD, and also manages to be the smallest and lightest despite going wide (10mm) and having a large maximum aperture. In fairness, it also has the smallest zoom ratio, though not by much. I suspect that many will find the weaknesses an acceptable tradeoff for the significant strengths.

As noted, Sigma’s Contemporary branded lenses have followed a very definite design path. Sigma’s build quality on these lenses is quite nice.  The aesthetic and feel of the lens isn’t really different than their ART series. The design language and materials are quite similar…just smaller.

But where the ART and Contemporary lenses diverge is in the features. The key difference is that the DC DN zoom lenses are essentially featureless.  There is no aperture ring, no switches, no iris lock, no declicking of the aperture, no focus hold button. Now, to be fair, the Tamron lens (probably the primary competitor) also lacks these features. The Fuji XF 10-24mm and 8-16mm have an aperture ring, while some competition on Sony has even more features.

I’ve seen this happen before; a lens maker locks themselves into a certain standard of features for a series of lenses, but then the market shifts and that design philosophy is no longer acceptable.

Case in point is Sigma’s approach to weather sealing on the Contemporary lineup. The 10-18X has a weather sealing gasket at the lens mount but no internal seals…just like the other DC DN lenses. This is at least one area where the Sigma falls behind the competitors – the Tamron 11-20mm, Sony 10-20mm, and Fuji 8-16mm + 10-24mm all feature fully weather sealed designs.

This is a very short lens (just 62mm in length), so that means there is a lot to fit in on a zoom lens. Sigma’s design is slightly unique in that the manual focus ring is actually the closer of the two. It occupies the center of the barrel, while the zoom ring is on a flared out section near the front of the lens. Like other lenses designed for mirrorless cameras, this is a focus-by-wire system in which input from the focus ring is routed through the focus motor.  It is actually the focus motor that moves the elements, making manual focus more of an emulation than a direct movement of the elements.  Some lenses pull this off better than others, and the Sigma 10-18mm DN is one of them. There is good weight/damping on the focus ring, and no visible steps during focus changes. I didn’t notice any focus lag either; the action on the ring and the movement of focus seemed directly linked.  I will note that the lens will automatically alert the body to magnify the image when you are manually focusing, which is a big help in visually confirming focus.  

There is about 10mm between the focus ring and the beginning of the flared section that leads to the zoom ring. I appreciate some space there, as that was one of my complaints about the Sony 10-20mm; there was almost no room between the two rings on that lens, and it was easy to inadvertently move the wrong ring. There’s a very definite difference between two rings and position on the Sigma, though there is a different problem. At the fully retracted position (there is a slight external zoom action), the lens hood fits so tightly against the zoom ring that there isn’t a lot of space for your thumb to fit on the narrow ring. If you happen to have longer fingernails, you might actually find zooming a bit of a challenge.

The zoom action itself is very smooth. This is a “reverse zoom” in terms of the retraction; the inner barrel is fully retracted at 18mm and extends the furthest at 10mm, though the barrel extension is only about 10mm.

Sigma is experimenting with a new lens hood design for this lens. Rather than bayoneting into place, it is actually just a push on design. You still need to line up the markings on the hood and the barrel, but then you just push the lens hood into place rather than rotate it. A spring/lever mechanism holds the hood locked into place. You can release it by just doing a slight rotation to the left.

The primary “pro” of this design is it allows them to the make the lens hood a little thinner as there doesn’t need to be room in the hood design for the bayonet action. Sigma touts the fact that while the filter size of the 10-18mm is 12mm larger than the 18-50mm (67 vs 55mm), the diameter of the lens hood is only 3.8mm larger.

If you want to reverse the hood for storage, you now line up an arrow on the lens hood with the previous mark on the lens barrel and push it forward. Removing it simply requires a similar slight rotation to the left. As per usual, Sigma’s lens hoods are just a little bit nicer than the competition, including some soft-touch materials, texture variations, and lens information imprinted on them.

The 10-18X has two different minimum focusing distances for the wide and telephoto ends of the zoom range. At 10mm you can focus as closely as 11.6cm (4.6″) and can get as high as a 0.25x magnification…though you have to be pretty much right on top of your subject to get it. 

At 18mm that disance extends to 19.1cm (4.6″) and the magnification drops to just 0.14x…though shots at 18mm are a whole lot easier to get!

The aperture iris is electromagnetic and controlled from within the camera (no aperture ring).  It has seven rounded aperture blades that do a fairly good job of retaining a circular shape even with the lens stopped down, though frankly you won’t have a lot of opportunity to shoot shallow depth of field shots with a wide angle lens like this. 

Stopping down will produce a decent 14 bladed sunstar effect.

There isn’t much deviation from the standard formula here, and while I do think there’s room for improvement, I appreciate the great strengths here as well. This is a lightweight, compact lens that also has a very nice build and feel to it. There’s not much in terms of features, but think what is most attractive is the compact size and light weight of a lens with both a large maximum aperture and a very wide angle of view.

Sigma 10-18mm DN Autofocus

Sigma continues to utilize a stepping focus motor (STM) in these smaller lenses as the elements are smaller and lighter than lenses and don’t require the higher torque that some of their large aperture full frame or sports oriented lenses. My experience with all of the Sigma DN lenses to date has been that I prefer their autofocus behavior on Sony than to Fuji, and that continues to be the case here.  To be fair, however, a large part of that is that I prefer Sony’s autofocus on their cameras, and that obviously impacts the performance of a lens. That caveat aside, I was generally pleased with the performance of the 10-18X even on Fuji. The STM focus motor gets the job done, and focus was fast, quiet, and accurate during my tests.

I didn’t really pick up on any focus sound at any point, and focus was responsive enough to pick up on my bratty little Bengal:

I did my autofocus tests indoors and outdoors, and found AF-C autofocus changes to be near instant moving from a close to a distant subject. Focus speed for stills is very good.

I also tested Eye AF tracking, and found that autofocus stayed “sticky” on Nala’s eyes as either she moved towards me or I (and the camera) moved around tracking here.

I had good autofocus results even when shooting backlit subjects, like these morning frost needles forming on bare branches.

Wide angle lenses put less stress on their autofocus systems because depth of field tends to be very large unless you are extremely close to your subject. I have zero complaints about the performance here for stills, however, as focus was quick and confident.

On the video front my findings were mostly good, though not quite as flawless as on Sony. My autofocus focus pulls test showed that there is plenty of speed to make focus transitions, but there is a common problem on Fuji – the autofocus confidence just isn’t as high. The focus pulls themselves go fast, but then there is a little bit of hunting and settling before focus locks on the new subject.

On a positive note focus breathing is fairly low.

My “hand test” (where I block the view of my face with my hand and then move the hand to allow focus to pop back to the eye) went fairly well. I saw less hunting in that scenario, and focus moved and locked with more confidence. This doesn’t surprise me at all, as Fuji has been operating with the same basic focus system for years, but have upgraded it in this last generation of cameras through AI tracking. When modern Fuji cameras have a trackable subject in the frame (something the AI processor is programmed to detect), autofocus works quite well. It works less well when there isn’t a readily identifiable and trackable subject.

For that reason Fujifilm vloggers will enjoy this lens. It’s small and compact and thus “gimbals well”, but because the focus system has an eye to focus on, focus was effective even when I was on the move or spinning around. Here’s a screenshot from one of those shots.

I did test to see if this was a parfocal lens and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was. I could focus at 10mm and zoom into 18mm and find that focus was still correct. That will help with video work.

In conclusion, autofocus isn’t quite as sophisticated on Fuji as it is on Sony, but I’ll also say that this has been one of the better zooms that I’ve worked on Fuji for autofocus performance.

Sigma 10-18X Image Quality

The Sigma 10-18X sports a relatively complex optical formula for such a small lens. There are 13 elements in 10 groups, and that includes number of exotic elements like 4 aspherical elements (including a large GM aspherical concave lens as the front element), 3 FLD elements, and one SLD element. The MTF chart and comparison shows a significant improvement over the older Sigma 10-20mm F3.5 that the was equivalent lens for DSLRs. The MTF chart shows a very strong center and midframe at both ends of the zoom range with minimal falloff in the corners at 10mm. There’s a stronger falloff at 18mm in the corners.

Real world results often look excellent to my eye, with excellent detail and contrast…though as per usual, the 40MP sensor of the X-H2 proves a high hurdle to climb if you start to closely analyze things.

We’ll work through the chart results by first looking at distortion and vignette.  Here’s a look at the before and after of manual corrections of both at 10mm:

I didn’t expect to see any real difference in distortion (it’s the same optical formula), but I’ve noticed a trend with lenses that I test on both Sony and then on Fuji that vignette is typically heavier on Fuji. I suspect it has something to do with the smaller diameter of the lens mount.

At 10mm there is a significant but not extreme amount of barrel distortion. I used a +25 to correct it, though there is a mild mustache pattern left after manual correction. The standard profile does a cleaner job of correcting the distortion. On Sony I needed a +53 to correct the vignette, but on Fuji I had to max out the slider (+100). That’s close to two stops higher on Fuji.

So how about the “telephoto” end of the zoom range?

The distortion flips to pincushion style at 18mm but corrected easily with a -7. , but it was very linear and easy to cleanly correct for. Vignette was a little lighter but still required a +80 to correct (+40 more than on Sony). Fuji’s correction profiles (Sigma gets full support here) work fine in camera for the lens for JPEG and video, and there is already a correction profile available for Lightroom/ACR that will clean things up nicely for RAW files. Here’s a look at a SOOC JPEG file of a brick wall at 10mm – no distortion or vignette to be seen:

Clearly no insurmountable odds there.

How about chromatic aberrations?

I saw very little longitudinal chromatic aberrations before and after the plane of focus. You can see very little fringing in all of the shiny metal and crystal bits on this decorative reindeer.

Lateral Chromatic Aberrations usually show up along the edges of the frame as fringing on either side of high contrast areas, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue here. Winter is the most obvious time to see issues with LaCA due to all the bare branches, but I don’t see any issues here even with corrections turned off.

That’s good news, as you are far more likely to see lateral CA on a wide angle zoom in real world images than you are to see longitudinal CA.

So how about resolution and contrast?  All chart tests done with a the X-H2 (70MP) using a tripod and a two second delay. Here’s a look at my test chart:

And here are the crops (at roughly 200% magnification) from the center, mid-frame, and extreme corner shot at 10mm and at F2.8:

In the center of the frame we can see that the Sigma 10-18X has no problem. It still looks fantastic. Mid-frame is a little murkier, though the corner look relatively good. Stop down to F4 and the mid-frame and the corners take a nice leap forwards:

There’s a bit more on tap at F5.6, so that means that real world landscape images at 10mm will look very nice all across the frame.

Diffraction comes early on pixel dense cameras like the X-H2, so I actually found F8 to have very slightly less contrast compared with F5.6. After F8 things go downhill fast as diffraction robs away contrast and acuity. By F22 (minimum aperture) the image looks very soft.

I would recommend sticking with F5.8-F8 for landscape work on a high resolution camera to get your best results.

I slightly preferred the overall image quality at 12mm. The center is about the same as 10mm, but the results in the midframe and corners are clearly better.

Real world 12mm images look great, though the absolute edges aren’t pin sharp on 40MP.

14mm is very similar to 12mm in contrast, though I didn’t feel like it resolved some of the fine lines quite as well. Take a look at the number 2 and the area around it on the right as compared to the left (12mm).

There’s a clear improvement at F4, however, and landscape apertures look pretty great in real world images.

16mm is mostly similar to 14mm with perhaps a little better detail and contrast…particularly along the edges of the frame.

I did note a mild regression at 18mm in my Sony E-mount review, but I’m seeing it less here on Fuji. As I compare 16mm and 18mm across the frame I see some give and take. Some areas favor 16mm, others favor 18mm. The performance is mostly similar between the two focal lengths, making the overall sharpness and contrast very consistent across this zoom range.

I chose this crop because it illustrates the challenge well – there is very little to distinguish between the two focal lengths…even side by side and magnified to 200%!

As before, you can see some improved contrast a bit more detail by stopping the lens down. I found a more significant different at F5.6 than at F4. By F5.6 the improved contrast is very noticeable.

The two ends of the zoom range are the most important, as you’ll often be in situations where you want to go as wide as possible, while the 18mm end will give both the maximum reach but also will be the go to for up close work…like in the shot of these mushrooms.

You can see from the crop that while the amount of detail at F2.8 on a high resolution sensor isn’t pin-sharp, it is sharp enough to work in most situations.

You are also most likely to get visible bokeh at 18mm. This image allows us to look at both the sharpness of the subject and the bokeh beyond.

At a pixel level I can see that contrast doesn’t “wow” me, but at every other viewing magnification the image looks great. There’s no “bleeding” around the edges of the leaves due to low contrast, and the quality of the bokeh is pretty nice. Wide angle lenses are almost never going to give you amazing bokeh (that’s just not their strength), but I would be happy in getting images like the one above.

Here’s another bokeh shot of a field of frost covered sweet fern. You can see a bit of busyness in the transition zone as things move out of focus (some outlining), but beyond that the bokeh gets fairly soft and creamy.

Flare resistance was fairly good in most situations, with good contrast and only minor issues with ghosting. That performance was pretty similar to what I saw on Sony. Here’s a fresh shot that shows good flare resistance.

I did see some “flashing” with the sun right out of the frame when shooting video, though I did find it fairly artistic and not distracting. Again, that’s a subjective evaluation, and I would recommend watching the video review to draw more conclusions for yourself. Here’s a few screenshots to show the effect.

Overall my feelings were very positive about the flare resistance.

The weather was much gloomier during my time with the X-mount version of the lens as compared to the earlier Sony version, but I continue to find colors pleasing on Fuji.

Even on a gloomy day the colors have a nice level of saturation.

The Sigma 10-18X is able to navigate the bump to 40MP on Fuji better than most zoom lenses I have tested on the sensor…but the difference in apparent sharpness at 200% comparing 26MP on Sony with 40MP on Fuji is pretty astounding. Look at the difference in corner performance at 10mm here:

That Fuji sensor is a monster for making lenses look softer at a pixel level, but that’s not on Sigma. Compared to other lenses, it actually holds up well. Here’s the Tamron 11-20mm F2.8 RXD (another lens that looked very good on Sony but softer on Fuji), and you can see that the Sigma definitely better.

All things considered, I feel like there is a lot of optical performance here for such a small package. You can see many more beautiful images by visiting the image gallery here.

Conclusion

The Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DC DN is a very welcome addition to the Fuji X-mount wide angle options. It’s the lightest and most compact while also being the cheapest and one of the best performers optically. It’s a lens that I would personally consider.

I would like to see Sigma increase the feature set of their Contemporary lenses, particularly when it comes to weather sealing, but they also have the advantage of having the lowest price point of competing lenses. This does help make that more acceptable.

Wide angle lenses like this are great for being able to get dramatic images, and this 10-18X is a great pairing for Sigma’s existing 18-50mm DN if you are looking for a lightweight F2.8 zoom. I would love to see Sigma also tackle an APS-C specific telephoto zoom to compete with Fuji’s 50-140mm in the future. I continue to question if Fuji took the quest for high resolution on APS-C a little too far, but the Sigma 10-18X handles the challenge as well as any zoom I’ve tested thus far.

Pros:

  • Extremely compact lens for having F2.8 aperture
  • Unique new hood design
  • Manual focus and zoom rings move smoothly
  • Quick and quiet autofocus
  • Low focus breathing
  • Seems to be parfocal
  • Strong optics throughout zoom range
  • Fringing well controlled
  • Good color
  • Good flare resistance
  • Good price

Cons:

  • Significant barrel distortion at 10mm
  • Weather sealed only at mount
  • No extra features

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Purchase the Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DN @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

Purchase the Sigma 18-50mm F2.8 DN @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

Purchase the Fujifilm X-H2 @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany 

Purchase the Fujifilm X-T5 @ B&H Photo | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Find it Used at KEH 

Purchase the Fujifilm X-S20 @ B&H Photo | Adorama  | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany | Ebay 

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Keywords:  Sigma, 10-18mm, Sigma 10-18mm, F2.8, DC , DN, APS-C, Fuji X-mount, Sony E-mount, Leica L-mount, Sigma 10-18 Review, Sigma 10-18mm Review, Sigma 10-18 DN, Review, Sony a6700, Sony a6400, Sony a7RV, Fujifilm X-H2, Review, Hands On, Dustin Abbott, Real World, Comparison, Sharpness, Bokeh, Flare Resistance, Autofocus, Image Quality, Sample Images, Video, Portrait, Photography, let the light in, #letthelightin, DA, Weather Sealing, #SIGMA, #SIGMA1018mmContemporary, #SIGMAContemporary, #SIGMADCDN

DISCLAIMER: This article and description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DN X-Mount Gallery

Dustin Abbott

December 5th, 2023

When I reviewed the Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DN a few months ago I expressed an interest in revisiting it on Fuji. Fuji’s cameras with the 40MP X-Trans sensors are serious disruptors in this space, and, while I own and love the Fujifilm X-H2, I’m still not decided as to whether they haven’t taken resolution on APS-C a bit too far, as everything but the most of elite of lenses struggle to resolve it. Thus a lens that performs well on Sony (at 26MP) may not look nearly as good at 40MP on Fuji. In fact, I have yet to see a zoom lens yet that really excels at 40MP on APS-C; I have a short list of lenses that keep up with the sensor, and they are all primes. Does the 10-18mm X-mount version handle this transition? You can see my thoughts in the video review below or by reading my text review.

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Thanks to Gentec (Sigma’ distributer in Canada) for sending me a review loaner of this lens. As always, this is a completely independent review. *The tests and most of the photos that I share as a part of my review cycle have been done on the 40MP Fujifilm X-H2 that I reviewed here.

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This year we’ve seen two important DC DN lenses, including the excellent 23mm F1.4 DC DN and this new 10-18mm DN, a wide angle zoom lens with a fast maximum aperture of F2.8. This will certainly be a welcome addition to Fuji shooters as there are relatively few wide angle zooms to choose from, and none that quite match the combination of compact size, price, and performance of the 10-18X.

The Sigma 10-18mm DN is the sixth lens in this series. Here’s a look at the DC (APS-C) DN (mirrorless) lineup thus far.

  1. Sigma 16mm F1.4
  2. Sigma 23mm F1.4
  3. Sigma 30mm F1.4
  4. Sigma 56mm F1.4
  5. Sigma 10-18mm F2.8
  6. Sigma 18-50mm F2.8

Sigma’s DC DN lenses have all fallen under the umbrella of their Contemporary lineup, and while Sigma has proven willing to experiment with new features and design elements within the ART and Sport lineups, the Contemporary lenses have all stuck to a fairly rigid design formula. That continues to be the case here, so this little lens mostly looks and handles pretty similarly to other lenses in the lineup.

There’s some good and bad with this, but what certainly isn’t bad is that you can capture some absolutely amazing images with this little lens.

Yes, the colors were just that rich; the Sigma has captured them accurately.

This is a useful zoom range, allowing you to go from extremely wide at 10mm (15mm full frame equivalent) through the various steps to 18mm (27mm full frame equivalent).

The Sigma 10-18mm X-mount lens carries a price tag of $599 USD. Should this lens jump to the top of your list when you are looking for a wide angle zoom lens for your camera? Here’s the original review for more information.

Photos of the Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 X-Mount

Photos Taken with the Sigma 10-18mm X-Mount

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GEAR USED:

Purchase the Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DN @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

Purchase the Sigma 18-50mm F2.8 DN @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

Purchase the Fujifilm X-H2 @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany 

Purchase the Fujifilm X-T5 @ B&H Photo | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Find it Used at KEH 

Purchase the Fujifilm X-S20 @ B&H Photo | Adorama  | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany | Ebay 

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Keywords:  Sigma, 10-18mm, Sigma 10-18mm, F2.8, DC , DN, APS-C, Fuji X-mount, Sony E-mount, Leica L-mount, Sigma 10-18 Review, Sigma 10-18mm Review, Sigma 10-18 DN, Review, Sony a6700, Sony a6400, Sony a7RV, Fujifilm X-H2, Review, Hands On, Dustin Abbott, Real World, Comparison, Sharpness, Bokeh, Flare Resistance, Autofocus, Image Quality, Sample Images, Video, Portrait, Photography, let the light in, #letthelightin, DA, Weather Sealing, #SIGMA, #SIGMA1018mmContemporary, #SIGMAContemporary, #SIGMADCDN

DISCLAIMER: This article and description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DC DN Review

Dustin Abbott

October 10th, 2023

When I started reviewing Sony, there were no Sigma E-mount lenses other than a few APS-C lenses that have since been discontinued. Sigma then did a big drop of ported EF mount lenses from their ART series to E-mount, though most of those have been replaced with new DN lenses. Sigma uses the DN designation for their lenses that have been specifically designed for mirrorless, and in less than four year they have released nearly 30 DN lenses. That’s right! The Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DC DN Contemporary lens is the 29th DN lens, and the newly announced 70-200mm F2.8 Sport will be the 30th DN lens my count. That averages to more than 7 lenses per year, which makes Sigma easily the most prolific lens maker that I’m aware of during that time. The majority of those lenses have been full frame lenses, however, and we’ve seen fewer of their APS-C specific designs, which Sigma designates with DC. But this year we’ve seen two important DC DN lenses, including the excellent 23mm F1.4 DC DN and this new 10-18mm DN, a wide angle zoom lens with a fast maximum aperture of F2.8. This will certainly be a welcome addition to Sony, Fuji, and Leica L-mount shooters…particularly if the lens proves to be a good performer. We’ll try to answer that question in both the video review and the text review below.

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Thanks to Gentec (Sigma’ distributer in Canada) for sending me a review loaner of this lens. As always, this is a completely independent review. *The tests and most of the photos that I share as a part of my review cycle have been done on the 26MP APS-C mode of the Sony a7RV.

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The Sigma 10-18mm DN is the sixth lens in this series. Here’s a look at the DC (APS-C) DN (mirrorless) lineup thus far.

  1. Sigma 16mm F1.4
  2. Sigma 23mm F1.4
  3. Sigma 30mm F1.4
  4. Sigma 56mm F1.4
  5. Sigma 10-18mm F2.8
  6. Sigma 18-50mm F2.8

Sigma’s DC DN lenses have all fallen under the umbrella of their Contemporary lineup, and while Sigma has proven willing to experiment with new features and design elements within the ART and Sport lineups, the Contemporary lenses have all stuck to a fairly rigid design formula. That continues to be the case here, so this little lens mostly looks and handles pretty similarly to other lenses in the lineup.

There’s some good and bad with this, but what certainly isn’t bad is that you can capture some absolutely amazing images with this little lens.

Yes, the colors were just that rich; the Sigma has captured them accurately.

This is a useful zoom range, allowing you to go from extremely wide at 10mm (15mm full frame equivalent) through the various steps to 18mm (27mm full frame equivalent).

The Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DC DN carries a price tag of $599 USD. Should this lens jump to the top of your list when you are looking for a wide angle zoom lens for your camera?

Sigma 10-18mm DN Build and Handling

Though Sigma has released a LOT of lenses over the past few years, this is (surprisingly) only the second APS-C specific zoom lens released for mirrorless cameras. The first was the 18-50mm F2.8 DN that I reviewed almost exactly two years ago. I quite liked that little zoom, and actually plan to revisit it with a Fuji X-mount review in the near future. The 10-18mm provides an obvious compliment to that lens, allowing for coverage from 10-50mm between the two lenses, or the equivalent of 15-75mm on full frame. This is all with a maximum aperture of F2.8, which is obviously very useful. What’s more, both of these lenses are extremely compact and light, making them very easy to travel with as a kit. The new 10-18mm DN weighs just 255g in Sony E-mount, or 9 oz. It is 72.2mm in diameter and 64mm in length (2.8 x 2.5″).

Up front we have the ability to use traditional filters in a very standard 67mm size.

As more and more lenses are released on these platforms (particularly on E-mount), it has become increasingly common to see more unique focal lengths and zoom ranges instead of just retreading the traditional versions. That means that doing a direct comparison between various lenses becomes more difficult as they don’t have all have the same focal range and aperture combinations. On APS-C we essentially have two paths – the F2.8 path that has a constrained zoom range to keep the size, weight, and cost down, or the F4 path that allows for a bit more zoom range but at the cost of the brighter aperture. The closest competitor to the Sigma 10-18mm DN will be the Tamron 11-20mm F2.8 RXD; it has a bit more zoom range, but, importantly, it is not as wide. It’s easier to crop in enough to account for that 2mm on the telephoto end, but you can’t always step back to get more in the frame. Here’s a look at these various competitors and their costs.

You’ll note that the Sigma is the cheapest of their four lenses at $599, and also manages to be the second smallest and lightest despite going wide (10mm) and having a larger maximum aperture. It also has the smallest zoom ratio, though not by much. I suspect that many will find the weaknesses an acceptable tradeoff for the significant strengths.

As noted, Sigma’s Contemporary branded lenses have followed a very definite design path. Sigma’s build quality on these lenses is quite nice.  The aesthetic and feel of the lens isn’t really different than their ART series. The design language and materials are quite similar…just smaller.

But where the ART and Contemporary lenses diverge is in the features. The key difference is that the DC DN zoom lenses are essentially featureless.  There is no aperture ring, no switches, no iris lock, no declicking of the aperture, no focus hold button. Now, to be fair, the Tamron lens (probably the primary competitor) also lacks these features. The Fuji lenses XF 10-24mm does have an aperture ring, while the little Sony manages to have a focus hold button, AF/MF switch, and also PowerZoom functionality.

I’ve seen this happen before; a lens maker locks themselves into a certain standard of features for a series of lenses, but then the market shifts and that design philosophy is no longer acceptable.

Case in point is Sigma’s approach to weather sealing on the Contemporary lineup. The 10-18mm DN has a weather sealing gasket at the lens mount but no internal seals…just like the other DC DN lenses. This is at least one area where the Sigma falls behind the competitors – the Tamron 11-20mm, Sony 10-20mm, and Fuji 10-24mm all feature fully weather sealed designs.

Enough about what isn’t here, however. Let’s focus on what is here. The is a very short lens (just 62mm), so that means there is a lot to fit in on a zoom lens. Sigma’s design is slightly unique in that the manual focus ring is actually the closer of the two. It occupies the center of the barrel, while the zoom ring is on a flared out section near the front of the lens. Like other lenses designed for mirrorless cameras, this is a focus-by-wire system in which input from the focus ring is routed through the focus motor.  It is actually the focus motor that moves the elements, making manual focus more of an emulation than a direct movement of the elements.  Some lenses pull this off better than others, and the Sigma 10-18mm DN is one of them. There is good weight/damping on the focus ring, and no visible steps during focus changes. I didn’t notice any focus lag either; the action on the ring and the movement of focus seemed directly linked.  I will note that the lens will automatically alert the body to magnify the image when you are manually focusing, which is a big help in visually confirming focus.  

There is about 10mm between the focus ring and the beginning of the flared section that leads to the zoom ring. I appreciate some space there, as that was one of my complaints about the Sony 10-20mm; there was almost no room between the two rings on that lens, and it was easy to inadvertently move the wrong ring. There’s a very definite difference between two rings and position on the Sigma, though there is a different problem. At the fully retracted position (there is a slight external zoom action), the lens hood fits so tightly against the zoom ring that there isn’t a lot of space for your thumb to fit on the narrow ring. If you happen to have longer fingernails, you might actually find zooming a bit of a challenge.

The zoom action itself is very smooth. This is a “reverse zoom” in terms of the retraction; the inner barrel is fully retracted at 18mm and extends the furthest at 10mm, though the barrel extension is only about 10mm.

Sigma is experimenting with a new lens hood design for this lens. Rather than bayoneting into place, it is actually just a push on design. You still need to line up the markings on the hood and the barrel, but then you just push the lens hood into place rather than rotate it. A spring/lever mechanism holds the hood locked into place. You can release it by just doing a slight rotation to the left.

The primary “pro” of this design is it allows them to the make the lens hood a little thinner as there doesn’t need to be room in the hood design for the bayonet action. Sigma touts the fact that while the filter size of the 10-18mm is 12mm larger than the 18-50mm (67 vs 55mm), the diameter of the lens hood is only 3.8mm larger.

If you want to reverse the hood for storage, you now line up an arrow on the lens hood with the previous mark on the lens barrel and push it forward. Removing it simply requires a similar slight rotation to the left. As per usual, Sigma’s lens hoods are just a little bit nicer than the competition, including some soft-touch materials, texture variations, and lens information imprinted on them.

The 10-80mm DN has two different minimum focusing distances for the wide and telephoto ends of the zoom range. At 10mm you can focus as closely as 11.6cm (4.6″) and can get as high as a 0.25x magnification…though you have to be pretty much right on top of your subject to get it. 

At 18mm that disance extends to 19.1cm (4.6″) and the magnification drops to just 0.14x…though shots at 18mm are a whole lot easier to get!

The aperture iris is electromagnetic and controlled from within the camera (no aperture ring).  It has seven rounded aperture blades that do a fairly good job of retaining a circular shape even with the lens stopped down, though frankly you won’t have a lot of opportunity to shoot shallow depth of field shots with a wide angle lens like this. 

Stopping down will produce a decent 14 bladed sunstar effect.

There isn’t much deviation from the standard formula here, and while I do think there’s room for improvement, I appreciate the great strengths here as well. This is a lightweight, compact lens that also has a very nice build and feel to it. I think people will love how compact the lens is (it is 22mm shorter than the Tamron!) and thus how easy it is to bring along.

Sigma 10-18mm DN Autofocus

Sigma continues to utilize a stepping focus motor (STM) in these smaller lenses as the elements are smaller and lighter than lenses and don’t require the higher torque that some of their large aperture full frame or sports oriented lenses.  The STM focus motor is sufficient here, however, as focus was fast, quiet, and accurate during my tests.

I didn’t really pick up on any focus sound at any point, and focus was responsive enough to pick up on my bratty little Bengal:

I did my autofocus tests indoors and outdoors, and found AF-C autofocus changes near instant moving from a close to a distant subject.

I also tested Eye AF tracking, and found that autofocus stayed “sticky” on Nala’s eyes even though they were closed for most of my moving around.

I had good autofocus results even when shooting backlit subjects, like these fall leaves starting to change.

Wide angle lenses put less stress on their autofocus systems because depth of field tends to be very large unless you are extremely close to your subject. I have zero complaints about the performance here for stills, however, as focus was quick and confident.

My autofocus focus pulls test went very well, with quick, smooth pulls from one subject to another. There is very little focus breathing with the lens, so there is little to draw attention to the focus transitions other than a different subject being in focus.

Likewise my “hand test” where I block the view of my face with my hand and then move the hand to allow focus to pop back to the eye went well. Transitions were smooth and confident.

That translates well to focus transitions in real world video as well. I could move from one subject to another with smooth focus transitions that make for nice video. There was a little less consistency of focus (focus moved around a little) as compared to similar tests done a few days before on the Tamron 17-50mm F4 VXD for full frame (my review here), though that lens was equipped with a higher end linear style focus motor. These focus “misses” were less obvious due to the minimal focus breathing – focus could move around a little without drawing the eye.

I also did a similar sequence where I walked in reverse with the lens on a gimbal as Nala followed me. Overall the results were positive, but again I did notice that there were more inconsistencies and that focus was sometimes changing and readjusting. It does go to show that there is definitely some advantage to the higher torque linear style motors. In general, however, I would say that the focus for video was quite good. You can see a screenshot from that video above.

Vloggers will enjoy this lens. It’s small and compact, but I also found video AF to be nicely sticky on my fact even when I was on the move or spinning around. Here’s a screenshot from one of those shots.

I did test to see if this was a parfocal lens and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was. I could focus at 10mm and zoom into 18mm and find that focus was still correct. That will help with video work.

So while focus isn’t perfect, it is overall very good on Sony. What focus issues I did find I had to go looking for.

Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DC DN Image Quality

The Sigma 10-18mm DN sports a relatively complex optical formula for such a small lens. There are 13 elements in 10 groups, and that includes number of exotic elements like 4 aspherical elements (including a large GM aspherical concave lens as the front element), 3 FLD elements, and one SLD element. The MTF chart and comparison shows a significant improvement over the older Sigma 10-20mm F3.5 that the was equivalent lens for DSLRs. The MTF chart shows a very strong center and midframe at both ends of the zoom range with minimal falloff in the corners at 10mm. There’s a stronger falloff at 18mm in the corners.

Real world results look great, to my eye, with excellent detail and contrast.

We’ll work through the chart results by first looking at distortion and vignette.  Here’s a look at the before and after of manual corrections to both at 10mm, then at 14mm, and finally at 18mm.

There’s really not much to see outside of the 10mm position, where there is a significant but not extreme amount of barrel distortion. I used a +21 to correct it, though there is a mild mustache pattern left after manual correction. The standard profile does a cleaner job of correcting the distortion. There is about two stops of vignette that required a +53 to correct for.

At 14mm there is little to worry about. Distortion is almost nonexistent (I used a -1 to correct the tiniest amount of pincushion distortion) and dialed in a +40 to correct the vignette.

There was a little more pincushion distortion at 18mm (a -7 to correct), but it was very linear and easy to cleanly correct for. Vignette remained at the +40 correction point. There’s nothing extreme or difficult about any of this; this is a good performance for a wide angle zoom. I can take the weakest point (10mm), shoot an interior space, and see a clean correction by using the correction profile.

So far so good.

How about chromatic aberrations?

I saw very little longitudinal chromatic aberrations before and after the plane of focus. You can see is no fringing on the shiny surfaces after the key here.

Lateral Chromatic Aberrations usually show up along the edges of the frame as fringing on either side of high contrast areas, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue here. I don’t see any fringing up in these branches at the top of the frame.

That’s good news, as you are far more likely to see lateral CA on a wide angle zoom in real world images than you are to see longitudinal CA.

So how about resolution and contrast?  All chart tests done with a Sony a7RV in APS-C mode (26MP) using a tripod and a two second timer. Here’s a look at my test chart:

And here are the crops (at roughly 200% magnification) from the center, mid-frame, and extreme corner shot at 10mm and at F2.8:

We see that sharpness is extremely good all across the frame. Even the corners look quite good.

That means that real world landscape images at 10mm will look very nice all across the frame.

I don’t see much difference when stopping down to F4 other than a very slight contrast boost towards out the outer edges of the frame. I see a slight bit more at F5.6:

I didn’t see any further improvement at F8, with F5.6 and F8 looking near identical. After F8 you will start to see some regression due to diffraction. By F22 (minimum aperture), diffraction has really softened the image.

I slightly preferred the overall image quality at 12mm. The results have slightly more detail and contrast, and because of lower vignette and distortion the corner results are a little cleaner and brighter.

Real world 12mm images look great.

14mm is essentially identical to 12mm, with both focal lengths delivering excellent sharpness across the frame even at F2.8. Here’s a 14mm favorite:

16mm is perhaps just a tiny bit better at F2.8, which is to say, excellent. Images look rich and detailed at 16mm:

There is a mild regression in the corners at 18mm as indicated in the MTF charters, though sharpness is still very high in most of the frame.

There is actually more room for improvement when stopped down at 18mm, with a significant improvement at F4 and a bit more at F5.6. By this point the corners are nice and crisp.

I was very happy with my real world results at 18mm:

You are most likely to get visible bokeh at 18mm. This image allows us to look at both the sharpness of the subject and the bokeh beyond.

The sharpness on the subject is excellent even at F2.8, with good detail and contrast. Bokeh is also fairly good here, though with a little more outlining than I would prefer in some of the specular highlights. There’s a light swirl effect, which people have varying opinions of. I personally don’t mind it.

Here’s another bokeh shot.

It’s not amazingly creamy or anything, but this is also a wide angle zoom. The bokeh is acceptably good. Lenses like this are more about what’s in focus and less about what’s NOT in focus. If you are more than a few feet away from your subject, most things are going to be in focus anyway. Here’s a shot taken from just three feet away (inside the cab of an old tractor):

Flare resistance was fairly good in most situations, with good contrast and only minor issues with ghosting.

I did see some “flashing” with the sun right out of the frame when shooting video, though I did find it fairly artistic and not distracting. Again, that’s a subjective evaluation, and I would recommend watching the video review to draw more conclusions for yourself. Here’s a few screenshots to show the effect.

Overall my feelings were very positive about the flare resistance.

Unfortunately a protracted storm system came in during my review time with the lens and I was unable to test coma. I hopefully will be able to rectify that during my time with a Fuji X-mount version in the future.

What I did have, however, was some really dramatic storm light that allowed me to capture some incredible colors.

Color rendition looked good even in less dramatic conditions.

I’m interested in seeing how the Sigma 10-18mm DN survives the much more pixel rich Fujifilm X-H2 and its 40MP sensor, but here on the 26MP of current Sony sensors, this is a very strong performance. I feel like there is a lot of optical performance here for such a small package. You can see many more beautiful images by visiting the image gallery here.

Conclusion

The Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DC DN is a very welcome addition to the various platforms that it comes to. Even on Sony, where I’ve tested for this review, there is a lot of space for a compact wide angle zoom like this. Sigma has been very selective with the APS-C zooms that they’ve released to date on mirrorless, but this was a smart move. They’ve opted to go for a slightly reduced zoom range to allow them to maintain a small size, large maximum aperture, and optical purity throughout.

I would like to see Sigma increase the feature set of their Contemporary lenses, particularly when it comes to weather sealing, but they also have the advantage of having the lowest price point of competing lenses. This does help make that more acceptable.

Wide angle lenses like this are great for being able to get dramatic images, and this 10-18mm DN is a great pairing for Sigma’s existing 18-50mm DN. I’m hard pressed to think of a better option for APS-C shooters at the moment, particularly if you value having an F2.8 aperture.

Pros:

  • Extremely compact lens for having F2.8 aperture
  • Unique new hood design
  • Manual focus and zoom rings move smoothly
  • Quick and quiet autofocus
  • Low focus breathing
  • Seems to be parfocal
  • Strong optics throughout zoom range
  • Fringing well controlled
  • Good color
  • Good flare resistance
  • Good price

Cons:

  • Significant barrel distortion at 10mm
  • Weather sealed only at mount
  • No extra features

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GEAR USED:

Purchase the Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DN @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

Purchase the Sony a7RV @ B&H Photo | AdoramaAmazon | Camera Canada | Sony Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany 

Purchase the Sony a7IV @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Sony Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany 

Purchase the Sony Alpha 1 @ Camera Canada | B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Sony Canada | Amazon CanadaAmazon UK | Amazon Germany | Ebay 

Purchase a Sony a9M2 @ B&H Photo | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany | Ebay 

Want to support this channel? Use these affiliate links to shop at: B&H Photo | Amazon | Adorama | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Ebay | Make a donation via Paypal

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Keywords:  Sigma, 10-18mm, Sigma 10-18mm, F2.8, DC , DN, APS-C, Fuji X-mount, Sony E-mount, Leica L-mount, Sigma 10-18 Review, Sigma 10-18mm Review, Sigma 10-18 DN, Review, Sony a6700, Sony a6400, Sony a7RV, Fujifilm X-H2, Review, Hands On, Dustin Abbott, Real World, Comparison, Sharpness, Bokeh, Flare Resistance, Autofocus, Image Quality, Sample Images, Video, Portrait, Photography, let the light in, #letthelightin, DA, Weather Sealing, #SIGMA, #SIGMA1018mmContemporary, #SIGMAContemporary, #SIGMADCDN

DISCLAIMER: This article and description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DC DN Gallery

Dustin Abbott

October 10th, 2023

When I started reviewing Sony, there were no Sigma E-mount lenses other than a few APS-C lenses that have since been discontinued. Sigma then did a big drop of ported EF mount lenses from their ART series to E-mount, though most of those have been replaced with new DN lenses. Sigma uses the DN designation for their lenses that have been specifically designed for mirrorless, and in less than four year they have released nearly 30 DN lenses. That’s right! The Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DC DN Contemporary lens is the 29th DN lens, and the newly announced 70-200mm F2.8 Sport will be the 30th DN lens my count. That averages to more than 7 lenses per year, which makes Sigma easily the most prolific lens maker that I’m aware of during that time. The majority of those lenses have been full frame lenses, however, and we’ve seen fewer of their APS-C specific designs, which Sigma designates with DC. But this year we’ve seen two important DC DN lenses, including the excellent 23mm F1.4 DC DN and this new 10-18mm DN, a wide angle zoom lens with a fast maximum aperture of F2.8. This will certainly be a welcome addition to Sony, Fuji, and Leica L-mount shooters…particularly if the lens proves to be a good performer.

Follow Me @ YouTube | Patreon |  Instagram | Facebook | DA Merchandise | Flickr | 500px

Thanks to Gentec (Sigma’ distributer in Canada) for sending me a review loaner of this lens. As always, this is a completely independent review. *The tests and most of the photos that I share as a part of my review cycle have been done on the 26MP APS-C mode of the Sony a7RV.

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The Sigma 10-18mm DN is the sixth lens in this series. Here’s a look at the DC (APS-C) DN (mirrorless) lineup thus far.

  1. Sigma 16mm F1.4
  2. Sigma 23mm F1.4
  3. Sigma 30mm F1.4
  4. Sigma 56mm F1.4
  5. Sigma 10-18mm F2.8
  6. Sigma 18-50mm F2.8

Sigma’s DC DN lenses have all fallen under the umbrella of their Contemporary lineup, and while Sigma has proven willing to experiment with new features and design elements within the ART and Sport lineups, the Contemporary lenses have all stuck to a fairly rigid design formula. That continues to be the case here, so this little lens mostly looks and handles pretty similarly to other lenses in the lineup.

There’s some good and bad with this, but what certainly isn’t bad is that you can capture some absolutely amazing images with this little lens.

Yes, the colors were just that rich; the Sigma has captured them accurately.

This is a useful zoom range, allowing you to go from extremely wide at 10mm (15mm full frame equivalent) through the various steps to 18mm (27mm full frame equivalent).

The Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DC DN carries a price tag of $599 USD. Should this lens jump to the top of your list when you are looking for a wide angle zoom lens for your camera? You can find out either in my video review linked above or by reading my text review here.

Photos of the Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DN

Images taken with the Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DC DN

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GEAR USED:

Purchase the Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DN @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

Purchase the Sony a7RV @ B&H Photo | AdoramaAmazon | Camera Canada | Sony Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany 

Purchase the Sony a7IV @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Sony Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany 

Purchase the Sony Alpha 1 @ Camera Canada | B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Sony Canada | Amazon CanadaAmazon UK | Amazon Germany | Ebay 

Purchase a Sony a9M2 @ B&H Photo | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany | Ebay 

Want to support this channel? Use these affiliate links to shop at: B&H Photo | Amazon | Adorama | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Ebay | Make a donation via Paypal

Buy DA Merchandise https://bit.ly/TWIMerch

B&H Logo

Keywords:  Sigma, 10-18mm, Sigma 10-18mm, F2.8, DC , DN, APS-C, Fuji X-mount, Sony E-mount, Leica L-mount, Sigma 10-18 Review, Sigma 10-18mm Review, Sigma 10-18 DN, Review, Sony a6700, Sony a6400, Sony a7RV, Fujifilm X-H2, Review, Hands On, Dustin Abbott, Real World, Comparison, Sharpness, Bokeh, Flare Resistance, Autofocus, Image Quality, Sample Images, Video, Portrait, Photography, let the light in, #letthelightin, DA, Weather Sealing, #SIGMA, #SIGMA1018mmContemporary, #SIGMAContemporary, #SIGMADCDN

DISCLAIMER: This article and description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS (X-Mount) Review

Dustin Abbott

September 5th, 2023

For the second time in about a month, I am working on a review of a lens that was designed on full frame but is being ported over to the APS-C only Fuji X-mount.  Tamron determined that its full frame 150-500mm VC lens was compact and competent enough to work on Fuji (where there are few telephoto options).  The result is (for the most part) successful, as I detailed in my review here.  But Sigma also has an excellent candidate for this converter – a direct competitor to the Fujinon XF 100-400mm OS (my review here)in the form  Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS (we’ll call it the 100-400X in this review for brevity).  The 100-400X is going to be a bit of disruptor on X-mount for a couple of reasons.  The first is that it is a very competent lens in terms of performance.  The second is that is going to be a huge value alternative at $950 vs $1900 USD for the Fuji.  The 100-400mm zoom range is one of the most popular for those who want some serious reach for birding, wildlife, or sports but don’t want the larger size that comes with longer focal lengths.  When you consider Fuji’s 1.5x crop factor on X-mount cameras you get a focal length equivalence of 150-600mm on full frame, which is obviously incredibly useful, going from this at 100mm:

to this at 400mm:

I have the original Sigma 100-400mm DN a positive review on Sony E-mount in mid 2020.  It was the first of the third party telephoto lenses to come to Sony E-mount, and it was very welcome because it was along about a third of the price (though you had to buy the tripod collar separately if you wanted one) while providing most of the features and performance of the Sony 100-400mm G Master lens.  I suspect that it can serve a similar role here on Fuji, mostly because it can create images like this…

…for under a thousand bucks.  The fact that Fuji’s own 100-400mm is getting a little long in the tooth won’t hurt, either, though there are still a couple of areas where the Fuji has the advantage (compatibility with teleconverters, for example).  So, does using a lens designed for full frame on an APS-C only system make sense?  We’ll try to unpack that in this review.  If you prefer to watch your reviews, just click the video below.

 

 

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Thanks to Gentec (Sigma’s Canadian Distributor) for sending me a pre-release review loaner of this lens. As always, this is a completely independent review. I’m doing this review on a 40MP Fujifilm X-H2 camera.

Sigma 100-400X Build and Handling

The Sigma 100-400mm is mostly similar in Fuji X-mount build to the Sony E-mount and Leica L-mounts before, though with a few minor feature changes due to the unique market positioning on Fuji. The lens continues to be lighter than the competition despite being designed for a larger sensor.  While the Fuji 100-400 OSS weighs in at 1375g (right over 48 oz), the 100-400X tips the scales at a relatively svelte 1135g (40 oz), a nearly 250g weight savings.  This is without the tripod collar, obviously (as this is an optional accessory for the Sigma), which will add another 123g.  (Nala really wanted to join this product photo session!)

The Fuji is 94.8mm in diameter and 210.5mm in length (3.73 x 8.29″), while the Sigma is thinner and shorter at 86 x 199.5mm (3.4 x 7.9″).  Not a major difference, obviously, but enough to be noticeable.  The front filter thread is also smaller at 67mm vs the 77mm standard for the Fuji.

Part of the reason for this difference is the fact that the Fuji lens does have an aperture advantage throughout the zoom range.  It starts at F4.5 and doesn’t hit F5 until a little before 200mm.  At 300mm, it’s f/5.2, and from 350mm on it is f/5.6.  The 100-400X performs much worse in this regard, as, while it starts at F5 at 100mm, it reaches F5.6 by 113mm where it remains until it hits F6.3 at 235mm.  What this means is that the Sigma is going to require more light (either slower shutter speed or higher ISO) than the Fuji in identical conditions regardless of the focal length.  

While the Sigma 100-400mm DN lenses are compatible with teleconverters on Leica L-mount, Fuji X-mount shooters are in the same boat as Sony E-mount – there are no TCs that can be used on the lens.

Sigma has made a few changes to the controls to accommodate the difference in Fuji’s protocols.  There are four switches and buttons on the side, but these have been slightly changed on X-mount.  Instead of an AF/MF switch, there is an AF-L/AF switch instead.  The Sony-style “Focus Hold” button has been rebranded as AF Function.  When AF-L is selected, you can use the button to either lock focus or reactivate autofocus afterwards.  So yes, we’ve got reduced function here compared to the Sony version.  The loss of a direct AF/MF switch is because Fuji lenses don’t come with this function (typically AF/MF is controlled from a dial on the camera).  The loss of more function on the “Focus Hold” button is due to the simple fact that unlike Sony or L-mount cameras, Fuji has no option to assign different values to this button in camera.

Other functions here include a 3 position focus limiter (FULL | 6M to infinity | Under 6M) and a three position switch for the OS (Mode 1 [Standard] | Mode 2 [Panning] | OFF).  

The OS (Optical Stabilizer) has gotten an updated tuning here and is now rated for 5 rather than 4 stops, which puts it on equal footing with the Fuji 100-400mm, which is also rated at 5 stops.  The first shot of Nala below was shot at 100mm and 1/7th of a second shutter speed, while the shot of the woodpecker is at 400mm and 1/20th of a second.

Both lenses have a standard zoom lock that locks the lens at 100mm and keeps it from extending.  The lens barrel will extend out a fair bit when zoomed to the telephoto end of the zoom range on both lenses, as these are externally zooming designs.

While these lenses have mostly similar controls, I prefer the layout and feel of the Sigma controls.  They are organized more logically and feel better to the touch.  I do have one practical complaint, however.  While hiking with the lens on a strap I would sometimes pull the lens up for a shot and it wouldn’t focus.  I would look, and the focus limiter would have moved to close focus position (furthest to the right), limiting focus.  I’ve not had this problem previously, so it does indicate in some carrying positions the switches can be inadvertently moved.

One feature the Fuji has that the Sigma does not is an aperture ring.  Aperture rings are fairly ubiquitous on Fuji lenses, but obviously this redesign by Sigma for X-mount didn’t extend quite that far.

Another minor difference is with the lens hood.  The Fuji lens features a little window in the hood to allow one to rotate a circular polarizer without reaching down into the hood.  The Sigma lacks this feature, though it does have a relatively small 67mm front filter thread and a nice flare in the lens hood at that point which allows one to reach in to rotate a C-PL fairly easily.  The lens hood also has a textured portion near the front for one to grasp as the 100-400 DN is designed to function as either a typical “twist” zoom or a “push-pull” design where one simply grasps the front of the lens hood and pushes or pulls the lens to the desired focal length.  Something for everyone here.

The 100-400 DN is a very nicely made lens, using a mixture of premium materials, including a brass lens mount, magnesium alloy in the first section of the lens, and then engineered plastics over a metal frame.  I didn’t get the feel that the Fuji lens was superior in materials.  The 100-400X is a good looking lens that feels very sturdy and well made.  It looks and feels more modern in design than the older Fuji option.

As noted already, the lens does not ship with a tripod collar (many people do not use one on a lens like this).  It comes with a rubber sleeve that covers the screws where the tripod collar attaches.  It has 100-400 stamped on there and makes for a cleaner finish when no tripod collar is attached.

The optional tripod collar is the TS-11. The tripod foot is nicely made, and, unlike the Sony tripod foot, it is ARCA compatible (meaning you can attach it right onto most tripods without the need for a quick release plate.  You can freely rotate and lock it in any position.

Using the tripod collar and foot makes a significant difference when using the lens on a tripod.  While the lens is on the lighter side of its class, it is still too heavy to easily balance on a tripod.

We have got a thick rubber gasket at the lens mount, but Sigma’s language does not specify other seal points in the lens itself, so that is likely another area where the Fuji lens is a little more robust.  Thus far Sigma’s “Contemporary” branded lenses (like this one) have only had sealing at the lens mount.

The 100-400 DN sports a useful magnification figure at 400mm of 1:4.1 (0.24x), which actually bests the Fuji’s 0.19x .  Minimum focus distance is 1.6m (5.25ft), which also best Fuji’s 1.75m.  Here’s what the Sigma’s MFD looks like:

You can really compress the background at close distances, and the bokeh is quite beautiful.  One could add an extension tube to allow for closer focus and higher magnification.  One thing is clear:  at minimum focus distance your backgrounds will completely blur out beautifully.  

The overall build quality is familiar to those who have used the lens elsewhere, but, for the most part, the 100-400X holds up pretty well when compared to the Fuji competition.

Sigma 100-400mm DN Autofocus Performance

This is an area that has historically been challenging for Fuji in general and even more so for third party lenses being adapted to the platform.  This is definitely the area where I experience my greatest frustrations with the 100-400x.  Sigma’s most recent telephoto lens on Sony received a new focus system (called HLA), but unfortunately we don’t get that here.  That means that we are working with an older STM motor that was in the original Sony design over 3 years ago.  There are moments when it works great, and other moments where it is pretty frustrating…and that’s on the X-H2, which has one of the most robust focus systems available on Fuji at the time of this review.  At times, autofocus was great, allowing me to effectively track and photography birds in rapid flight.

In other situations, just trying to focus on a slightly closer subject (but further than the minimum focus distance) would be impossible.  Focus would only go to the background, and even trying to choose a more obvious focus choice would not motivate focus movement.  Here’s what autofocus gave me in a shot that I wanted:

…and here’s what manual focus gave me.

I think we can all agree the latter is the much nicer shot.  The optics on this lens are really quite good, but there are definitely moments when the autofocus experience holds it back.  In the scenario above, there were a few minutes of trying to get autofocus to work, then another few minutes of trying to manually focus (a very slow process as it takes many full rotations to go through the focus possibilities ).  I estimate I had about six minutes invested in trying to get two very easy photos that should have taken a couple of seconds each.

Frustrating.

And these subjects weren’t going anywhere.  In another instance I had a great shot of a dragonfly about 10 feet away.  By the time I went through all the effort to get focus to the proper place, I got this:

You’ll notice there are no dragonflies on this pine bough.  The dragonfly patiently waited for a minute or so, but then moved on.

There were other situations where focus worked just fine.  About fifteen minutes after the dragonfly episode I got a nice series of well focused images of a butterfly flitting around wildflowers.

About five minutes later I saw a pileated woodpecker through the trees, and tried to react quickly to get the shot.  At first, this is all autofocus gave me.

It just refused to focus.  I maneuvered around a bit to allow eye detect to focus on the eye, and even with some foreground obstructions, I got a well focused result.

My observation has been that the current iteration of Fuji autofocus is that focus is quite good if the AI has a detectable subject to track, but it’s not nearly as good if there is no trackable subject and the core autofocus system (which hasn’t changed much in years) has to do the heavy lifting.  This shortcomings are magnified by a long focal range and a fairly slow maximum aperture of F6.3 on the long end.  I’m pretty spoiled by the autofocus capabilities of my long glass on either Sony or Canon, so I do find all of this somewhat frustrating.

In long tracking sequences with the X-H2 and the 100-400x, I found that tracking was okay if I started the burst with a focus lock.  There were some dips in and out, but probably about a 70% keeper rate.

If I started the burst without a good lock, the camera and lens never did achieve proper focus.  I could follow the action of the bird for dozens of frames without focus ever locking on, which is rather disappointing for 2023.  

Most of the time autofocus would grab the eye of the bird quickly, and I could get some great reactive shots.

Other times it just wouldn’t want to grab on at all.  I can’t really tell you why…because other times focus would lock well even with the subject’s back turned to me.

I shot long bursts at 15FPS with the mechanical shutter on the X-H2, and, while I got some shots during the session that I really liked, I also had a lot more castoffs than usual.  I would say that my overall keeper rate for the session was no better than 60%.

If you plan on doing a lot of BIF work or tracking a lot of fast paced action, you might want to spend a bit more for one of the Fuji options, though, to be fair, there isn’t really a “slam-dunk” option on the platform outside of the hugely expensive 200mm F2.  I think most able photographers will be able to get the Sigma 100-400X to work just fine, but just realize that you won’t be getting anything like a 90% hit rate for action work.  But I came away with dozens of great looking shots from just a 20 minute session of tracking gulls, so there is value here for birders or wildlife photographers.

On the video front I found that at 100mm (the easiest focal length to frame and typically fastest autofocus speed) focus pulls were reasonably successful, though with some obvious stepping.  Focus breathing was fairly minimal, however, so that’s a plus.  My “hand test” where I alternatively block the view of my face with my hand and then remove it went well, however, with good transitions from my eye to my hand.  In another clip, focus picked up my face quickly when I stepped into frame.

On a more negative side, I shot a clip of flowers in the morning sun and focus was initially good, but then focus racked forward to where nothing was in focus and didn’t return for at least five seconds.  

The footage itself looked good, with nice detail even when shooting at 8K on my X-H2.  I wouldn’t buy this lens for video work if that work required sophisticated autofocus, but if you want to augment your footage with some long shots, it certainly provides the least expensive way to get that kind of reach…and the footage looks great.

There is obviously room for improvement on the autofocus fronts.  I’m hoping that at least some of my complaints can be fixed via firmware updates, and perhaps the lens will also benefit from growth in Fuji’s autofocus systems in the future.  Some of these frustrations are Fuji frustrations in general, but there’s no question that I had fewer complaints when using Fuji’s own telephoto options and even the Tamron 150-500mm faired better in my tests.

Sigma 100-400 DN Image Quality

The Sigma 100-400 DN has a moderately complex optical formula with 22 elements in 16 groups.  This includes one FLD element (a low dispersion glass) and four SLD (special low dispersion element) to help with aberrations and distortion.  I was quite impressed with this lens on its native full frame when I reviewed it on a 42MP Sony a7RIII years ago, but the standard of Fuji’s 40MP APS-C sensor is much more demanding.  That many pixels on a smaller sensor is the equivalent of 90+MP on full frame, which requires a lens to be really strong optically to resolve the sensor.  Fortunately that is an area of strength for the 100-400x, as the optical performance is very competitive with the more expensive Fuji options.

This is a lens capable of producing really great looking results even on the high resolution Fuji sensor.

The Sigma gives a very strong showing when it comes to vignette and distortion.  What distortion is there is a very mild pincushion distortion that grows from a -1 to correct to a maximum of -3 to correct at 400mm (essentially 1,2,3), but at any point in the zoom range you could leave the distortion uncorrected and never even notice it.  Likewise vignette is at one stop or less throughout the zoom range, and you could easily leave it uncorrected as well.  You can see the uncorrected and then corrected results at 100, 200, and 400mm below.

You may have already figured out why these figures are so much lower here than what we saw on Sony – you are putting a full frame lens on a much smaller APS-C image circle, which means that the majority of the vignette and even distortion have been cropped off (they fall outside the APS-C image circle).  This is the area where a full frame lens is most advantaged by using it on a smaller sensor.  The Sigma does have full support of Fuji’s in-camera correction profiles for JPEG and Video as well, and RAW files will be corrected via the available correction profile in your favorite software.

I also saw minimal issues with Longitudinal Chromatic Aberrations (LoCA), which means that you should see little fringing in your shallow depth of field shots:

I also saw next to no Lateral CA near the edges of the frame.

All good thus far.  The harder test is coming, however, as the 100-400x must now face a much more pixel dense sensor than it was initially designed for.  The highest resolution E-mount or L-mount camera in 2020 was a 42MP full frame sensor; this pixel density is vastly higher.  That can be the area where full frame lenses on high resolution APS-C sensors can struggle. My resolution torture test is done on the 40MP Fujifilm X-H2 and results are examined at a very high 200% magnification.  Here’s a look at the test chart:

And here are the nearly 200% crops at 100mm, F5 from the center, mid-frame, and corners:

That’s an excellent result with very consistent sharpness across the image frame.  It also compares very favorably to the much more expensive Fuji XF 100-400mm, both in the center:

and in the corners:

The Sigma is the clear winner here, particularly in the corner, where it probably benefits from having the weakest performance from the lens cut off by the crop.

And yes, the Sigma has a slower aperture here (F5 vs F4.5), but if I stop both lenses down to F5.6 and compare at 100mm, the Sigma is still the clear winner all across the frame.  Impressive.

Stopping down to F5.6 or even F8 makes little improvement, if any, so you can be confident that you are getting close to peak performance wide open, which is really important on the 40MP Fuji bodies because diffraction arrives so early.  Real world results look good as well:

Diffraction arrives early on these bodies, so while the minimum aperture is F22, I would avoid using it because diffraction really robs away sharpness and contrast progressively after F8:

100mm is the high water mark for the lens performance, however, so while 200mm is good, it isn’t quite as good as what we’ve seen at 100mm (though very, very close):

Maximum aperture is F5.6 at 200mm, so stopping down to F8 brings no advantage because diffraction has started to very slightly soften the image.  Fortunately I think that most people will find real world results in and around 200mm at F5.6 very usable:

Image quality is weakest at 400mm, though it still exceeds what I saw from the older Fuji 100-400mm lens:

As before, the image quality is fairly consistent across the frame.  There’s good sharpness there to begin with, and the weakest part of the image gets cut off by the crop factor, leaving still strong corners.  When focus is nailed, you can get good results wide open at 400mm:

I don’t find contrast “off the charts”, but, to be fair, the only telephoto lens that I’ve been really impressed with on this high resolution sensor is the very expensive Fujinon XF 200mm F2 OIS (my review here).  I haven’t really seen better performance than this from any of the zoom competitors.  The Fuji 100-400mm has a slightly faster aperture of F5.6 at 400mm, but the more expensive XF 150-600mm is slightly slower (F7.1), and the Sigma results are as sharp as what I saw when testing that XF 150-600mm.  Bottom line is that this is about as good of image quality you are going to get at 400mm on the Fuji platform at the moment:

F6.3 isn’t incredibly fast (even at 400mm), but remember that the compression of the focal length is equivalent to 600mm on full frame, meaning that you can really defocus a background.  You can see from the image below that the quality of the bokeh doesn’t look like a $10,000 F4 prime (there is some nervousness to some of the textures), but also the background is strongly blurred.  At closer focus distances you can really defocus the background and get very creamy results with nice subject isolation:

Obviously I prefer the images with greater compression, as the creamy backgrounds look great.  But even in this image where the background is only mildly defocused, I still think the nature of the blur isn’t bad.

How about flare resistance?  I replicated the results from Sony here, as they are representative for the behavior on Fuji, too.  Flare is typically less of an issue with a lens like this, as the angle of view is so narrow (particularly on the long end), that you rarely point it at the sun.  Still, however, the results aren’t bad here.  There are six tests shown below.  The first series (of four) is of the lens at 100mm where the sun is most likely to be in the frame.  We’ve the sun centered in the frame wide open, then in the upper right corner, then with those results repeated at F11.  There’s a mild flare pattern that doesn’t worsen when the lens is stopped down.  Pretty good.

The final two images show the lens at 400mm with the lens wide open and then stopped down to F11.  There’s a little most veiling and loss of contrast here, though this will probably rarely be a real-world factor.

I ended my section on the autofocus with many reservations, but I’ve got no such reservations here.  The image quality stands up very well to the Fuji competition that will cost twice as much.  If you’d like to see more photo samples, I would recommend that you visit the image gallery here.

Conclusion

The 100-400mm focal range is popular for a reason.  By designing a variable aperture lens, lens makers are able to fit a fairly high performing long telephoto lens into a body roughly the size of a typical 70-200mm F2.8 zoom.  The end result is a a very flexible tool that can meet most anyone’s telephoto needs without breaking their backs in terms of the weight.  The Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS takes that to the next level, as it also won’t break the bank at a price point of right under $1000 USD.   

Fuji has been a bit of a wasteland for telephoto options, with only two lenses reaching beyond 300mm from Fuji.  The release of the Tamron 150-500mm VXD added a third lens, and this Sigma provides a welcome fourth option.  But the Tamron and Sigma lenses are actually full frame designs, but their reasonably compact size allows them to work on this smaller platform.  Like the Tamron, the biggest limitations include the lack of compatibility with teleconverters and the simple fact that autofocus isn’t as effective as what we’ve previously seen on Sony.

The difference in price between the Sigma and the Fuji options will probably mean that there are plenty of people who would be willing to do deal with a few more autofocus frustrations to get a quality telephoto lens that they can afford.  The fact that the Sigma 100-400X actually bests the Fuji competition optically won’t hurt, either.  The Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS is a perfect example of the role that Sigma can and should play in the Fuji marketplace – a quality mid-tier option that offers 90% of the first party lens at a much cheaper price.  

 

Pros:

  • Nice build quality including some weather sealing and premium materials
  • Slimmer and lighter than competing lenses
  • Fairly good tracking results for birding or fast action
  • Excellent image quality…particularly at the very important 400mm position
  • Nicer bokeh than many variable aperture zooms
  • Almost no vignette or distortion
  • Excellent chromatic aberration control
  • Improved optical stabilizer (5 vs 4 stops)
  • Good magnification and close focus results.
  • Fantastic price

Cons:

  • Autofocus can be frustrating at times
  • Tripod collar a separate purchase
  • Variable aperture zoom reaches smaller apertures very quickly
  • No TC options available on Fuji

 
 

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Keywords: Sigma 100-400mm DN, Sigma 100-400 Fuji, Sigma 100-400, Sigma 100-400mm, Sigma 100-400 OS, Sigma 100-400mm OS X-mount review, 100-400mm, Dg DN, Dg, DN, OS, Contemporary, F5-6.3, Review, Fuji X, Fuji X-mount, Review, Telephoto, Action, Tracking, Hands On, Dustin Abbott, Real World, Comparison, Sharpness, Bokeh, Flare Resistance, Autofocus, Image Quality, Sample Images, Video, Photography, Fujifilm X-T5, Fujifilm X-H2, let the light in, #letthelightin, DA, #SIGMA, #SIGMA100-400mmContemporary, #SIGMAContemporary, #SIGMAContemporaryPrime, #SIGMADCDN

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Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS Fuji X-Mount Gallery

Dustin Abbott

September 5th, 2023

For the second time in about a month, I am working on a review of a lens that was designed on full frame but is being ported over to the APS-C only Fuji X-mount.  Tamron determined that its full frame 150-500mm VC lens was compact and competent enough to work on Fuji (where there are few telephoto options).  The result is (for the most part) successful, as I detailed in my review here.  But Sigma also has an excellent candidate for this converter – a direct competitor to the Fujinon XF 100-400mm OS (my review here)in the form  Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS (we’ll call it the 100-400X in this review for brevity).  The 100-400X is going to be a bit of disruptor on X-mount for a couple of reasons.  The first is that it is a very competent lens in terms of performance.  The second is that is going to be a huge value alternative at $950 vs $1900 USD for the Fuji.  The 100-400mm zoom range is one of the most popular for those who want some serious reach for birding, wildlife, or sports but don’t want the larger size that comes with longer focal lengths.  When you consider Fuji’s 1.5x crop factor on X-mount cameras you get a focal length equivalence of 150-600mm on full frame, which is obviously incredibly useful, going from this at 100mm:

to this at 400mm:

I have the original Sigma 100-400mm DN a positive review on Sony E-mount in mid 2020.  It was the first of the third party telephoto lenses to come to Sony E-mount, and it was very welcome because it was along about a third of the price (though you had to buy the tripod collar separately if you wanted one) while providing most of the features and performance of the Sony 100-400mm G Master lens.  I suspect that it can serve a similar role here on Fuji, mostly because it can create images like this…

…for under a thousand bucks.  The fact that Fuji’s own 100-400mm is getting a little long in the tooth won’t hurt, either, though there are still a couple of areas where the Fuji has the advantage (compatibility with teleconverters, for example).  So, does using a lens designed for full frame on an APS-C only system make sense?  You can get my thoughts either by watching my video review or reading the text review here.

 

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Thanks to Gentec (Sigma’s Canadian Distributor) for sending me a pre-release review loaner of this lens. As always, this is a completely independent review. I’m doing this review on a 40MP Fujifilm X-H2 camera.

Images of the Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DN

 

Images taken with the Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DN 

 

 

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Keywords: Sigma 100-400mm DN, Sigma 100-400 Fuji, Sigma 100-400, Sigma 100-400mm, Sigma 100-400 OS, Sigma 100-400mm OS X-mount review, 100-400mm, Dg DN, Dg, DN, OS, Contemporary, F5-6.3, Review, Fuji X, Fuji X-mount, Review, Telephoto, Action, Tracking, Hands On, Dustin Abbott, Real World, Comparison, Sharpness, Bokeh, Flare Resistance, Autofocus, Image Quality, Sample Images, Video, Photography, Fujifilm X-T5, Fujifilm X-H2, let the light in, #letthelightin, DA, #SIGMA, #SIGMA100-400mmContemporary, #SIGMAContemporary, #SIGMAContemporaryPrime, #SIGMADCDN

DISCLAIMER: This article and description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.