Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN Art Sony E Mount 578965

Product Information

Above: Nikon Z 24-70mm f2.8 S on a Nikon Z7 at 70mm, f2.8; 100% crops from the FF-corner at f2.8 (left), f4.0 (middle), f5.6 (right)

Sigma’s new zoom lens is very sharp in the APS-C image circle up to 35mm becoming a bit softer toward the long end. The FF-corner starts not bad at 24mm but already shows signs of astigmatism. This becomes progressively worse with 35mm and 50mm looking mushy and a slight recovery at 70mm. The lens also exhibits quite some field curvature toward the FF-corner at normal distances.

Introduction

This is similar to theNikon Z 24-70mm f2.8 S. The Sony FE 24-70mm f2.8 GM and Tamron28-75mm f2.8 Di III produce much clearer/stronger sunstars. Focusing is internal – the lens does not extend and the filter threads do not rotate during focusing. The MF ring has about a 90 deg rotation; significantly more than the Tamron, and feels accurate and comfortable in manual mode. The focus ring also has no hard stop like the Tamron does. The Tamron Lens hereby, is a mid-class Zoom, good, but no SP(Super Performance) Series. Tamron should make their SP 24-70/2.8 G2 (Canikon DSLR Lens) as SP recreation also for the current DSLM Generation as optical new calculation, just what Sigma did.

Above: Nikon Z 24-70mm f2.8 S on a Nikon Z7 at 50mm, f2.8; 100% crop from center, APS-C-corner, FF-corner; large original available at f2.8, f4.0, f5.6, f8.0, f11 The build quality and handling of Sigma’s new 24-70mm Art lens for mirrorless cameras is top-notch. It feels really robust without being overly heavy, and has refined handling in every area, from the smooth-action zoom and focus rings to the various buttons and switches. Autofocus is super-fast, deadly accurate and virtually silent.I’m unsure how I feel about Leica using Sigma’s lens optics. I feel it creates too much clutter in the camera system and not enough innovation. Leica, however, has improved on what Sigma did in some ways. Hopefully, Leica will fix this with a future firmware update. And we’re thankful to the readers that pointed out this problem to us. We’ve already made Leica aware of it. Update June 2023 Sigma USA's 4-year warranty is far superior to Canon's standard 1 year warranty (Sigma's international warranty is also 1 year). To summarize the Sigma 24-70 HSM Lens' image sharpness in a single paragraph, I would say that this lens is soft at f/2.8, mostly sharp at f/4 and sharp across the frame at f/5.6. The graph below shows the degree of corner shading visible in images from the three lenses at their longest focal length and widest aperture (when it will be most noticeable).