Sigma f2.8 90mm - Incredible Macro/Portrait Bargain!
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- Опубліковано 25 тра 2024
- This is one of the best kept secrets in vintage lenses right now. It's the cheapest 90mm macro lens I could find.
It's incredibly sharp, it shoots macro images and its 90mm focal length means it makes LOADS of background blur too.
It's small, light and compact and it's REALLY cheap too.
Check out the video to see what it can do!
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Zenography you truly are the poet of ‘Blur’ closely followed by your musings on colour. Pleased you’ve returned to your roots Vintage glass.
Funnily enough, I was using this lens today for the first time on my Pentax K1 that I got last week. I was using it as a short telephoto and it was excellent. The focus throw is a bit too short at telephoto distances, and not as accurate to focus as the old Tamron SP 90mm f2.5, but still perfectly usable. When I got the lens last year, there was absolutely no dampening of the focus ring as all the grease had gone! If you slide off the rubber grip on the focus ring and remove the plastic sleeve underneath, you gain access to the helicoid. All I did was put some silicone grease on the movement and it's now perfect. A good, versatile lens that's compact and sharp. :-)
I have a later version of this lens in a Nikon AF mount, bought new around 25 years ago. It has much more plastic in the construction, but the contrast and color characteristics are as you describe. It was my go to lens for a number of years due to it's versatility.
The best thing about vintage lenses is the aperture ring. The reason I love Nikon AF-D lenses is that can have both auto focus and an aperture ring. Some modern lenses have an aperture ring, but too few of them do. This Sigma looks like a very sweet lens. A pity it only goes to f22 instead of f32.
its quite funny how - because of video to be frank - lenses are being redesigned and re-introduced just to add the aperture ring. That should have never been removed 🤷🏼
I just changed the subscription to "Bell All". I hadn't come across your videos in months, even though I liked them so much, especially because of your calm voice and uncommon lens reviews. I encourage anyone who has experienced the same thing as I did to set the bell to "All" before it's too late if they don't want to miss new videos.
I got a Vivitar 90mm f2.8 Canon fd mount for £80. 1:1 macro. Sharp as too. Highly recommend for vintage macro.
Really good video Nigel thanks for info... Will look out for one at a good price....very promising lens.....for those who know.....yes thanks for that.......
I don't know how many different versions Sigma had of their 90mm f2.8 macro but the version I had was excellent as a macro lens but very soft at infinity. So you have to be careful which version you're getting if you want it as a landscape lens as well as a macro lens.
I had a Sigma 28mm 2.8 with the same generation of styling. In fact it looked identical to this, but just a bit shorter. I'm amazed how small this lens is.
My 28 was solidly built and with perfectly acceptable image quality but it didn't have much finesse. Felt a bit "industrial" frankly, but it only cost about £50 new which was a tiny fraction of the equivalent Nikon AI-S. The next generation of Sigma lenses had a slightly soft matt rubbery coating which I didn't like. Personally I found it unpleasant to touch and I reckon it would have soon worn smooth and shiny in patches, looking very shabby.
Interesting. Yeah the blur is very busy and distracting and it might be cool to choose a more plain background with less detail and colors that don't match the subject in focus
And secondly, if we have to shoot a detailed background and textures out of focus, then if we move around the subject a little, especially with a gimbal, then background will get motion blur and it might smooth it out a bit. Or if we are in a car shooting out of the window, we just have to turn keeping the subject in the same part of the frame, while the background will do its magic
Looks lovely. The CA can be easily removed in Lightroom and the contrast whacked up a bit if necessary. Very tempted to get one..
I just bought an Olympus 50mm 3.5 macro that I'm now loving to use I like the look of the sigma lens Nigel maybe at some point I can get one myself I will look on the web I got a good deal on the Olympus lens like you say one as to keep looking for the deals and you can find them thanks Nigel.......
Not surprising if you know lens design history. 50, 40 years ago, a pro would more likely shoot portraits with a macro lens than a very fast one. Classical lens designs, where elements are in a fixed array, are all optimised in design for infinity. Macro lenses deviated from that in placing the optimum much closer by. And did great with portraits.
Less fast lenses can rely on elements with a cylindrical side wall that hence do not have the prism like cross section edge where the worst optical performance is created - chromatic aberration, etc. Scale that design up to faster by extending the dimeter and you add those aberrations. Either sell a bad lens or change the design with, likely, more elements. And more elements in solving one problem, give new problems.
So this 2.8 lens doesn't need a bunch of elements, hence can be cheaper and lighter and smaller.
As to shallow Depth of Field (DoF) we have to understand DoF on a deeper level. Its formula of course relates DoF to distance, focal length and aperture. But there's a parameter in the formula that everybody forgets, and nobody understands what the implications are. That parameter blends the effects of six variables into one parameter. It's called "Circle of Confusion" (CoC).
1- film/sensor resolution - better -> smaller CoC -> shallower DoF
2- lens resolution - better -> smaller CoC -> shallower DoF
3- processing - better -> smaller CoC -> shallower DoF
4- monitor/display/print resolution - better -> smaller CoC -> shallower DoF
5- display size - larger -> smaller CoC -> shallower DoF
6- viewer-display distance - shorter -> smaller CoC -> shallower DoF
In which 4..6 explain why DoF is a perception thing.
Put the DoF formula in a spreadsheet and play with each variable to see what the result is.
Notice how a fraction of CoC change can significantly alter DoF.
Add the notion that your theoretical lens has its focal length at infinity setting, but once you focus closer by, its effective focal length becomes longer. This is called "focus breathing" by "cine" photographers. The corollary of focus breathing however is that the effective aperture also changes with it. My 105/2.8 macro lens at 1:1 focusing (distance) setting has an effective focal length of about 160mm and this means that the aperture of f/2.8 at infinity (105mm/2.= 37.5mm entry pupil diameter), while still 37.5mm, effectively has become 160mm/37.5mm=~=f/4.3.
Focus breathing with aperture breathing may not change DoF significantly as focal length gets longer while aperture as fraction of focal length gets smaller.
But "sharpness" (as in 2-) has a big impact on CoC and hence on DoF.
Lenses that suppress focus breathing are essentially zoom lenses that zoom a bit out when you focus closer by. This suppresses focus breathing and it may help with aperture breathing. Your macro lens does not likely have that - mine doesn't.
As zoom lenses have elements that move separately, this concept spawned the development of lenses with floating elements that do other things: focusing or making focusing distance dependent corrections - Nikon's "S" class Z mount 85mm f/1.2 lens has two motors for moving elements while being a "prime" lens. Its 15 elements in 10 groups need an incredibly good coating in order to prevent glare (ghosting across the image, contrast and sharpness reduction) and prevent flare (visible artefacts like aperture and sun trails). These lenses do that so well that people start to complain that its hard to get flare.
You can't keep your pudding and eat it.
Also note that the number in f/number only represents the entry pupil as fraction of focal length and says nothing about how fast a lens actually is. If you think your 1.2L lens is fast, look for its T-value that tells its actual light transmission: it probably is T=1.5 (almost 0.5 EV worse than 1.2). Another person's 1.4G lens of the same generation may also have a T=1.5 at full open and infinity. Making them equally fast. As the 1.4G is much sharper than the 1.2L it may actually have comparable or shallower DoF because of the CoC.
It's like that man of the laws of physics said: all relative.
Does a half macro lens become full macro on a M43 camera?
No. You crop into the central part of the image circle, however, because the sensor is also smaller it does not change the magnification. However, using extension rings, or better still, a teleconverter does increase magnification. You can use a MFT adapter, then your MFT 1.4x or 2x teleconverter between adapter and body. most of us don't have extension rings these days, but they are a cheap option. With adapted vintage lenses the cheap 'dumb' tubes are generally sufficient.
Lens which does not have ratio 1:1 or larger but half of it is not a macro . Maybe producer should check what really means word Macro prior to putting worthless text or sticker and getting consult from marketing counter beans.