Sigma 18-200 DC OS HSM – Quick Review

Sad news last week when gravity decided to kill my 18-135 Nikon lens and damage my camera was followed by the good news of a new, better lens and my camera surviving the fall.

The new lens came in today and I went around town taking a few pictures with it.  I didn’t have anything planned and took all the pics without a tripod to check out the effectiveness of the optical stabilization (which works quite well, btw).

The thing that is impressing me the most is the power of this lens.  Here’s the same picture shot at 18mm and then at 200mm.

Pretty impressive right?

Unfortunately, I’m getting TERRIBLE chromatic aberration with this lens. Absolutely horrendous at both the 18mm and 200mm and at f-13.  Thank fully, Adobe Photoshop CS3 has some tools to fix this.

Unfortunately, again, the PS CS2/CS3 filter, Distort – Lens Correction – Fringe tool doesn’t do damn diddly.  It’s a complete waste.  It follows purple/yellow type fringing which isn’t typical with D-SLR‘s.

Luckily, the RAW import tool in Photoshop has a much better lens correction tool that almost gets rid of it completely, with some slight grey fringing as a side effect of the treatment.

Chromatic aberration aside, I’m liking this lens.  But I’m still not sold on it.  There might be something wrong with my lens… The optical stabilization is quirky, noisy.  If you put your ear to the lens you can hear what sounds to be very, very bad.  Maybe it’s just the nature of optically stabilized lenses.  This is my first one to own, but the Nikon I had used before was completely silent.  Of course that was a couple of thousand dollar lens, but still.

At one point the lens would not auto focus.  Resetting the lens’s settings, turning the camera on/off… nothing worked until I reseated the lens, then fixed.

Later in the day I noticed this weird noise coming from my camera bag.  The camera was off but the lens kept moving in and out, maybe trying to focus.  Again, the camera was turned off.  However, this problem MIGHT be the D80’s fault.  I remember a firmware upgrade I missed that had something to do with the status light blinking, which was happening when the lens was making these noises.  Reseated the lens and again, problem fixed.

So I love the features of this lens; the optical stabilization is stellar, the zoom range awesome and the build quality seems to be top notch.  But, the chromatic aberration, the quirkiness of the focus/optical stabilization and weak bokeh makes me second guess this lens choice.

The next best option would probably be the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S which clocks in at $1100 more than the Sigma 18-200 DC OS HSM and not even half the range (which is why it can be fast at f/2.8 and be so damn SHARP!).

So, for the next week I’ll be debating this lens.  Keep it or save up for something a little better.  Most reviews say the chromatic aberration in this lens is stellar so maybe I just need to play around with different f-stops.

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Good News, Bad News, New Toys

Some family friends asked me to take pictures at their/our Thanksgiving dinner.  I obliged even though the idea of walking around taking pics of people did not interest me in the least.

No one wanted their picture taken and they all gave me a hard time, so with that, I quit taking pics. Easier to not take pics than take pics so I’m all for the easy way out.

I did however see one awesome picture that needed to be made, so I went outside to take the picture.  Around that time my dad asked me to open the gate for him.  I sat my camera down on the shelf of a gas grill and went to the gate.

Crash, bam, boom.  My Nikon D80 along with 18-135mm Nikon lens crashed to the ground and broke into pieces.

Devastated doesn’t begin to describe what was going through my mind at the moment.

Anyways, I brought the pieces to Houston Camera Exchange.  They kindly sent me to a camera repair shop.  They fixed what was wrong with the camera, though one button doesn’t work… going to see if Columbia Camera can fix that for less than the $280 they suggested it would cost.

The lens is dead.

So I was stuck.  Buy a new lens or pay $450 to get mine fixed.

A new Nikon lens is $800.  That’s more than I could really spend at this juncture haha.  Houston Camera Exchange recommended the Sigma 18-200mm f3.5-6.3 DC OS.

Turns out it is a better lens than what I used to have and better than the Nikon 18-200 VR ED DX 3.5/5.6 in overall contrast, sharpness etc etc.

So I ordered the Sigma and it should arrive Tuesday from Amazon.com for $360 which is $400 off the retail price!

Then tonight I checked out the Epson store on a whim and saw they were selling the Epson Stylus Photo R280 printer for $29!

That is a steal, it was originally $110 more than that.

I bought that too.  It might not be available anymore, it was supposed to be a Black Friday deal but as of a few minutes ago, it was still online.

It, according to This Week in Photography (aka TWiP), the Epson R280 is a

8.5? wide printer [that] makes gallery-quality prints rated for over 80 years (under glass) on many different papers.

They went on to talk about how incredible the inks were (nearly as good as the K3 pigment based inks), how fast it was and that it was the best in its category.

For me this will be my proofing printer.  No need to use my expensive K3 inks from my Epson Stylus Pro 3800 to make simple 8×10’s for my professor to quickly browse through.

So, while it sucked hurting my camera and killing my lens, I got some great deals today and will actually, maybe and hopefully be able to take it up a notch.  Especially with this new lens, my first with a vibration assist, supposedly good for 4 f-stops!  Awesome.

Oh, and in other news, I sold a picture today!  This one, the House on Pacquin.

Now I must go to bed.  I’ll make a post covering my Thanksgiving break soon.  Right now I need to get some sleep before my flight in the morning!

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