Glad you enjoyed it! I wasn't going mad was I? The vlog section really did have a special look to it!

@@cameralabs Not your imagination Gordon. Very stylized obviously but in a way reminds me of the pop you get from the Nikon 85mm f1.2. We’re used to losing contrast at these wide apertures which with these modern designs and coatings doesn’t happen in the middle of the frame these days. It’s a very special lens.

@@waveland phew, glad you can see it too!

The “3D” look immediately popped out at me, even before you mentioned it. It was just an instant “oh wow, what’s going on here?” reaction. It was very surprising, it feels like there’s something more going on than just the wide aperture. (Maybe it’s the combo of such good DOF separation, together with the forced perspective of an ultra wide?) Really excellent review BTW. You were the OG of video reviews, and have only gotten better with the years 👍😁

Glad you enjoyed it!

Yeah, I couldn;t vlog for long but the results looked so good, I kept trying again!

I'd love for there to be a new 18-35!

There's been a few really nice lenses that have come out, like the 35-150mm f2 Tamron.

What ban?

I only every use standard profiles - this was the standard Sony profile. The lens design helps make the image pop, but so do other wide fast lenses.

Nice to hear from you Dave, and thanks for the kind comment! I'd say you're spot-on. Get the Sigma is you NEED or VALUE the f1.4 aperture (eg Astro), but for everyone else, the Sony makes more sense for its size, weight, full support for Sony's electronics etc. Still, isn't great that we have choices like these to make?

Just keep repeating - I can get a cheap 16!

Good question, but I'm afraid I don't have that controller. But since the lens is natively driven by the AF system of the camera, I would expect it to be controllable by the camera in the same way as other lenses.

@@cameralabs Nice then. Thanks Gordon.

I honestly wouldn't know, I've not reviewed that adapter myself so can't say. TBH, adapters are always going to be a compromised solution as they introduce another join where things can go slightly askew and reduce your potential quality. Yes, they do amazing things, but you may not be getting the best from a lens and body combo with them, and if you're shooting astro wide open, you'll notice first. Always best to go native, so I'd wait for Nikon to do something like it, or hope a third party goes native. Or better still, try a test before you buy.

Yep

You're very welcome! ANd yes, Sigma's really knocking it out the park and making L mount more attractive with every release!

This is designed for short flange mirrorless cameras, so the optical design is wrong for DSLRs - sadly for Pentax!

Not to you for sure, but for some astrophotographers, absolutely.

I don't think there will be any new EFM lenses anymore

That's the Sony stabilisation

@@cameralabs Quite compelling proof that digital stabilization -- so often touted as a substitute for genuine optical stabilization, used as an excuse for Sony to cut corners and forego push-pull integration with lenses combined with IBIS -- is simply awful!

@@focuspulling it really depends on who's holding the camera and what they're doing. Sometimes it can work really well, and if you're handholding more static compositions, it can work well too - YMMV - I do shake quite a lot.

Wow, that’d be *fantastic* if Canon would actually let Sigma into their platform, here’s hoping that’s true! (It’s actually a matter of Canon licensing Sigma to use their mount, rather than the other way around.) Onion-ring bokeh comes from how the tungsten-alloy molds are made for pressing aspheric lenses. They’re made on ultra-precision lathes with single-point diamond cutting tools. The diamond tool basically leaves a surface with a single long but microscopically wide groove spiraling from the center to the edge. Onion ring bokeh is basically the lens imaging that groove. Panasonic was actually the first company to overcome this, by *hand-polishing* the molds to get rid of the grooves without altering the overall curvature of the lens surface. Other companies eventually figured it out too, and it’s now pretty routine.

@@DaveEtchells I have a hard time believing that this solution wasn't found even when making the very first molded aspherical. But you sound like you know the subject well so I'm happy to believe you.

@@lqr824 Yeah, everyone knew that the grooves were the problem, or at least they figured that out very early on. That was part of the reason why ground/polished aspherics continued to be relevant in the market for a good while after molding technology appeared. (Another reason is that it’s very challenging to use molding to make large-diameter aspheric elements due to issues with thermal contraction of the glass as it cools, leading to internal stresses.) The problems were the nanometer scale of the grooves, and the required precision of the lens curvature. How could you get rid of the grooves without changing the optical shape, which had to be meaintained to just 10s of nanometers? I first saw the manual-polishing solution on a personal tour of Panasonic’s lens factory in Tendo, Japan (near Yamagata). The first breakthrough was just thinking that it might actually be *possible* to manually polish them out. The next trick was to have a profile-measuring instrument with nanometer-level accuracy and a fine enough tip to be able to register the grooves right next to the worker doing the polishing. Then it was “just” a matter of workers developing the skill and “touch” to be able to controllably remove just the right amounts of material from the right parts of the mold, literally working with a cloth wrapped around their fingertip dabbed with diamond polishing paste. They’d look at the profile the measuring machine showed, identify an area they wanted to work on, then gently rub that portion of the mold surface for what they thought from experience would be the required amount. Then they’d scrupulously clean the mold and re-measure the profile. It was unbelievable, they were taking off just 10-20 *nanometers* of material at a time 😮 It was really remarkable watching it done, and I wrote it a whole article for my website (Imaging-Resource.com) describing it, it would have been a huge news story at the time, but alas, Panasonic decided at the last minute that it might give away too much proprietary info to their competitors, so asked me not to publish it. Within a couple of years it became common practice, but I never got to “break” what would have been an amazing story 😢

True that.

An extra kilo or two? That's HUGE. My entire lens and body combination often doesn't break a kilo.

Hah, thanks Pav! I try to keep them reasonably concise these days, but still want to get my comparisons in there. Lovely lens, but tough competition with the Sony. Loved your review too, great sample images, and as always your very shallow DOF pieces to camera!

You can wish!

@@cameralabs my father would have said, "you can wish in one hand and spit in the other and look to see in which hand you get the most".

Sadly not in Z mount

Glad to help, I was surprised so few of the other reviews have made any comparisons. And yet I seem to have the least views.

Nebula Photos compared coma

@@rockmusicvideoreviewer896 saw that already, thanks

@@rockmusicvideoreviewer896 but did they also do vlogging?

@@cameralabs Danny Li didn't mention anything about V logging. Your reply seems a little defensive. I didn't mean anything by mine, other than just to help him out with directing him to additional info on coma.

On the other hand, look at Canon's EOS R system - they do have a 16 2.8, but so far, no 14 primes.

@@cameralabs It's a mad world! ;)

Well it's clearly the PERFECT lens for vlogging! I'm a little disappointed no-one else tried it for this in the other reviews I've seen.

@@cameralabs hahaha

The Sony 14 1.8 is still an amazing lens - you'd really have to want or need the extra aperture and astro-related features to consider swapping.

@@cameralabs I shoot tons of astro with Sony 14 1.8. I would say 2/3 of a stop from the Sigma isn’t worth it. And swapping would be useless for my video work. Most gimbal (except the pro level gimbal which is very heavy) can’t handle 1+ kg lens. Not to mention the need for tons of square filter for video work that would add more weight to the Sigma. The Sigma is really a dedicated astro lens.

Hmmm, not sure why that would be, there's sound on mine! But it's just uploaded so may be reprocessing? Could you try refreshing or in a different browser?

@@cameralabs I can hear it now. I was watching on my phone before, and when you had just uploaded it. Now that I have restarted, it seem this wretched KZfaq is allowing the audio through. Thanks Gordon.

@@---us7qf probably a rendering thing, glad it's resolved now!