dSLR Dad

I’ve begrudgingly kept my Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Lens, mainly because the actual lens assembly pops-out of the housing from time-to-time so I can’t sell it. At $80 it is a great value, but it’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer (until f/2.8). I was looking at the Canon 50mm f/1.4 USM Lens (available at Amazon and B&H Photo), but it seems somewhat soft at the corners, even on a digital body. It also doesn’t have the same high quality feel as Canon’s excellent EF 85mm f/1.8 USM Lens (which I loved, available at Amazon and B&H Photo).

Well, leave it to Sigma to announce a quality, large aperture alternative, the new 50mm F1.4 EX DG HSM standard lens. It will be offered in Sigma, Canon, Nikon, Pentax^*, Sony^* lens mounts. The * means if your Pentax or Sony camera body does not support HSM, auto focus will not be available. With any luck, this 50mm f/1.4 will be match the quality of their fantastic Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM Lens. Hopefully, Sigma will release this at a street price under $300.

Excerpts from the Sigma Press Release (2008-3-18):

• Standard lens with large maximum aperture of F1.4.
• It creates sharp images with high contrast and ensures superior peripheral brightness.
• Incorporates molded glass aspherical lens, perfectly correcting coma aberration and creating superior image quality.
• Super multi-layer lens coating reduces flare and ghosting.
• Hyper Sonic Motor HSM ensuring silent, high-speed AF.

This is a large aperture prime lens with a standard focal length of 50mm, ideal for digital cameras. This lens is perfectly suited for a wide range of subjects enabling outstanding, sharply defined images against a nicely blurred background. The fast, F1.4 aperture makes this lens desirable for use with Digital SLR cameras. This lens effectively becomes an 80mm medium telephoto lens on digital cameras with APS-C size image sensors. The optimum optical design and molded glass aspherical lens elements provide excellent correction for all types of aberrations. This lens has superior peripheral brightness and provides sharp, high contrast images even at the maximum aperture. Superior optical performance is also ensured throughout the focusing range. The super multi-layer lens coating reduces flare and ghosting. This lens has a minimum focusing distance of 45cm 17.7” and has maximum magnification of 1:7.4. It creates a very attractive blur, even when a small aperture is used.
This lens incorporates HSM Hyper Sonic Motor, which ensures a quiet and high-speed AF as well as full-time manual focus override.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 5:32 am and is filed under Camera Lens, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.