Sigma 100-400 mm F5-6 – It is a great lens and is light don’t worry about the lack

November 30, 2019

Sigma 100-400 mm F5-6 – It is a great lens and is light don’t worry about the lack

I’ve only owned this lens for a week but i’ve gotten some fantastic shots with it. The auto focus right out of the box on my nikon d500 was incredible when set to setting 1. Alot of people said that i would need to buy the sigma usb dock to fine tune the auto focus but whether the new batch of sigma 100-400 comes pre installed with a good tune i don’t know as i’ve not used one prior to this one, having no trouble so far with it. It is a great bit of kit and it’s a dream to use. It’s so satisfying and smooth to zoom in and out and the focus ring is also very smooth. I recommend this lens for people who don’t want to have to fork out for the thousands of pounds that some of the nikon or canon range cost. This does the trick for what i need it for and have taken some really sharp bird photos. Can’t recommend it enough for someone either starting out or on a budget. Just buy it and you won’t regret doing so.

Fantastic piece of kit well worth the money.

Only downside is that the autofocus doesn’t work when used with the teleconverter.

Really pleased with the lens having used it at two airshows since purchasing.

Using this lens on a canon eos77d body so getting aprx 640mm reach which is decent for wildlife shots, such as birds in the garden. Very pleased with the quality of the photographs it is producing. I find so long as i can get shutter speeds of 1/500s or faster with os on position 1 and iso of 800 or less, i can produce some crisp shots. The lens is not heavy for it’s size, but even so i do miss not having a tripod mount which is the only negative point i would raise. I’d be worried using the tripod mount on the camera with this lens. [btw i have tried this lens with a sigma tc-2001 2x teleconverter and my results were not great. I think it’s a step too far unless you have super-bright conditions. ]

I bought this lens on the performance of my sigma 150-600mm which is a phenomenal piece of kit. I required a large tele-photo lens that could be comfortable handheld. I’m not sure that it’s quite as good as the 600mm?. But it’s not far short, it’s an excellent piece of kit.

Using with adapter on my z6 – first class lens.

Great size and build, sharp across all focal lengths and with fast af. I just didn’t like the zoom ring’s inconsistent zoom spacing nb 300-400mm was much shorter travel than 100-200 and 200-300. Had a few os issues in certain conditions which led me to pay for the usb dock, yet having updated the firmware i noticed no difference to final image os performance. The only difference i saw was in how the image is shown through the ovf (more stable/shaky dependent on os mode). It’s certainly a better lens all round than the far more expensive nikon 80-400, and there are currently no other lenses in this exact range offered for similar price/weight. Therefore i highly recommend it.

It is a great lens and is light don’t worry about the lack of a tripod collar it wont break the camera mount it just does not need one and fits into most lens cases it has already improved my keeper rate for bif shots locking on very quickly, a modern nice piece of kit that is light enough to take on a long holiday trip here are a few shots from it. The last 4 are straight out of my d2x @ iso 500 and 1/1600 sec.

Used this lens as an intermediary lens between 70-300mm and 150-600mm. It is much lighter, smaller which makes life easier. Very fast and excellent focusing. I use it for wildlife photography and nirds when i am not going to carry a very heavy lens and tripod with gimbo. Better results than some of the big camera names.

I bought this lens from a high street retailer for £650 as i didn’t want to lug my beloved (and non-weather sealed) nikon 200-500 to the nurburgring 24h race. I didn’t really get a chance to test the lens before i left and was a bit concerned about taking it away without calibrating it properly. I did a couple of quick tests and it seemed to be fine, but as i had to send my 150-600 sport lens (which i no longer own) back to sigma for calibration, i wasn’t exactly confident. I didn’t take my laptop with me to germany, but the pictures looked sharp enough when viewed on the camera screen, although it’s not always possible to get a true idea of how well the lens is doing until you download the pictures. In it’s standard setting, the focus seemed snappy and accurate. It’s possible to speed the auto-focus up even more using the sigma dock and custom settings on the lens (or slow it down for more accuracy or for video) and you can also change the properties of the optical stabilisation. The lens handles well and seems quite sturdy. The mount has a rubber gasket, but the lens barrel is not weather sealed according to sigma. I took a couple of optech rainsleeves which kept the lens nice and dry on the soaking wet sunday and i would thoroughly recommend that if you intend to use the lens in wet weather, that you should invest in a rain cover of some sort, even if it’s just 5p for a carrier bag. The sigma seemed sharp; the autofocus quick & accurate and i didn’t get a hernia humping around a huge lens. So when i got home and downloaded the photos, i saw why the lens was so ‘cheap’?actually, no. I was shocked at how sharp the lens actually was. Even uncalibrated, my lens appears to be at least as sharp at 400mm as the current generation nikon 80-400 which i owned a couple of years ago and i got at least as many keepers from the sigma on my recent trip as i did the last time i went to the nurburgring with the nikon 80-400. That’s astonishing considering the nikon now retails at 3 times (and more at many retailers) the price of the sigma.

I bought this to replace a canon 70-300l and 400 f5. Ideal for bird and aircraft photography on an aps-c body but also small and light enough to replace a 70-300 in your general camera bag. Optically it would seem to be virtually indistinguishable from the l lenses it replaced, though i don’t think it would take the physical abuse that the professional lenses would. Having said that the lens feels very well made, certainly not fragile and feels good in the hand, much better than canon’s consumer grade lenses which tend to feel, frankly, like something from airfix.

The price was great as i found it for £571 on amazon by mh direct and that’s a lot lower than the main amazon price. Having had the nikon 80-400 but found it too slow and so heavy. This is lighter, slimmer and much faster to lock focus and track. Here are the specifications for the Sigma 100-400 mm F5-6:

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Compact and lightweight construction
Perfect for hand-held telephoto photography
Allows both Push/Pull and Twist zoom
Compatible with the SIGMA USB Dock and MC-11
Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM | C Canon Fitting, Lens Hood, Instruction Manual

Much heavier than canon’s 55-250 stm lens but has slightly more reach and the images produced seem better to me. Have mostly used handheld without issue (a little heavy). Would be great if it let in more light but then it would be heavier and much more expensive.

I already own the sigma 150-600 contemporary lens and when sigma introduced the 100-400 version i had no hesitation in buying it. It’s a bit lighter that the 150-600 which is great and iq is every bit as good as its big brother.

Reviews from purchasers :