Monday, July 2, 2007

Sigma EX 10-20mm f4-5.6 vs Canon EF-S 10-22mm f3.5-4.5 mini review

I have been thinking of getting a wide angle lens for my camera for awhile. There were not much choice. EF-S 10-22mm seems to be really good as i borrowed my friend Pete's one and played with it. It's a very solid lens. I was trying to convince him to sell it to me as he's not using it much but he didn't. :)
Buying a new Canon 10-22mm is no easy matter . Its US$700 affair. So i was looking around and found a few alternatives. Sigma 10-20mm , Tokina 12-24mm and Tamron 11-19mm. Out of all that, Sigma seems to have the widest focal length, on par with Canon. And it only retails at US$450-500. I was unsure about the Sigma quality but I found this amazing photographer from Flickr who uses the Sigma and producing breath-taking photos. So when i found someone selling one at Trademe (NZ eBay equiv), I bought it.

After I took this photo as a test and posted in office Photo mailing list, a few people asked me how it compare with Canon. So I decided to borrow Pete's Canon and did a few shots with it. Unfortunately, the weather is really bad that day and it start to drizzle, so I only manged to take a few shots. Here is the results.
Here is the results of the test. I took the same office building with my 30D with AV mode on my tripod and just swap the lens.
Two interesting thing is that Canon may be 0.5mm wider or Sigma is a bit short. And my 30D keep metering the scene more brighter with Sigma. (like 1/3-2/3 stop).


Both shot at f4 ( I shot canon in f4 for its favor, not wide-open)
Click on the image to see it bigger.

I can clearly see canon has more vignetting even though its not wide open.

Now at f8 for both.
Click on the image to see it bigger.



Now time to compare sharpness. 100% crops are here.


I can say Sigma is sharper in both corner and center, even wide open at f4. Look at the top 100% crop of the building . Even Canon is stopped down a little to f4, it cant match Sigma's sharpness. The rest are pretty much the same results.
In fact, I shot a few in between f-stops for both lens and it shows Sigma get really sharp by just stopping to f5 and it also clean up the vignetting a lot.

Canon suffer from strong vignetting till f8 but it can be corrected in Lightroom or Photoshop.

Conclusion, I am very pleased with my Sigma and its a fine lens. Its cheaper , sharper , lighter and smaller , comes with petal shape Lens hood and a nice pouch. I cant ask for more. But I am sure Pete wont be so happy to read this post. Hehe.

Cheers.

3 comments:

Andreas Helke said...

How did you focus in your test? I found that the autofocus almost never works correctly with my Canon 350D Canon EF-S 10-22 combo. Most of the time I get much better results by estimating the distance and manually focusing with the help of the distance scale.

Maung Maung Hla Win said...

You have a point here .Its in One shot AF mode.. but I doubt its the focus issue as u can see the centre crop of Canon seem to be in focus. Just the corner is soft. And if a wide lens cant use AF, that's pretty bad imo. Cheers.

Wybe Pieter said...

Hey, I know it's a very old post but I would like to point you at the fact that you used a filter on the canon. Which makes the vignetting stronger; specially when it's not a wide angle converter.