Sigma 351965 56mm F1.4 DC DN Contemporary For Sony E, Black

Product Information

The build quality is solid and I have no complaints about the autofocus. It’s fast and extremely quite making it really good for video as well as photography. No AF/MF switch on the side of the lens means you have to use the camera menu by default to switch, but this can be easily custom programed to a button if you use that feature a lot. MPB puts photo and video kit into more hands, more sustainably. Every month, visual storytellers sell more than 20,000 cameras and lenses to MPB. Choose used and get affordable access to kit that doesn’t cost the earth. The lens benefits from an open aperture of F1.4 to achieve sufficient amount of bokeh and admirable brightness even with APS-C size cameras which tend to have smaller bokeh effects compared to 35mm full size systems. Its compact and lightweight body is perfect for daily use, capable of capturing various scenes ranging from portraits to snapshots, as well as night view. Focus is available as close as 19.7 inches (50cm). It's good enough for 1:7.4 life-size magnification at its closest focus distance. It's certainly not a tool you'll use for macro images, and is similar to what you get from the Sony E 50mm F1.8 OSS and Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm f/1.8. Another Sigma Stunner If you have a full-frame Nikon camera, such as the Nikon Z6 II, you can use the Sigma 56mm with it, with your camera automatically diverting to crop mode to give the same 84mm equivalent focal length. You might therefore consider it to be a better priced (and smaller) version of the Nikkor Z 85mm f/1.8 S lens for this type of camera.

The optical construction is 10 elements in 6 groups, with one being SLD (Super Low Dispersion) and one aspherical. The diaphragm comprises 9 rounded blades, intended to improve the “bokeh” of the lens. At f/11, diffraction starts to inhibit lens resolution and by f/16, they all appear quite soft. f/11 f/16 Naturally, it’s not all about sharpness. When using a wide aperture to gain a tight depth of field, the bokeh, or quality of defocused areas, can be equally important. The Sigma excels here again, with a wonderfully soft bokeh and a nicely smooth transition between focused and defocused areas. An added bonus is that there’s extremely little axial chromatic aberration, even when shooting wide-open. In this respect, it performs rather better than the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 Contemporary lens. Lab tests The Sigma 56mm F1.4 DC DN Contemporary Sony E-Mount lens is a particularly smooth portrait length prime lens and part of Sigma's Contemporary series lenses. The lens is designed for use in combination with Sony E-mount mirrorless cameras in APS-C format. The lens is characterized by its bright f/1.4 maximum aperture, which is suitable for working in difficult lighting conditions and also offers improved control over depth of field for isolating subjects and working with selective focusing techniques. The optical design uses two aspherical elements and an SLD element, which help to reduce both spherical and chromatic aberrations for greater sharpness and clarity. A Super Multi-Layer Coating has also been used to suppress lens flare and ghosting to achieve more contrast and color accuracy when working under strong light conditions. Supplementary to the optics is an AF stepper motor, which is suitable for both photo and video applications because of the fast, accurate and virtually silent performance. Features of the Sigma 56mm F1.4 DC DN Contemporary Sony E-Mount We reviewed the Sigma 16mm f/1.4 DC DN Contemporary just a few weeks ago so let's move on to its cousin now, the Sigma 56mm f/1.4 DC DN Contemporary. The lens is attractively priced at around 450USD/400EUR as is as such aligned to the more moderate camera pricing in the APS-C/MFT class. In full-format terms, it is equivalent to a fast "85mm" medium tele lens (on Micro-Four-Thirds: 112mm) which is suitable for a variety of use-cases such as portraits, street photography, or other shallow depth-of-field applications.At a close focus distance, we can see that the 56mm is a little sharper than either Sony lens at their respective fastest apertures. Fastest apertures

First let’s take a look at how centre sharpness compares at a distance of approximately 7 meters. Reference image When shot wide open, the bokeh balls of all three lenses are round at the centre but assume the familiar cat’s eye shape the closer they are to the edge of the frame. Those of the 55mm display a slightly stronger onion ring effect whereas the 56mm’s are larger thanks to the 1.4 aperture. Fastest apertures (centre) Fastest apertures (corner) At f/5.6 and beyond, the results look very similar once again. The 55mm and 56mm are still a tad sharper than the 50mm but the differences are barely worth mentioning. The best corner results are found at around f/5.6 with all three lenses. f/5.6 f/11 Not many cameras in this class offer a seal where the lens mount attaches to the camera body but I appreciated this feature since mirrorless camera sensors are already quite exposed without a mirror to protect them. All three lenses are extremely quiet. In the case of the two Sonys, you can hear the motor whirring faintly if you put you ear close to the lens whereas the Sigma is deadly silent.For this lab testing I was shooting Raw quality and made absolutely no adjustments in Lightroom, so you are seeing exactly what was produced by the Sigma 56mm f/1.4 DC DN Lens and Sony A6400. I exported the raw files and 100% crops as 1500px jpegs at 75% quality and output sharpening set to screen/ low for reference. Full Scene Test w/ 100% Crops The 56mm f1.4 is the longest of the trio and gives you an equivalent focal length of 84mm, making it particularly ideal for portrait photography. If you’re a DX user, then the nearest you’ll get to this focal length from a proprietary prime lens is the Nikkor DX 24mm f/1.7 lens, or, you might instead use something like the Nikkor Z DX 50-250mm f/4.5-6.3 VR lens or the Nikkor Z DX 18-140mm f/3.5-6.3 VR lens. Alternatively, you might consider mounting the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 S lens, which would give you an equivalent of 75mm on your APS-C camera, but will cost you a little bit more, and is quite a lot larger than the Sigma 56mm lens. All things considered, the Sigma 56mm f/1.4 really is an exciting addition to the Sony APS-C lens range. It is around half the price of the Sony FE 55mm f/1.8, yet has a faster aperture and delivers superior sharpness except for at the widest apertures at a long focus distance. The quality of the out-of-focus rendering is a little more pleasant than the two Sonys and the autofocus speed, though not quite as snappy, is fully compatible with Sony’s PDAF system. I would love to see Sigma include features like a focus hold button or an auto/manual focus ring but I appreciate that eliminating them likely keeps the cost of the lens to a minimum. Performance crosses to the outstanding range at f/2 (3,141 lines), and edge performance is close enough to average (2,902 lines) that we won't fret about it from here on out. Images show even more detail at f/2.8 (3,557 lines), and peak performance comes at f/4 (3,878 lines).

Combined with the bokeh achieved at the minimum aperture of f/1.4, this lens creates some beautiful portrait images. At the end of the day I highly recommend the Sigma 56mm f/1.4 Lens to anyone using a crop factor camera like the Sony A6500 and A6400, or even folks using a full frame e-mount camera in Super 35mm video mode. With an effective 84mm focal range this lens is ideal for portraits and maximum subject separation effects in particular. No optical stabilization might turn you off, but with the f/1.4 max aperture it’s not really an issue getting fast enough shutter speeds to hand hold in most cases. However, if you are using the A6500 then the sensor stabilization will help you out in super low light situations when hand holding at lower shutter speeds.

Manual focusing

Resolution continues to be impeccable at f/5.6 (3,723 lines), but diffraction starts to cut into detail as early as f/8 (3,341 lines). Still, you can shoot there and at f/11 (2,915 lines) and net crisp photos. There is certainly a loss of quality at f/16 (2,354 lines), which is expected. In the corners, the 55mm appears to have an advantage over both the 50mm and 56mm wide open. Fastest apertures Like the 16mm and 30mm before it, the 56mm sports a bright f1.4 focal ratio which can achieve shallow depth-of-field effects, especially with its longer focal length. The dust and splash-proof design features a rubber sealing at the mount and the lens is supplied with a circular hood. The barrel measures 60mm in length, 67mm in maximum diameter, weighs 280g and employs a 55mm filter thread. The optical design uses 10 elements in six groups, has nine rounded aperture blades and a closest focusing distance of 50cm. There’s no optical stabilisation, but many of the bodies it’ll be mounted on feature body-based stabilisation of their own. If you buy the E-mount version you can mount it to a full-frame Sony camera, as the mounts are physically identical, but it shows a vignette. It's most pronounced when stopped down, as you can see in the image below, shot with the full-frame Sony a7R III with the lens set to f/8.