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About Nikon DSLRs

Sigma 35mm f/1.4 DG HSM A1 for Nikon – Part I

Nikon lenses

My Sigma 35mm f/1.4 review.

I have generally stuck with lenses from the maker of the camera body – Leica, Canon, Panasonic/Olympus and Nikon – for the simple reason that I have the most awful memories of the aftermarket alternatives. When I worked in cameras stores during vacations as a kid, the most returned items were lenses from the likes of Tamron, Soligor and especially Sigma which, when not just downright awful optically would often fall apart mechanically. For the generally modest savings compared to the real thing and the massive attendant depreciation, the economics simply did not solve. My Sigma 35mm f/1.4 review follows.

But more recently old line designers, like Zeiss and Schneider, started making inroads into the super premium FF, APS-C and MFT lens markets, generally at prices substantially higher than the camera makers’ own lines. Cosina manufactures the Zeiss designs. I’m not sure who makes the Schneider ones. Maybe it’s Samsung, given how many of their cameras feature Schneider lenses. One thing is fairly sure and which is that neither is made in Germany.

Sigma, that maker of many of the worst clunkers in optical history, made some early progress under contract to Leica for Leicaflex lenses, the 28-70mm f/3.5-4.5 Vario Elmar being one example where Leica’s eagle-eyed inspectors claimed to have bestowed some QC discipline on a manufacturer alien to the concept. That was ages ago. More recently, Sigma came out with two well reviewed primes in the 50mm and 85mm optics, both AF and both f/1.4, though reports of autofocus issues with both abound. That’s pretty tough competition with the Canon and Nikon versions, especially at 85mm, but Sigma garnered a following for its lenses, suggesting that they were turning a new leaf.

It is very much in all photographers’ interests that independent lens makers succeed. Nikon and Canon have greatly increased the prices of their best primes, with their 35mm f/1.4 offerings selling for $1,500 and $1,600 respectively, with stellar reputations to match. That is a lot of money. Yet, had you told me that I would be trying a Sigma lens on my Nikon I would have laughed all the way to the boozer. But I am doing exactly that (trying the lens, that is, not laughing en route to the boozer), awed by the incredible critical reception for this optic. Either Sigma has very deep pockets to fill the shallow ones of the paid review set, or there’s something exciting going on here.

The Sigma 35mm f/1.4 DG HSM A1 is a non-VR AF full frame lens from Sigma which comes in a variety of mounts. Nikon versions remain back-ordered but I was able to rent one for the weekend and can report on it here. It will cost $900 with hood and case.

My rental, s/n 50004444, came from Borrowlenses.com for the simple reasons that they are down the road from my home and because they had just got the first ones in stock. I paid $60 for a weekend rental. After the foul stench left by my prior Sigma experiences I was not about to plonk down cash without a dry run first. The big appeal here, of course, is the auto focusing design and f/1.4 does not hurt either. That should mean optimal resolution by f/2.8 for really large prints, and 35mm is very much in my sweet spot for street snapping. I do not really need a zoom or anything much longer for that.


The cool dudes at BorrowLenses.com. D3x, 35mm Sigma at f/4.

Some of the best lens test data recently is coming from Roger Cicala at a competing lens rental place named LensRentals.com. What distinguishes his analyses is that he tests dozens of lenses of any one type on his optical bench, thus reporting not just on quality but also on manufacturing consistency. And that’s a must have for Sigma optics whose history of poor QC and inconsistency is legendary. Cicala only has one sample of the Sigma in Canon mount at the time of writing, and you can see his review here. Doubtless he will soon report on sample variability.

The lens is distinguished by its largely metal (there’s a thin rubber coating on the focus collar) finish, a marked departure from the plastics used by Nikon and Canon in even their costliest offerings and, uniquely, a rumored add-on device which will attach to the lens and permit updates to firmware and focus collimation through a PC (please, Sigma, make it work with Macs) with a USB connection. No details yet on the pricing of this innovative device. It really should come free with the lens, given Sigma’s reputation. The lens is all black, with none of the garish gold markings (Nikon) or ‘look at me’ red rings (Canon) which add zero value to the user experience. The gold and red stuff always reminds me of insecure Americans who emblazon their rear view windows with ‘Harvard’, ‘Yale’ or ‘Balls Pond Road’, the last for the degree-mill set.

The depth-of-field scale on the lens – visible in the image above – is useless and should be dropped. The gearing of the focus movement means that there’s insufficient space for a proper DOF scale. Further, these scales can only be meaningful at a specific enlargement ratio and really are a thing of the past. For that matter, the focus distance scale should also be dropped.

The chromed blob visible in the above picture is marked ‘A’, and is purportedly a statement that the optic is a member of the manufacturer’s ‘Art’ line of lenses. This is marketing BS of quite exceptional purity.

I do not understand weatherproofing issues. The Sigma has no rubber O ring – found with certain allegedly weatherproof Nikon and Canon optics – on the bayonet flange. My 16-35 Nikon AF-S has this ring and it strikes me as an exercise in futility. Quite how water could penetrate the very tight seal between lens and body beats me, O ring or no O ring. What ‘weatherproofing’ means to me is that there is a good seal between the moving parts of the lens – the focus collar and A-M switch – and there is no data I have seen which compares the Sigma with the Canon and Nikon offerings in this regard. So I am pretty clueless here. Suffice it to say that ‘reviews’ state the Sigma is not weatherproofed. Beats me what that means or how they know. In heavy rain I would simply encase the barrel in a plastic bag and have at it, using AF, as no external parts move when the lens is focused using AF.

Early reviews suggest that the lens not only outperforms the Canon and Nikon alternatives optically, it also is more than a match for the $1,840 Zeiss 35mm f/1.4 optic, which is MF only. I cannot comment, not having used any of the alternatives. The Sigma is AF with AF override or MF optional. The feel of the focus collar does not change between the A and M settings and is quite the best I have experienced in a lens with internal motors, and superior in smoothness and damping to the AF-S 16-35 Nikkor. You do not feel or hear any gears using AF override or MF. The AF mechanism is audible to the user in quiet surroundings, inaudible to everyone else. A tactile and aural delight.

The lens is very solid in the hand and no lightweight. Balance on the Nikon D3/D2 is a bit front heavy as there’s a lot of glass in this optic, but the combination handles well. My 16-35mm Nikon f/4 AF-S VR weighs 1.5 lbs and is 4.9″ long, taking 77mm filters. The Sigma, a non-VR prime, comes in at almost the same weight but is only 3.7″ long. It takes 67mm filters. Fit, feel and finish all harken back to the golden era of all metal lenses with brass helicoids. The plastic petal-type hood, included, clicks on nicely but adds a lot of bulk and length. My rental came with front (pinch type) and rear caps, the hood and a protective filter. I did not use the hood – it is silly-large for a street snapper, though it does clip on and reverse nicely, still permitting the use of the front cap. The rental lens appears new.

Because of Sigma’s poor reputation, the first thing I did was point the lens at a bookcase – tripod, MLU, remote release – to determine whether any fine focus adjustment was required. My Nikon D3x correctly reported the lens as a 35mm f/1.4 in the fine tuning menu and required absolutely no adjustment for optimum auto focusing. I wasn’t about to hit the street only to find that everything was out of focus. Further, infinity focus was just as accurate. Indeed, I simply could not reliably get sharp focus at any distance at f/1.4 and f/2.0 with manual focusing, using the LED focus confirmation light, whereas AF nailed it every time. Impressive, especially in light of all the grumbling on the web. Impossible to know if this is sample variation or user error.

The obvious comparison here is to my 1971 pre-Ai 35mm MF Nikkor f/2, a stellar performer from f/2.8 down, and clearly delivering better resolution than the current 16-35mm f/4 AF-S optic I also use. More on that in Part II.


Sigma on the D3x compared to the much smaller 35mm f/2 MF pre-Ai Nikkor. Sigma’s hood removed.

The one anomaly compared to Nikkors is that the focus collar rotation is opposite to that of the Nikon optics. Still, with AF it’s not a big deal but may take some getting used to if you use AF override, done by simply manually rotating the focus collar in AF mode, like on current Nikkors.

The next task was to make a lens correction profile as the Sigma is known to exhibit fairly serious vignetting at f/1.4, and my profile corrects it. If you must have vignetting, that should be a user choice at the processing stage, not a lens default. Doubtless Adobe will publish one eventually. Mine is made at f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8 and f/4. Vignetting is gone by f/4 and Lightroom and Photoshop will automatically select the correct version defaulting to the last at any aperture smaller than f/4. This profile also removes the small amounts of lateral chromatic aberration the lens displays and also removes a small amount of barrel distortion. You can download the profile here. This profile works with RAW images only. That page includes OS X and Windows installation instructions.

If your import preset in Lightroom is checked to invoke the lens correction profile or if you check the box below, you will see this on import in the Develop module:


Lens correction profile in Lightroom 3 and 4.

While I have named the profile “Nikon D3X ….” it will be correctly invoked with any Nikon camera. The ‘Model’ field description is what LR uses to look up the matching lens profile; the name of the camera body is irrelevant. I have no other non-Nikon bodies or lenses with which to test this profile, but it should also work fine with Canon, Sony and Sigma bodies, though you may have to select it manually. The profile is fine with FF and APS-C, though less needed on the latter which cuts out much of the corner vignetting.

DPReview drooled all over their sample and you can read their findings here while I make off to take some snaps with it. Just don’t get too thrilled about their field snaps as one of the qualifications for being a DPReview tester, an otherwise worthy bunch, is a total inability to take a good photograph, a qualification shared by optical lab rats worldwide. No problem. They are not paid to take great pictures.

I’ll update this Sigma 35mm f/1.4 review in Part II.

The Nikon D3x

Nikon bodies

Getting it right.

So enamored was I of the handling of my Nikon D2x that I determined to get a full frame body built along like lines. That meant a D3, D3x or D3s. The current D4 costs too much for what it offers.

I thought long and hard about the D800 but discounted it. My D700 with the add-on MB-D10 battery grip does not handle anywhere near as well as the D2x which has the integrated vertical grip. I guessed the same would apply to the D800 with add-on (and seriously overpriced) grip.

A related advantage the D3x has is that the controls and menus are almost identical to those on the D2x, so no learning curve. A non-trivial consideration with complex modern DSLRs. Finally, the D800/600 bodies appear to suffer some anomalies used with old chipped MF lenses, whereas the D3x does not. That’s a key consideration for me.


The Nikon D3x. Discontinued March, 2012.

The D3 has the same 12mp sensor as the D700 and is an outstanding bargain at $1800 lightly used. The D3x is a rarer bird, coming with the 24mp sensor which it trades for a slightly lower framing rate in continuous shooting. The D3s add a movie mode and sensor cleaning but sticks with the 12mp sensor, albeit much improved by all accounts over the one in the D3/D700. At $3,400 it is overpriced in my opinion.

I decided on the D3x, though not without some trepidation, wondering whether my collection of old – most are 30 years old or more – MF Nikkors could hold up to the demands of the sensor. I paid $2,850 and yes, could have bought a D800 for less. As a final pre-purchase reality check I downloaded RAW files from DPReview from both the D3x and the D800 and found the result a toss up when it came to resolution, pixel-peeped at an 11 foot (yes, that’s 132″) effective print size – meaning 2x in LR4 – on my displays.

On receiving the one-user camera with just 19,000 clicks on it (the shutter life is stated at 300,000 and it’s a $300 replacement if it fails) I took the easy way out and snapped a few images with my three AF lenses – the costly 16-35 VR G, the 85/1.8 AF-D (the one with the ghastly plastic barrel and resolution to die for) and the 180/2.8 AF-D, the last a lens it’s almost impossible to take a bad image with, though I have tried mightily.

The math seems to work perfectly here. The D700 image starts to break up at 1x in Lightroom 4. There’s lots of low light capability left in the sensor, but the individual pixels are large enough that they start destroying resolution at this 5.5 foot equivalent print size. By contrast, images from the D3x start to break up at 2x, an 11 foot print size.


The engine room of the tugboat Hercules. Resolution aplenty.
D3x, 35/2 pre-Ai MF Nikkor at f/8, ISO 400.

There’s a little more to it than that. When the D700 image starts breaking up the best lenses are not close to their maximum potential. By contrast, with the D3x the sensor starts to break up just as the lens resolution is giving up, a perfect match. I would guess that with the even denser 36mp sensor in the D800/800e only the very best lenses at optimum apertures can hold their own in terms of resolution.

Who needs an 11 foot print from a DSLR? Let’s be real. No one does. The pro making pictures of veggies for the sides of Safeway trucks is going to use MF digital. If nothing else he would be laughed at showing up in the studio with a hand held camera. It’s marketing, not rational thinking. The biggest appeal to me of the D3x sensor over the excellent one in the D3/D700 is that I can selectively enlarge sections of an image with less loss of resolution. As a street snapper who uses a prime lens much of the time – the sweet spot being mostly the 28, 35 and 50mm lengths – I cannot always use ‘foot zoom’ to get close enough, fast enough to my subject, so must resort to cropping in Lightroom to do my thing. The denser sensor in the D3x simply improves the number of keepers.

Use with MF lenses:

The interchangeable focusing screens in many Nikons make for easy tailoring of the screen to your preferred use. But when it comes to my mediocre eyesight you can forget about it. They simply do not make enough difference to go through all the pain of proper installation and fine tuning. So I depend on the focus confirmation LEDs in the viewfinder with MF lenses, these changing from arrows to a blob when critical focus is achieved. While there is always LCD focus with LiveView, that’s simply not a consideration for a street snapper. You don’t go around the Tenderloin or Lower East Side with a DSLR stuck two feet in front of your nose at the end of an outstretched arm trying to determine proper focus. Great for tripod use, not for the street. Good for a mugging, though. The LED confirmation light has worked perfectly for me with the D700 yet, when I took the D3x out for a spin with the 28mm f/2 MF Nikkor – a real corker that one – my first results were disappointing. Even the forgiving broad depth of field of the 28mm lens showed focus errors at f/4 at my typical 5-10 foot working distances. The dense sensor in the D3x is totally unforgiving, taking no prisoners. It shows errors lower density sensors cannot.


Prop wrench on the Eureka ferry boat. Same data as above.

So I got down to fine tuning my MF lenses for best results with the D3x body. I could see the resolution in my snaps but it was not at the point where I had focused.

Now as long time readers know – and many have emulated my approach – I have installed CPUs (‘chips’) in all my MF Nikkors. These carry a host of benefits described here, not least of which is the ability to automatically invoke the correct lens correction profile on import of files to LR or PS. My many profiles can be downloaded here. I will continue to add to these as new (old) lenses come along.

But one little used feature of these chips is the ability to fine tune the point at which the AF confirmation LED illuminates in the viewfinder. While I have found that almost all my MF lenses need no such tuning, two – the 50/1.4 and the 105/4 Micro – needed adjustment, a process I describe here. After doing this I knew that all my MF Nikkors were properly collimated for optimum manual focusing on the D700 (and my D2x).

Yet after trying several focal lengths on the D3x, all were wrong. So I went into the D3x’s menus, Setup Menu->AF fine tune, and found that regardless of focal length, every one of my chipped MF lenses is reported as ’50mm f/1.4′. By contrast, Nikon chipped AF lenses, whether AF-D or AF-S, are correctly recognised. So this means that for Nikon chipped lenses, you can fine tune each lens to perfection, and that tuning setting will be recognized automatically when the lens is mounted. (The D3/D3x/D3s bodies support up to twenty lenses; the D700 up to twelve). For home-chipped MF lenses, all will use the same setting, meaning you cannot use this feature to disparately fine tune more than one lens, as far as the camera is concerned. It sees all home-chipped MF lenses as being the same lens.

Thus the correct approach with chipped MF lenses, using the TagoTech chip from Singapore I describe, is to use the one setting which will bring as many lenses to perfect LED focus as possible. Once that is done, any outliers can be fine tuned using the programming capabilities of the chip, as described in the link above.


Bike Farm. This one was at f/4.

In my case I found that a +4 setting set all to rights and now those old MF wonders really started to sing. All my MF lenses showed a like focus shift, suggesting that the fault lies in the D3x body. The flange to sensor distance is wrong by a constant amount, (or, if you prefer, and more likely, the coincidence between AF LED illumination and the focus module is out) and it’s something that the 24mp sensor discloses ruthlessly.

So how good are those old clunkers anyway?

Having run out of excuses, it came time to photograph the proverbial bookshelf (my test target!) on a tripod. Tripod, mirror lock up, remote release, the whole thing. Bert the Border Terrier in dutiful attendance, albeit with a somewhat skeptical mien.

I did this for two favorite street snapper focal lengths, 28mm and 35mm. My MF primes, both pre-Ai with those gorgeous scalloped metal focus collars, are the 28/2 multicoated (1975) and the 35/2 (1971 vintage). These have proved to be outstanding performers on the D700 and D2x. The other lenses I own which cover these focal lengths are the costly and current 16-35 f/4 AF-S VR G and the 35-70 f/2.8 AF-D, both AF and chipped by Nikon. The bookshelf test does not tell much about color rendering and nothing about use into the sun. But it tells lots about resolving power. And the results were not especially surprising, based on my use of these lenses. (Lens correction profiles were used in all cases to remove distortion and chromatic aberration).

28mm at f/4:

  • Best by a clear margin – 28 f/2 MF
  • Second – 16-35 AF-S and clearly inferior

35mm at f/4:

  • Best by a clear margin – 35 f/2 MF
  • Second – 16-35 AF-S
  • Third – 35-70, with little to choose

Simply stated, once correctly focused, the old MF Nikkors smoke the latest and greatest zooms when it comes to resolving power. Plus you get one to two more stops at the fast end when absolutely needed. Bulk and weight are far lower, naturally.


Papered over. Same data as above.

Correct focus:

None of this means that use of the older MF lenses is ‘point-and’shoot’. The LED confirmation light in the viewfinder is not binary. There’s a range of focus collar rotation where it remains illuminated – analog intrusion in a digital world. So you revert to the old technique used for focusing long MF lenses using a film SLR. You oscillate the collar about the illumination point until the center is found. Then you press the button. At anything faster than f/8 at 2x pixel-peeping in Lightroom you will see the difference with a 24mp sensor, but not with a 12mp one, based on my experience with the D3x versus the D700.

Reality check:

Take a look at my recent column with the images of the stylish lady snapped in the Mission District of San Francisco.

These were at ISO 400 so you could do even better at ISO 100 if it comes to the best resolution, though the risk of camera shake grows.

Here’s a section of a 66″ wide image:


Nikon D3x, 35mm f/2 pre-Ai MF Nikkor.

See what I mean?

Nikon’s bizarre pricing

Nikon bodies

How to kick your loyal customers in the unmentionables.

The table below shows the new and current used prices for Nikon’s ‘serious’ bodies. I don’t use the word ‘pro’ as I am clueless what that means. Maybe it means paying full retail for something that is soon worthless?

We all know that depreciation with digital bodies is rapid, but imagine you bought a Nikon D3x in January, 2012 and are now selling it to get the yet higher definition of the D800, after deciding that’s something you cannot live without. Well, your $8,000 ‘investment’ just crashed to $2,800. That’s worse than Apple stock recently.

Maybe Nikon has some deep reason to financially emasculate buyers of its costlier hardware, because they must have known when introducing the D800 that the prices of the D700 and D3/D3x would crash. Quite why they had to price the D800 at a bargain basement $3,000 when at $4,000 they would have sold everyone they can make beats me, but they sure did a number on owners of the earlier bodies. Same for the D600. They could sell that body all day long for $3,000, like the D700 before it, and it would still be cheaper than the competitor from Canon with a like pixel count.

I take a more benign view of the situation as I’m not a ‘pro’, as defined above. As long as Nikon wants to cannibalize its top end offerings and trash resale values, I’m a happy camper. I can pick up a D2x for 14 cents on the dollar with a remaining life of 175,000 clicks. Or a D3x, with a whopping pixel count full frame sensor for 35 cents on the dollar with 275,000 clicks remaining. Works for me. Can I tell the difference from the D800 in an 80″ print? Nope. And I get a nice integrated hand grip free.


Discontinued March, 2012, just 9 months ago and already down to 35 cents on the dollar and falling.

Whether my technique is up to that big sensor, well that’s another question entirely.

Nikkor-H 28mm f/3.5 lens

Nikon lenses

A lightweight 28mm.

This one seems to have slipped through the review mill, so here are the details.

Mine is the pre-Ai version of 1971 with the metal scalloped focus collar . It’s considerably smaller and lighter than its f/2 sibling and can often be found for around $40. My mint copy ran $63 delivered. Construction and engraving quality represent the very best Nikon ever accomplished. The lens is a fine match for lighter bodies; it tends to be a bit too small for best handling on the larger bodies with battery grips.

I removed the five slotted screws retaining the bayonet flange, removed the aperture ring and filed down the necessary relief to clear the aperture feeler on modern Nikons, making this into an Ai lens. You can see the relieved arc in the picture below.

CPU installation on this one is tricky as the rear baffle is sloped, for some reason. It has to be removed and cut back to create the plane perpendicular surface to which the CPU is glued.


CPU installed after the baffle was cut back.

As usual I have created a lens correction profile which you can download here.

This file includes three profiles, at f/3.5, f/5.6 and at f/8. LR and PS will use the closest match. The 28mm f/3.5 shows vignetting at f/3.5, disappearing by f/5.6 with very minor barrel distortion being corrected.

This profile is for the pre-Ai and Ai versions, which had 9 elements in 8 groups. I have not tested this profile with the later Ai-S lens, though it appears to have a similar optical design.

If you use a filter, make sure it’s a slim one. The correct hood is model HN-2. I use one with a standard slim Nikon 52mm UV filter.

As is common with pre-AiS lenses, the aperture stop down lever exhibits substantial non-linearity, as illustrated here so you really want to pass aperture control from the camera to the lens’s aperture collar to assure proper metering.

The lens is sharpest between f/5.6 and f/11 where it cedes nothing in definition to its far costlier sibling.

Pixel peeping the D2x

Nikon bodies

Quite exceptional.

The Sony designed sensor in the Nikon D2x has a couple of things going against it. The design is some 9-10 years old and the sensor is APS-C. Half the size of a full frame one. Total pixels are just over 12 mp.

I keep reading about how this sensor cannot handle ISO400 or anything faster and how limited it is when it comes to large prints, so I thought I would do a bit of pixel peeping at extreme magnification ratios.

Here’s the original image. It was taken using the 85mm f/1.8 AF-D lens in overcast light at ISO400 and 1/1000 second and f/2.8, using autofocus.


Funny hats. Market Street at the Embarcadero, San Francisco.

I exported the RAW original as a TIFF from LR to PS CS5 where all I did was to enlarge the image using the Image->Image Size->Bicubic Smoother telling it to shoot for a 60″ wide print. This takes out the jaggies which are just becoming visible at this huge size. Then back in LR I tweaked the sharpness sliders a bit until it looked good. The whole thing took seconds to do. I then magnified the PS processed image to an equivalent width of 80″ (that’s over 6.5 feet!) and took a screen shot which appears below:


Center section of an 80″ print.

Viewed at 2 feet from my 21″ display the image is perfect. Large areas of smooth tone are just beginning to show noise if you stick your nose in it.

Here are the PS CS5 settings:

The original Nikon RAW file of 20.2MB swells to 827MB after the PS step, giving even my nuclear powered Hackintosh pause for thought, meaning a second or two to pop up the greatly enlarged display image.

The sweet spot for this sensor is reputed to be the native ISO of 100, whereas the above is at ISO 400, so there’s s good deal more performance yet to be squeezed out for the most critical results. Further, the native ISO of that old sensor is also known for outstanding color rendering, matching the best that is available today. I must give that a shot one day.

Not half bad for an obsolete sensor and body with a middle of the road lens. Sure, the latest sensors have better dynamic range and can go to unheard of ISOs, but for my purposes there’s not an awful lot wrong with the D2x, a bargain if ever there was one. Now excuse me while I get the glue out and reattach a bit of the rubber covering which is coming off the body ….