Sigma 50-500 OS

aquarian_light

Anyone with any experience?
only competitor is the 80-400 with it's ancient screw drive focus thats devastatingly slow for birds and dashing wildlife. How does this lens stack up?

adamz

it's been mulled over many times. please use forum search. here are some links to some older discussions:
-http://nikonrumors.com/forum/topic.php?id=1195
-http://nikonrumors.com/forum/topic.php?id=2321

aquarian_light

Cool, those are two and three years old.... My new d800 negates about 90% of the concern discussed there. I.E poor in low light due to slow apertures. Since I can safely shoot and use files up to 12500 iso, f6.4 at the long end is fast enough. And neither of discuss the focus speed and tracking or the OS capabilities for birds and wildlife. And they're both on the old forum... to which I cannot post. So....

Anyone with any fresh opinions?

heartyfisher

Bigma bigmama2 are just as big :-)) there have not been any other 500 lenses inthe time since the last posts inthose forum threads. Wat are your exact concerns?

Devastating slow? I wouldnt say that. The motor in the camera plays an important role in the speed of focusing. I would think that the d800 should speed up the 80-400 a bit. Even the d300 got the speed up fast enough for bif, so the d800 should improve on that I would think.

ads

"And neither of discuss the focus speed and tracking or the OS capabilities for birds and wildlife."

I've only shot the 50-500 OS on a D5100, but the lens focuses very fast, noticeably quicker than the 70-300 VR Nikkor it replaced. OS is good enough that I can hand hold shots at 500mm on static objects down to shutter speeds of about 1/250th which is way slower than you'd use for moving wildlife.

I think the tracking capabilities are down to the AF system in the body rather than the lens. The only downside is low light, but if you can shoot 12800 ISO the f6.3 aperture will not be a problem.