Today we're gonna try and find out which of
the Sigma Art lenses that cover the 24-35mm range
performs best for video and for photo,
as well as adapted and speed boosted.
Oh, and I'm shooting this video right now
using the winning lens.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening everybody? I'm Gerald Undone
and for relaxing times, make it Suntory time.
So, I do a lot of shooting in the 24-35mm range
and I love Sigma lenses, but I've never had all of
their lenses that cover that range at the same time.
But as I announced in my social posts earlier this week,
I do now. By the way, if you're not following me on
Instagram or Twitter, I highly suggest that you do
so that you can see those little sneak peeks
and behind the scenes on upcoming videos
and get your votes in for
tests that you want me to run.
Alright, so for today's test
we've got the 24 and 35mm f/1.4 primes.
We've got the 24-35mm f/2 zoom for full frame
and the 18-35mm f/1.8 crop zoom.
I didn't include the 28mm in this round up
because that lens is in a different class
and price point and I don't really think
would be fair to compare it.
It's of the same calibre of that 40mm Sigma monster
that I reviewed a little while ago and I highly recommend
you watch that video if you want to know what you get for 50%
more money in those newer Sigma lenses, but for this video,
we're just going to be sticking to the lenses that fit
in the same price and performance ratio.
The format for today's video is just going to be an intense
discharge of test results, and it might be a bit scattered.
But I will put a table of contents in the description
for those that want to jump around or go back.
And lastly before we get into the results
I want to thank Camera Canada for supplying me
with all these Sigma lenses and adapters.
I'm using all EF mount stuff for these tests
but Camera Canada was also kind enough to lend me the MC-11
so that we can do some Sony full frame performance tests
as well, and they gave me the dock so all the firmware
for the MC-11 and the lenses is all updated as of June 2019.
Basically, Camera Canada is awesome.
And I constantly recommend them to Canadians looking to get
Sigma or any other brands lenses.
Alright, so let's start with sharpness.
So, I did two sets of sharpness tests.
The first batch is on the Blackmagic Pocket 4K
using the Metabones Speed Booster Ultra. This way we can
see if there's any practical differences in the lenses
once the resolution is reduced down to 4K.
But then I ran the test again on the Sony a7 III
in photo mode so that we can see if the differences change
or increase using the full 6K sensor. Conveniently the results
were pretty much the same on both systems.
Now, I'm going to show you some of the samples now,
but I can't really show you all of the results because
I did each battery of tests three times.
So, I have over 150 sample images,
but I will show you the final scores.
Alright, so to give you an example of what I did
here in Lightroom is a batch. This is one batch of tests
and like I said, I did this three times
and so we can just do a little bit of comparison here.
So, for each one of these I've written down
the zoom lenses at what focal length they were and I went
through all their focal lengths and I also went through
the apertures from-- there's their fastest,
but obviously we can only compare certain ones.
Up to f/4 for all of them. But to give you a rough idea
of how I evaluated the sharpness,
I would compare two like configurations.
So, here we have the Sigma 35mm prime at f/2
and we can compare that to the Sigma 18-35 at 35 also at f/2.
And then I would bring them up in a side-by-side like this.
I wouldn't know which one is which though I would do it
sort of blind and then I would make my determinations
and then I would look and see which image was on the left
and which image was on the right.
These are 4K samples taken from
the Blackmagic, screen grabbed out
at full resolution from the edit and then evaluated that way,
so we can see what the 4K resolution is
because obviously there may be smaller variations than there
would be if we had this on, you know, some 40 MP camera
that doesn't really count for video that much.
but basically I would start by evaluating the centre
of the frame and seeing how the sharpness
was there and evaluating as it moves across.
I would check the corners and see if there's
any, you know, distortion and weirdness there.
I would check fonts for clarity,
look at the colours, and I would go
all the way to the edges and see how the fonts rendered out
in the edges like that and then I would make an overall
determination of which one
was best between those two images.
So, in this case, I would actually say
that the one on the left is clearer, contrast-ier,
and sharper for the most part
and even over in the corner--
Well in the corner the one on the right
seems to do a little bit better
and I would look over here
and say that-- it's a pretty close tie on the film
and Polaroids pretty much a tie to the--
it might start favouring the one on the right a little bit
and then I would look and see which one was which
and so the one on the right is the Sigma 18-35 at 35mm,
and the one on the left is the 35mm prime.
And I'll show you one more of those for fun.
Let's do the Sigma 24-35 at f/2.8 and also at 24mm.
And let's compare that to the 24mm prime also at f/2.8.
And let's zoom in on this right away
and we'll take a look here.
And to me these are actually pretty close.
I would say the one on the left seems a little
bit contrast-ier and sharper.
Let's jump over down here in the corner.
Probably the same thing is true. I'd say the one the left wins.
But these ones are pretty close...
and the one on the left I think wins there.
And again there, so I would say the one on the left is just
a little bit better in every way and I would check and see
which is which. So, the one on the right is the 24mm prime
and the one on the left is the 24-35mm at 24 at f/2.8.
And this was really surprising to me.
I thought when stopped down-- I thought
that the primes would be sharper all the way across the board.
But once you stop down a little bit I actually
found that the zooms were winning and even wide open
I found that the zooms were winning as well at f/2
and so I'll just give you my sort of overall results
of each time out of these batches of tests.
What you can see here that I have in Excel
is that every time I pair two together, I would make one
green, that was the winner. So, we can see that the 24-35
at 24 beat the 24 prime, at 35 it tied with the 35 prime.
The 18-35 at 24 tied the 24, the 18-35 at 35 beat the 35.
That one was surprising. I just showed you that one.
I thought the 35 prime would win there
because it's an excellent lens.
The 24-35 at 24 and the 18-35 at 24 tied,
and then the 18-35 at 35 beat the 24-35 at 35.
So, the 18-35 at 35mm is, like,
the sharpest of all these configurations
that I checked and I would go through the different apertures.
like that, so at f/2 for instance, which is the lowest...
which is the fastest that all of them can be run on
because the slowest lens that we have is an f/2.
And in that case the 24s, were tied, the 35 actually won
at f/2 over the zoom, the 18-35 however
tied the primes at both 24 and 35mm
and the 18-35 beat the 24-35 at 24 and 35
for its wide open and that's because
the 18-35 was stopped down a little bit.
And so when you add all these up for each round,
the average was that the 18-35 would pull eight points
per round, the 24-35 would pull four points.
The points are based on how many times it got a green box,
basically, where it was, like, you're the best or you're tied.
And then the 20-- the 35 & 24 primes
each got three points each.
This was surprising to me that the 18-35 just kind of
pretty much rolled over the other ones
in terms of sharpness, and that both zooms
beat both primes
when stopped down to equal measures that
everyone-- every lens is able to.
Obviously there's going to be considerations there
that you can get more light in and get faster with the primes
and you're going to have to trade that off, but when
equalized you're not losing anything with the zooms,
you're not losing anything by having a zoom.
Now let's look at the chromatic aberration and distortion.
So, here I've got the Sigma 18-35
and if we compare that to the 35mm prime.
So, we're going to see that the 18-35,
although it can produce sharper results,
it does have some stronger distortion issues
as you move through the focal range.
And these can be seen a lot more strongly here
with the way that these lines
are kind of warping on the left.
And then I also have a brighter light shining
on the left hand side so that we can check
for chromatic aberration while we're zoomed in because
I've got these lines blown out
and we can see however that the 18-35 is performing
pretty, pretty good for fringing when compared to the prime.
It might be a little bit worse
than the prime at the same apertures
but it's doing okay. It's on par.
The only thing is that it's a little bit more distorted.
So, a little bit more distorted but a little
bit sharper. Now if we take a look at the 24-35,
which I think probably did best in this regard
and we'll compare that to the 35mm we'll see
that it doesn't really have the same distortion issues.
Maybe a slight bit more than the prime, but not as
noticeable as the 18-35.
But the fringing is reduced, I would say,
and it also seems to have a more muted colour,
which is interesting as well.
So, I would say that the fringing is either
as good or better than the prime lens
and this continues on as well when you check out the 24mm.
Let's do the 24mm prime against the 24-35 at 24.
If we zoom in over here, we can see that the 24 prime
which is on the left now is significantly worse
for chromatic aberration than the 24-35.
And as far as distortion is concerned
I would say that the 24-35 is not...
any worse. If anything, it might be slightly better.
So, the 24-35 basically crushes the 24 in every category
that we've checked so far, the 18-35 wins in sharpness,
but is worse in distortion the 35mm has a nice
kind of, like, balanced of all the tests so far,
but the 24-35 wins in this category. Now everything
we've done so far has been pretty intense pixel peeping
and from a more pragmatic position you could
argue that all these lenses perform about evenly
and excellently, and they would all be pretty great
for any purposes that you would throw at them and that fact also
remains true for the flaring test for which I could barely
discern a difference between the four lenses.
Now, let's talk a bit about focus.
The most consistent focuser of the lot is the 24-35.
I did a series of One-Shot AF tests on the Blackmagic
and some continuous stuff on the Sony,
and the 24-35 had the most consistent results.
The 24mm was usually the slowest
and not as consistent as the 35mm prime
and the 18-35mm had the strangest results.
It was sometimes the fastest but it also missed focus
more often than the other ones and it's not parfocal like
the 24-35mm is. For those of you that don't know,
parfocal just means that the lens will remain sharp
as you zoom through the ranges, rather than changing focus.
The 24-35mm stays equally sharp
regardless of whether you're at 24 or 35mm
but the 18-35mm shifts in focus as you zoom through.
Now you can actually adjust the rotation
of an element inside of the Speed Booster
in order to make the 18-35mm parfocal, but doing this
will unfortunately make the 24-35 mm
varifocal now. So, you can actually only have one lens
or the other work perfectly.
But in a sense this means that the 18-35mm
is flawed because the 24-35mm was parfocal
out of the box and it was also parfocal on the Sony
when I wasn't using the Speed Booster.
Where the 18-35 is the one that required customization.
And if you do make those changes, it could mean that only
that lens will now be parfocal and any other zoom lens
that you might potentially use in the future
won't be because you made those adjustments.
But it's still the right thing to do
I would say if you plan on marrying
that Speed Booster with that lens and that's just kind
of like that combination that you use all the time or if
all your other lenses are primes then it's still good and I would
recommend making that adjustment because you'd rather have
the lens be parfocal, but if you're switching between zooms,
then the 18-35 is just kind of flawed in this regard.
Now when it comes to continuous autofocus, they all
performed better than I thought they would,
perhaps the latest firmware for the MC-11 helped with this
but for video AF on the Sony they were all quite good.
I put face detection on me on the Sony for like half an hour
while I worked and it didn't lose focus on me once and I also
did the in and out test and the pop-up test and it was fast
and responsive and about as good as I would expect maybe those
comments were based on people usually using the stuff
on the GH4 and GH5 and obviously it's not as reliable
on that, but I would say if you set the Sony to fast
for the autofocus setting that these
lenses are very usable for video autofocus.
The only drawback is that they're a lot
louder than a native lens
that's, you know, fly-by-wire would be
and it has that gnawing rat sound that might be
an issue depending on your recording situation.
Now it is easily defeated by a well-placed
microphone and proper levels but to give you sort of
a worst-case scenario, here's what it sounds like
recorded using the built-in microphone in the camera.
I didn't talk very loudly so I had to boost everything
so you could really hear what this lens sounds like
but with the mic placed away, you're not going to hear it
at all. But this is what it sounds like worst case.
[moderately loud crackling noise when changing focus]
Now another consideration when it comes to video
is the focus breathing which is the distance that's
sort of travelled by the lens when you focus that almost
makes it seem like you're zooming when you shouldn't be.
And this is another area where the zooms did surprisingly
well and beat the primes in my tests. The 24-35mm
showed minimal breathing on full frame and was almost
non-existent when cropped in on the Blackmagic.
And the 18-35mm showed excellent performance as well.
The primes were significantly worse though
with the 35mm being the worst by far.
Now, there are some other factors that will likely affect
your decision making. First, the 18-35mm
is an APS-C lens, which means that its image circle
won't fully cover the sensor of a full frame camera.
So, when it comes to versatility, in some ways,
it's more limited than the other lenses.
When it comes to full frame photography,
I found that it wasn't really usable
until at least 24mm,
but it wasn't good until at least 28mm.
But then at 35mm, it was surprisingly excellent.
And in some ways beat the 35mm prime.
Now for 16:9 video modes on the full frame a7 III
the framing is a lot more forgiving
and so the range is a little bit wider
with 24mm looking a lot better
for video than it did for photo on the 18-35.
Now none of this is an issue if you use this lens on an APS-C
or Micro 4/3 camera. But it is worth considering
when we compare it to the 24-35mm, which is a full frame
and can work on all of the cameras for its full range.
But for video purposes an argument could be made
that both of those lenses are 24-35mm full frame
video shooters because of the usable range on the 18-35,
but for photography, I would say you should look
at the 18-35 more like a 28-35mm lens.
However for you photographers, you will find that
the vignetting and distortion is easier to correct
on the 24-35 than it is on the 18-35 which requires a lot more
tweaking when dealing with that, you know vignetted
image circle problem and with some of the distortion
problems that we already talked about on the 18-35.
So, if you want a quicker turnaround process
the 24-35 is probably better because
the automatic corrections are usually good enough.
So, in those cases the only real advantage
to the 18-35 when used for these full frame
hybrid purposes would be that extra 1/3 stop
of light on the f/1.8 versus the f/2 on the 24-35,
but the 24-35 has an answer for that as well
because it can be paired with the Speed Booster XL which is
1/3 of a stop faster than the Speed Booster Ultra,
but you can't use the XL, the 0.64x on the 18-35
because again, you'd have those same
image circle problems. Now, when it comes to
low light performance the primes definitely win
because you're getting up to an extra stop of light
when compared to the zooms, but you're trading
that extra light for reduced versatility. And there's also
physical differences to consider because the primes
are obviously much smaller and lighter, and all of these
lenses have different front filter thread sizes,
with the 35mm taking a 67mm filter
the 18-35 taking a 72mm filter,
the 24mm prime taking a 77mm filter,
and the 24-35 taking the 82mm filter.
Alright, so those are all the facts,
now let's draw some conclusions To start, the image quality
of these lenses is surprisingly even, you can't really go wrong.
You can only go faster or zoom-ier.
So, it'll really just come down to the purpose of the lens.
If you want a lens that you're only going to use
for video and probably not full frame video,
get the 18-35mm. Easy.
If you have an APS-C camera, and you want to do photo and video,
get the 18-35mm. If you shoot full frame
whether exclusively or that's just one of your many systems.
I would get the 24-35mm.
In fact, despite being a happy owner
of the 35mm prime, now that I've done these tests
the only time that I actually recommend
the primes is if you know that you're going
to want to use one focal length a lot more than you'd
ever want to zoom, because in that case you can save yourself
some weight and get a smaller lens that can do
the same job with the added advantage of having
up to a stop of extra light.
I feel like there's no clear winner here,
but there is a clear loser.
I like the 24mm prime the least.
I would definitely rather have the 24-35mm because
the weight doesn't bother me, and if anything it helps
with getting more stable video. And being a stop slower
doesn't bother me either because on full frame
I think that f/2 is plenty and on Micro 4/3 for video
I'll be using a Speed Booster.
So, again f/2 should be adequate.
And the same applies to the 35mm prime.
Again, I'd rather have the 24-35mm,
which again, remember, crushes those other two
when it comes to focus breathing performance.
The harder decision is when comparing it to the 18-35mm
because the 18-35 is a little bit sharper,
has a wider range, is a little bit faster, and a little
bit lighter and smaller. But it's not naturally parfocal
like the 24-35 and I can't use it as comfortably on full frame.
But since the usable range of the 18-35
is pretty close to 24-35 when on full frame
and since it's a bit sharper, and is probably most
commonly used in video, which does have more forgiving
framing, and since I can use it as a great 35mm
if I need to, I'd say it's the best of the lot.
But the 24-35mm with a 0.64x Speed Booster
is a very, very close second place, and definitely
my preferred pick when it comes to full frame photography.
And for some reason, it's actually cheaper right now
in Canada than the 18-35mm.
Usually the 18-35mm is the cheaper of the two lenses,
which is why I would also
give it a slight edge over the 24-35.
But if you live in Canada, right now
you can get the 24-35 for, like, $300 off.
And so in conclusion, and to follow up on
the tease that I made in the intro to this video,
I've been shooting this entire time on the 18-35mm,
and nearly six years later it's still one of
the best lenses available for hybrid video shooters.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found this video
helpful or at least entertaining and if you did,
make sure you leave it the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already,
but if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining
feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright... I'm done.