Sigma 745306 150-600mm F/5-6.3 DG HSM Contemporary Zoom Lens for Nikon

I have had this lens for 2/3 weeks now. I have taken over 500 images with it already. And I have to say it is fantastic. Well worth the money.1st thing I noticed was the size, it's huge. Especially at 600mm. Now I knew it was big, but using it daily I realised how big. And heavy... When I 1st went out with it I thought how can you hand hold it? Now I'm a big bloke, and I felt the size and weight. However, as time has gone by, I don't notice it any more, odd what you get used too.Build is ok, very plastic. But feels sturdy and strong. The lens lock is invaluable, as it prevent lens extending as you walk. I use with a nikon D7200. And I can't quite fit the assembled lens / camera into my lowpro sling bag. I will upload some images of the issue later. If you want to carry around fitted then you need a bag that allows the m to be packed vertically, not horizontal across the bag.Focus is excellent, really fast. And zooming is a bit of a chore, in that you have to twist to zoom then release and twist again to full zoom. Not great if you need to zoom fast. But in general ok.Image quality is far better than my old tamron 70-300mm. (still a great cheap lens by the way).At this time focus at 600mm is slighty soft. So I neeed to tune it to the camera. Looks like another purchase coming up for the sigma tuning thingy.I have bought a gimble for my tripod to help . But all the images except the moon were hand held. And I did take moon shots hand held. the image stabilisation is very good, does seem to pust hand held shots slightly to the right. You can feel the motor working. But its good as you can see.I nearly bought the Nikkor 200-500mm f/5.6E, I tried it at Jessops (lovely lens) but I don't regret buying the sigma. I wanted the extra reach and boy do I like it. It is a slow lens though so brighter light is preferred unless you are happy with high ISO's. the D7200 is great, but I am noticing the high ISO, (so noise when shooting moon was noticable to me)Great lens, well worth a buy.

Naturally this is a big and heavy lens, and with the tripod mount it works extremely well in all lighting conditions as you would expect. The image quality is excellent and I've attached a photo of a robin with some zoomed in insets to give you an idea. If you look carefully you can see the reflection of my house against the blue sky in the Robins Eye. It's that sharp. However, it doesn't stop there. That image was taken hand held at the full 600mm zoom. Yes, the light was good, and I'm using a Canon 6D at 1000 ISO, but to me at least that is pretty impressive. The autofocus was almost instant and spot on. Being a big telephoto, you are having to be at least 2-3 meters from the subject for focus! The other feature I like is the manual focus override. If you have the time, and birds are not very patient usually, you can fine tune the autofocus manually.The second sample was taken at night indoors and also handheld. This was at maximum ISO and the autofocus does hunt around a bit, but not bad for hand held indoors at 600mm. There is a feature to set the autofocus range to basically near or far and that reduces the hunt time in low light. You can see here that at max aperture the depth of field is insanely narrow, so when doing wild life stuff it's better to go up to F11 or so and have a higher ISO unless you have manged to squash your subject flat somehow.So the final picture was hand held at around 500mm with the lens resting on a railing to provide some extra stability. The bottom left inset shows the sharpness that can be delivered, the numbers on the blue container are perfectly readable. Again this was at 1000 ISO.I was a bit worried about getting this in my backpack, but the solid zoom cover is reversible and it all fits in very nicely after a bit of reorganisation.I've not bothered with the USB tuner. The results are amazing without it. But I can see how it might be useful.Finally, don't bother with a 1.4x converter. The images are better if you just crop! Sigma do seem to make very good lenses! My Sigma 12-24mm ultra-wide angle is also excellent!

I've just bought a "contemporary" version for my Nikon D810. I have only had it for a short while but am mightily impressed with both its image quality and the performance of the optical stabilisation (OS) system.Hand-held shots are completely viable, even at the full 600mm focal length. OS does its job well.Autofocus works well and fast, even in poor light, with very little "hunting".Build quality is good, zoom action is smooth.Image quality is excellent.I have bought a lens dock but in fact I don't think I'll need it as focus is spot-on out of the box.I bought this lens because I am frustrated with the performance of my Nikon 28-300 zoom at its long end, it never seems to be quite long enough and the image quality degrades a bit. Comparing images from the two lenses side by side is a revelation: not only do you get over twice as close but the image quality is also massively better.Downsides? It's heavy, but then it's a large lens with a reasonable maximum aperture so it can't be otherwise. I wouldn't want to lug it around all day though.Incidentally just for fun I tried it with my 1.4x teleconverter. Auto-focus mostly worked but it struggled a bit at longer focal lengths on poor contrast subjects. Maybe worth it for a static subject where you can set focus manually but not usable for anything which would require active focus tracking.