Review by Klaus Schroiff, published February 2020

Introduction

Upon the initial contact, you will immediately notice two things. First of all, it's not a small lens and as such it follows a bit of a Sigma tradition. Sigma tends to prefer compromising size in favor of performance. The other aspect is the build quality. It may be a "Contemporary" lens but there's nothing cheapish about it. The lens body is made of metal. The ginormous, rubberized focus ring is super smooth. It's almost too big when trying to get a handle on the lens for mounting/unmounting. Sigma's statement regarding the degree of sealing is a bit fuzzy. They are referring to a sealed lens mount but this leaves a question mark regarding the focus ring at least. The lens does not extend during focusing so that's certainly positive when it comes to surviving in harsher environments. A petal-shaped hood is part of the package.

The AF is quite fast and essentially noiseless. Typical for most E-mount lenses, manual focusing works by wire. Considering the huge focus ring, you may expect that it is a joy to use this lens in manual focus mode but, unfortunately, this is not the case here. Among all the mirrorless lenses that we tested so far - and that's not a small number - this is the one with the worst manual focus mechanism to date. The focus "steps" are way too coarse which is a pain at short to medium focus distances. Thus as unfortunate as it may be, you should better stick to autofocusing which is reasonably accurate.