Sigma 70-200 f/2.8 EX DG OS APO Review

I have gone on record several times saying the OS is not a huge deal in a lens.  Especially for sports shooting.  It is not often that I admit being wrong, but this is one of those times.  But only a little bit wrong.

I have had both the Canon and Sigma 70-200 non stabilized lens.  I also have some image stabilized lens.  While helpful, I have never really found image stabilization to produce such a huge improvement in image quality to justify the cost.

I recently found a guy on Craigslist who had the new Sigma 70-200 f/2.8 EX DG OS APO lens for sale.  I noticed the ad had been up for 22 days.  Having been a slightly little disappointed with the old version of the Sigma lens compared to the Canon version, I was not really in the market for the lens.  But I figured since the ad was up for so long, if I could get the lens at a good price I would try it.

I offered the guy $600 for this Sigma lens and he agreed.  The lens looked absolutely brand new.  If I purchased it in store I would never suspect it had ever been used.

Sigma has come a long way from their old version of this lens.  The image quality is amazing.  It is much faster focusing, but still slightly behind Canon.


Where I really saw a difference was in low light using the image stabilization.  I was easily able to hand hold this lens down to 1/15 of a second.  I am a guy who struggles usually with 1/50 of a second.

I found the low light pictures to be extremely sharp and accurately focused.

The other thing I like about this lens was I found it was so easy to manually focus.  I really have no explanation for it, but with all my other lens I feel like I am going back and forth trying to find that perfect focus.  With this lens once I got close I seemed to be able to find that sweet spot without going to far.

This lens is heavy.  It is much heavier than the non stabilized version of both the Canon and Sigma.  That is not to say you can't hand hold it.  It is very manageable.  But if you are not used to these kind of lenses it may take you a few times out to adjust to the added weight.

As I have said many times, I primarily shoot sporting events.  I was able to take this lens out to a baseball game that started around 7:30 and went until around nine when it was nice and dark.  I found this lens performed very well, even when I was relying on the stadium light.

As many others have said in the past, I found setting my aperture to f/4 produced sharper images.  At f/2.8 the images were still very good, but I found the moving subjects caused me to have some soft focusing on the face at times.  Nothing terrible, just not as good as I wanted.

I found this lens focused fast in the low light situation.  I was able to switch from being focused on the batter to the shortstop fielding the ball with no issue at all.

The image stabilization helped once the sun went down as well.

Optically this lens is much better than the old Sigma 70-200 version and I think it rivals the Canon 70-200.  I know the lab tests show this lens lags behind Canon, I did not find this to be significant in real world use.  But you can look at the pictures and decide for yourself.  While I would say the Canon may have a very slight advantage, it also costs more than twice as much.  Unless you are shooting professionally and you need the absolute fastest focusing lens and sharpest possible image in every single circumstance, I think this lens is more than adequate.