![\"The](\"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/sigma_100-400.jpg\")
<\/a>Construction and Handling<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Sigma 100-400mm is part of Sigma’s Contemporary lineup. This line was meant to be generally consumer focused, and as such I didn’t really expect a lot with regards to fit and finish. However, the Sigma impresses given the low cost. While I’m sure there are some cost-cutting measures in the lens, the outer design is gorgeous. The exterior is constructed primarily with smooth matte finish plastics, but there’s definitely some sort of metal substructure to the lens, and the mount is metal. The lens fits right in with Sigma’s more recent lens design philosophy, and I think it looks fantastic. The lens has a rubber gasket to seal around the lens mount, but there are no other obvious signs of weather sealing. The overall construction of the lens feels solid and more robust than the typical consumer zoom, though without taking apart the lens, I can’t comment on the quality of the internal construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With the slightly slower aperture range of f\/5-6.3, the lens is more compact than your typical 100-400, and it ends up being similar in size to most 70-200mm lenses, and weight is a bit lighter than a 70-200mm f\/2.8. The Sigma 100-400mm is 7.2″ long and weighs about 2.5 lbs (1160g). Compared to the Sony 100-400mm at 8.1″ long and a bit over 3 lbs (1395g), the Sigma is rather compact for this focal range. The front element takes fairly small 67mm filters, which is great. It’s not a lightweight lens, but for its focal range, it’s definitely on the lighter side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 100-400mm has a broad rubberized zoom ring towards the end of the lens that zooms smoothly and with very nice damping. The lens barrel extends during zooming towards the long end of the focal range, but the lens tube has no wobble at all in it. In a somewhat odd turn, the included lens hood has a flare that is intended for your fingers to grasp so you can use the lens as a push-pull zoom if desired. If that sounds weird to you, like it might damage the zooming mechanism, I thought the same as well, but the lens manual denotes that this is by design and that it is intended for either zooming method.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The manual focus ring is well damped and sits closer to the camera. It’s ribbed plastic, rather than rubber, but it feels fine to use. The fit and finish of the lens is great, and I was frankly impressed given the low price of the lens. The included lens hood is made of plastic, and is reversible. Like a lot of Sigma lenses, the hood fits very close to the body when reversed, which is great, as the lens isn’t much larger in diameter with the hood reversed than it is without the hood at all. A lot of other 100-400mm lenses have enormous hoods which make it more difficult to fit in a bag, so the slim profile is a very welcome feature here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the left side of the lens is a group of four switches. The first allows selection of autofocus, full-time manual focus with AF, and manual focus. The second is a focus limiter to shorten the range at which the lens will try to focus. The third controls the image stabilizer option, including a dedicated panning option, while the fourth allows for ‘custom modes.’ These can be set using the optional Sigma Dock, and allow for tweaking autofocus speed and smoothness settings, as well as custom focus limiter settings that can later be accessed by flipping the switch. Unfortunately, as I do not own the Sigma dock, I was unable to try these modes out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the down side, you may notice from the pictures that this lens is missing something most every 100-400mm lens has: a tripod collar. I’m sure cutting the tripod collar helped reduce the cost of the lens, but it’s something that really should be present in a lens of this length. The weight is right on the borderline of what I’m generally comfortable cantilevering out on the lens mount. While I feel that the rather robust lens mount of my A7 III is able to handle the size and weight of this lens, I do not feel comfortable shooting tripod mounted with the A6000, as I fear it would potentially cause damage to the mount.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since I was using this lens adapted for Sony E-Mount, this section is going to be a bit different. The capabilities of the lens on Sony E-mount bodies depends largely on which adapter is used. I have three different EF to E-mount adapters: the Metabones IV, Fotodiox Pro, and Sigma MC-11.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Metabones is the most expensive of the bunch, with the current version costing $399 new. It was among the first adapters that truly provided decent capabilities. The Fotodiox Pro is the least expensive at $99, but I’ve found in my use that it’s quite a good little adapter, though out of the box the shiny plastic inside can cause some issues with reflections. I bought some blackout flocking and cut it to fit the inside of the adapter, which removed those reflections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Sigma MC-11 is in the middle, at $250 retail, but it often goes on sale for $150. It’s a well-built adapter and provides similar capabilities as the others with Canon lenses, but with newer Sigma lenses, the MC-11 offers better compatibility – allowing full use of lens as if it were a native E-mount optic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of these three adapters, the Metabones was actually the worst when it came to autofocus with the SIgma 100-400mm. Using this adapter, focus was a bit sluggish and was hit or miss for accuracy in bright outdoor conditions. Indoors, autofocus was completely unusable. The Fotodiox Pro fared quite a bit better, with reasonable AF speed and good accuracy outdoors, and even passable AF indoors. However, continuous AF wasn’t particularly good at accuracy when tracking, and focus on closer subjects would often cause the lens to hunt. Both of these adapters also limit which AF modes are usable and which focus points can be selected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unsurprisingly, the MC-11 is by far the best adapter for use with this lens. With the MC-11, the Sigma 100-400mm behaves as if it were a native E-mount lens, with all focus modes available, such as expanded flexible spot and zone focusing. The lens doesn’t focus as quickly as a native lens would, but it really isn’t bad at all. In lower light, focus is deliberate, but accurate, even on closer items at the long end of the zoom range. Outside, single AF works very well, though speed is moderate. AF speed was definitely faster on my A7 III than on my A7 II, though both cameras are usable for general shooting. Two things surprised me with the MC-11. First, I found C-AF to be quite good, and I could accurately track moving subjects, at least at moderate distances. Close up, it fared worse. Second, the MC-11 allowed the 100-400mm to be used on my A6000 with reasonable autofocus in good light, though performance in lower light was far worse than on my A7 III. With my other adapters on the A6000, you might as well just consider this a manual focus lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is the Sigma 100-400mm a good lens for sports or wildlife on the A7 series? Well, if you have an A7 III or A9, I’d say it will probably do a pretty good job for wildlife work or sports where you are a ways from the action and focus isn’t moving towards you rapidly. If you’re shooting tight shots up close for action, or are using one of the older Sony bodies, a native lens will work notably better for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In testing continuous AF tracking with my son running towards me, I found the lens to struggle to maintain focus when he was within about 5-10m when shooting at 400mm, but at further distances, especially when using Eye AF, accuracy was pretty good, with about a 75% hit rate shooting at 8fps on my A7 III.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Sigma 100-400mm comes with an optical image stabilizer (OIS) system. This is an other thing that requires a proper adapter to work correctly. On A7 II and III bodies with IBIS, the optical stabilizer and in-body stabilizer will conflict with each other when using the Metabones or Fotodiox adapters. With these adapters, it’s best to turn off the lens stabilization and rely solely on the IBIS. However the MC-11 correctly uses the OIS in conjunction with the IBIS system on my A7 II and A7 III, and allows for stabilization on my A6000 using the OIS only. On my A7 III with the MC-11, I found the stabilizer good for around 3 stops of stabilization with good technique. It’s a nice addition and frankly a much-needed feature on a long lens such as this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before I get into discussion on the optical properties of the lens, I did want to mention the aperture range. The lens is an f\/5-6.3, which sounds extraordinarily slow at first blush, but in reality, it’s just 1\/3 stop slower at both ends than the standard f\/4.5-5.6 range found on most 100-400mm lenses. This is an extremely minor difference in real world use, though the one area it could have an impact is if you are using it on a Canon body and want to attach a 1.4x TC, as the resulting f\/9 aperture with the TC is just a touch slower than the f\/8 requirement of many cameras. However, in my day-to-day use, the slightly slower aperture was a complete non-issue. As an interesting note, with the A7 III, I could still use autofocus when attaching my old Kenko 1.4x Canon EF teleconverter (which I’ve had since about 2008), when using the MC-11. Because the TC turns the lens into a ‘non-Sigma lens’, you do go back to the limited focus modes when putting an EF teleconverter on, but when outdoors, I still had autofocus, and it was accurate, though not very fast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You’d be forgiven if thinking that an $800 telezoom would not be competitive with the much more expensive native options. Most modern 100-400mm lenses are $2,000 and up. And while image quality on the Sigma 100-400mm isn’t likely up to the optical properties of the G-Master lens, I was very impressed with the quality of images I got out of this lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Sigma 100-400mm f\/5-6.3 is a sharp lens. It starts that way at 100mm wide open and continues through 400mm wide open. I fully expected a fair bit of softness at 400mm, but to my surprise, the lens maintained very good sharpness across almost the entire frame at 400mm and f\/6.3. It isn’t blisteringly sharp like many of the prime lenses you can get, but it is still on a high level, and punches well above its weight given the bargain price.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Below is a shot taken at 400mm f\/6.3. Here is a 100% crop<\/a> of that image. While the 42MP cameras in the A7R range might want for a bit more resolving power, on a 24 megapixel sensor, it can produce plenty of detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stopping down the lens does increase sharpness a bit, and I found when pairing the lens with my Kenko 1.4x teleconverter that stopping down around one stop sharpened up the images in that combo significantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I haven’t yet used the Sony 100-400mm GM, but compared to most consumer-grade telezooms that I’ve used, this Sigma was surprisingly sharp. I will caution, though, that this review is based on only one sample of the lens. I have seen other reviews, and there does seem to be some copy to copy variation with the lens, with some showing worse sharpness and others showing similar sharpness to what I have experienced with mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While the lens has a moderate aperture range, the long focal lengths available allow you to blur out the background significantly. The Sigma puts in a rather nice performance here as well, with generally smooth background blur that is fairly neutral. At moderate distances, there can be a bit of a bright ring on the specular highlights, but the overall character remains fairly smooth throughout the focal range. The wider end shows a bit more nervousness than the long end, but again, I was surprised at how good the lens performed in this area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s one area where you’d expect the lens to show mediocre performance, but Sigma has really designed this lens with quality optical performance in mind, and the out of focus rendering is lovely as a result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Sigma 100-400mm produces images with pleasing color response and a moderate contrast profile. Images aren’t particularly punchy, but I wouldn’t expect that from a consumer grade telezoom. However, the images take post-processing well. The color is fairly typical of recent Sigma lenses, with perhaps a touch of a warm cast and very pleasing and natural color saturation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 100-400mm shows a bit of lateral chromatic aberration, but it’s easily corrected and shouldn’t cause any issues in field use. Longitudinal CA is actually very well controlled. Just a touch of fringe can show up a little in certain circumstances, but the lens is surprisingly well corrected in this regard, which was rather impressive for such a low-cost lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Sigma 100-400mm follows a fairly typical distortion pattern for telezooms, with a touch of pincushion distortion at the wide and that increases to more moderate levels at the long end. Lightroom has a correction profile for the distortion that will take care of it if you are using this lens to shoot distant buildings, but in real world use, I didn’t find it to be particularly field relevant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a bit of vignetting that eases as you stop down, but again, nothing particularly noteworthy in this area. However, with regards to flare, the lens does not put in a particularly good performance. With the sun in the frame, there’s a definite loss of contrast, and rather large green and purple ghosts are displayed, as can be seen in the image above. The shot above also induced the fine lines that can pop out on some PDAF image sensors, though they’ve been corrected in post in the shot above. Given the very narrow angle of view, these situations aren’t going to pop up that often, but it’s worth noting if you tend to shoot with the sun in the frame fairly often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In all, I was very impressed with the optical quality of the Sigma 100-400mm It punches well above its price with regards to image sharpness and bokeh, while showing relatively low chromatic aberration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reviewing a non-native lens is a unique experience. Note that for native Canon, Nikon and Sigma shooters, the OIS and autofocus performance are likely to be better than what I experienced when adapting it to a non-native mount. However, despite the use of an adapter, I found the Sigma 100-400mm to perform reasonably well for autofocus when using Sigma’s MC-11 adapter, at least on my A7 III. The older A7 II was still fine, but definitely more deliberate in focus speed. I would definitely recommend the MC-11 for use with this lens, as performance suffers with other adapters and is especially terrible when used with the Metabones adapter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Optically, I continue to be impressed with this lens as I shoot more and more with it. Considering the dramatically lower cost compared to the native Sony option, I really wasn’t expecting great performance, but Sigma continues their recent trend of creating very good glass for very affordable prices. The lens is sharp, produces very nice bokeh and all around punches far<\/em> above its low price. It’s also well constructed and feels more expensive than it is. It’s a touch slower than most 100-400mm lenses, but I’m perfectly fine trading 1\/3 stop of aperture for the half pound of weight savings. In all, I’m very happy with this lens. For those who need high performance AF on Sony cameras, the Sony 100-400mm will probably be worth the extra cost, but for those who simply want a good lens for everyday long lens work, this is a very attractive offering from Sigma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Click on an image to enlarge<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t generally do reviews of Canon EF lenses, as I’ve been shooting mirrorless exclusively for the past 7 years. However, with the availability of EF to E-mount adapters, and the Sony system still being a little thin in some areas, there are Canon mount lenses that may potentially be great alternatives for use on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7521,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[377,378,26,8,203,176],"class_list":["post-7511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-100-400mm","tag-canon-ef","tag-lens","tag-review","tag-sigma","tag-telephoto"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/sigma_100-400C.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p28RGq-1X9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7511"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12661,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7511\/revisions\/12661"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a>Adapters and Autofocus<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a>Image Stabilization<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Continue: Image Quality<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Image Quality<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Sharpness<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Bokeh<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Color, Contrast and Chromatic Aberration<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Distortion, Flare and Vignetting<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Continue: Conclusion and Image Samples<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Pros<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\n
Cons<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nImage Samples<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>If you enjoyed this review, check out the rest of my reviews in the Review Index<\/a><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"