Sigma 10-20 mm f/3.5 EX DC HSM review - Vignetting

Have you rated your lenses yet?

Sigma 10-20 mm f/3.5 EX DC HSM

25 September 2009

Szymon Starczewski

8. Vignetting

The slow Sigma 10-20 mm f/4.0-5.6 showed vignetting of just over 30%. Having slightly better brightness Nikkor 10-24 mm came out worse and showed light falloff in the corners of the frame of about 40%, no matter the focal length. Tamron 10-24 only at the shortest focal length reached 37% and for longer focal lengths showed vignetting of about 17-20%. The fast Tokina 11-16 mm came out quite well here, showing at the shortest focal length vignetting of about 36%, then decreasing to 20-27%.

Sigma 10-20 mm f/3.5 EX DC HSM - Vignetting

Unfortunately, Sigma 10-20 mm f/3.5 doesn’t come out so well here. At the most difficult variation of the widest angle and f/3.5 aperture, vignetting reaches a huge level of 53% (-2.16 EV). Bad news is not over yet, as vignetting falls quite slowly with stopping down. At apertures f/4.0, f/5.6 and f/8.0 it amounts to 43%, 29% and 25% respectively.

Increasing focal length helps, but not as much as we’d expect. At 15 mm and the maximum aperture, light falloff in the corners of the frame amounted to 42% (-1.59 EV). Here, decreasing of vignetting is even slower when stopping down, as at f/4.0 vignetting amounts to 39%, at f/5.6 still reaches a high level of 32%, and at f/8.0 we have a value of 25%.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - advertisement - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The maximum focal length isn’t any better. At f/3.5 the level of this aberration was measured to be 43% (-1.61 EV), at f/4.0 it’s 40%, at f/5.6 it’s 35% and at f/8.0 - 26%.

We can see, then, that we’re dealing with one of the worst results in the ultra wide angle zoom lenses category. Vignetting will surely bother us in many situations, except maybe, when we’re fans of the mythical “magic” full frame camera bodies give. The thing is, to get this you also need a shallow depth of field, which this lens doesn’t provide you with.