Sigma 20 200mm Lens Review For Sony

A couple of weeks ago, Sigma mailed me their soon to be released 20 to 200 millimeter all-in-one super zoom lens. And when I got it, I was very disappointed because it was so small, I knew this had to be for crop sensor cameras. And I thought, ah, I can't review this. I don't even own a crop sensor camera. But before I mailed it back, I decided to look into it. And somehow this little bitty lens is a full frame lens. And it goes all the way to 20 millimeters wide. How does it do this? And can it possibly create good looking images? Let me put this to the test. The lens is incredibly small, very lightweight. It feels like it's made of relatively cheap plastic. The zoom ring is fairly smooth, maybe even a little smoother than I expected for a lens of this caliber. Focus ring feels decent. And it's got an auto focus to manual focus switch on the side, as well as a zoom lock as well. Now, obviously this is not a very fast lens. It's also a variable aperture lens, which means that it's going to start at F 3.5 at 20 millimeters. But as you zoom in, it's going to quickly stop down to F 6.3. Now I've been shooting for a very long time. And in the back of my mind, it always feels like I need at least F 2.8 to get shallow depth of field images. But each time I test out a lens like this, I am pleasantly surprised by the shallow depth of field that I am capable of getting with lenses around F 5.6. So much of it just comes down to how close to your subject you are. Even if you're wide angle or telephoto, the closer that you can get to your subject, the more separation you're going to get from your subject and the background. The images out of this lens looked much better than I expected them to, especially for a super zoom lens of this size and price. But more important than image quality to me was the convenience of this lens. I have used other all-in-one lenses before that definitely zoom further, but don't get nearly as wide as this lens. Take a look at this zoom range here. This is 20 millimeters. This is 200 millimeters. Back to 20 millimeters. And as you can tell, this lens is plenty wide enough to record yourself if you want to, group portraits, landscape photography, landscape videography. Most of these all-in-one lenses do not get nearly this wide. And remember, all of those lenses that are for sale that are 18 to 300 millimeters, those are not full frame lenses. Those are for APS-C sensors. And 18 millimeters on APS-C is approximately 30 millimeters on a full frame lens. All right, here you can see focus breathing at 200 millimeters, almost non-existent. But as I rack here at 20 millimeters, significant focus breathing. Now this may sound silly, but one of my favorite features of this lens is its minimum focusing distance. Right now I'm at 85 millimeters. This is a trunk of a small tree. Check this out. Look at how close I can get to this tree. I currently do not own a macro lens and it seems like all of my pro lenses have a minimum focusing distance of 20 to 30 inches. This lens has a minimum focusing distance under 10 inches when you're zoomed into 100 millimeters. So if you wanna get close to a subject, shoot something really small, this lens is gonna do a great job with that. For still photography, autofocus seem very fast, snappy, accurate. And for video, you can see an example shot here. I am jumping between the foreground and background. I have my autofocus speed set to slow so it looks a little bit more cinematic. I think this looks great. It's nice and smooth. All right, let's go a little bit deeper into image quality here. Obviously this is not a pro lens. We're not gonna get the sharpest images possible. However, this lens actually performed much better than I was expecting it to. 20 millimeters wide open at F3.5. We've got significant distortion going on. And of course we can fix this. Maybe something like that looks better. But you can see just how significantly bad that distortion is. And then of course the next thing that you'll notice is just how bad the vignetting is. The vignetting does get better as we stop down, but it really only goes away at F14, which is kind of hilariously bad. But I can go back to this F3.5 image and switch the vignetting to brighten the edges 100%. I still don't know if that's enough, but that's significantly better. Let's zoom in to 400% here. You'll notice in the center, we have a pretty sharp shot. 20 millimeters, which is pretty nice. Now if we move over all the way to the edges, you'll notice that our vignetting is so dark we can't even see the edges. But if I brighten that up, you'll notice that we're not getting very sharp results on the edges here. But this is pretty much exactly what I would expect from a lens like this at 20 millimeters. Now we do see a little improvement when we go to F3.5 to 5 to F7.1 here. This is noticeably sharper. Still not great on the extreme edges here, but if I crop in just the littlest bit, this is actually a pretty good result. And remember, I'm zoomed in to 400% here. So I would say this is pretty good for something like landscape photography if you're willing to stop down. Now this shot was taken at 85 millimeters at the widest aperture, which is F6.3 at this zoom. And you'll notice slight vignetting. Not significant at all. If we stop down to F9 here, you'll notice it almost completely goes away. Let's go back to that wide open shot. We'll zoom in all the way. Very nice and sharp, maybe a little bit more contrast in the center of the image. Once again, if we look at the extreme edges here, not sharp at all, but if we just slide over just a little bit, it actually gets sharp pretty quickly. And as I cycle through these, we have F6.3, F9, F13, F18, and F25. It gets better and sharper as we stop the lens down. Now these shots were taken at 200 millimeters. The widest aperture at this point is still F6.3. Let's zoom in to 400% to the center here. Very nice result on the center. And when we look at the extreme edges here, kind of a similar result. As I cycle through these different F stops, you can see as we stop down, it gets sharper and sharper and sharper. And the other funny thing here, watch as I cycle through these quickly, you can watch the vignette completely move out of the frame as I stop down. It looks like I'm getting the best results at 200 millimeters at F25, which is incredibly slow, but I would still say wide open, the shots are better than I expected. So this lens isn't going to win any optical awards, but in the real world, does it even matter? Yes, the edges are a little soft and they're a little dark, but can you even tell? Are you even looking at the edges of these photographs or are you looking at the subject? And is the subject sharp? Yes, it is. All right, price. I literally just looked it up. I was hoping this lens cost just 700 bucks. It would be an easy recommendation. It currently costs $1,000, which I think is justifiable. It's the only full-frame lens that can get this wide that has this type of zoom range. However, at $1,000, you can get some really nice lenses. If you want to stick with full-frame all-in-one lenses for 900, so $100 cheaper, you could get the Tamron 28 to 300 millimeters. It's not as wide, but it gives you an extra 100 millimeters reach. Or for $1,300, you could get Sony's 24 to 240 millimeter lens, again, not quite as wide, but a little bit more reach on the long end for a little bit more money. Now, when it comes to travel photography, I have always just used a 24 to 70 millimeter 2.8 lens. It's going to give me the best image quality possible. If I needed something wider, I would just shoot multiple images and combine them into a pano. However, I know a lot of you travel and you like shooting animals, and 70 millimeters is never going to be enough for animals. 200 millimeters might not be enough for most animals either though. And all these shots that you're seeing right now, I shot with this lens at 200 millimeters. And I do wish that I had a little bit more reach, which would push me personally to something like the Tamron 28 to 300 millimeter to get that extra reach. However, some of you might really appreciate the 20 millimeters that this lens gives you, especially if you're recording yourself, like I do all the time. So guys, if you're looking for the best image quality, obviously this is not the lens for you. But if you're looking for a small lens, that's ultra convenient, that can kind of do it all, this lens is much better than I expected it to be. It's not cheap, but it's definitely on the cheap end. It's certainly worth considering. Check out the 20 to 200. 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