Sigma 24mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art Lens for Nikon F

I bought this lens mainly for the focal length and 1.4 aperture, but the optical quality ended up really surprising me. It's extremely sharp even wide open. Sure the edges lose some of that sharpness, but it's hardly noticeable unless you're pixel deep diving. Stop it down a bit and it might just be the sharpest lens I've ever used, really damn good stuff. And the depth of field is so silky smooth, I absolutely love the dreamy watercolor like backgrounds this lens can provide.Auto focus in low light can be a bit of a letdown (sometimes), but it's easily worked around once you get a feel for what the lens needs. I've been hearing some people have had issues with focus calibration, but luckily mine was perfect out of the box.It's a very large and heavy bit of glass, not to the extent that it's uncomfortable to hold, but it definitely has a significant presence in the hands.The fast aperture and wide focal length make this an ideal choice for low light street photography. I'm loving the shots I can get just using the beautiful neon signs, warm street lamps, and the triple color threat of a changing traffic signal. The Sigma 24mm 1.4 has been my go to lens for everything of late, it's great for portraiture, product photography, landscape. If it's in your budget, and you don't already have a fast wide, I wholeheartedly recommend you add this to your camera bag.

Build quality is Top Notch, nothing to complain about here. Wanted an Auto Focus lens for Astro & Night imaging. Not as sharp wide open as it is stopped down. Coma distoration is significantly more than my 14mm full manual Rokinon. Auto focus and aperature control is a joy to have. However auto focus at lower light level does have some issues. Image quality for landscape and portrait is AMAZING! Shallow depth of field with the extended wider angles is very nice. All in all a VERY good lens IF you are going to use it for something other than Astro imaging. Can't recommend it for Astro ONLY photos due to the visible coma distortion on stars.

Just for those who are interested in purchasing a wide angle prime lens for some kind of astro or nightsky photography. I bought this lens just a couple of weeks ago and used it on my Canon 6D mainly for photographing the stars.The build quality of the Sigma 24mm lens is on the superb level. Infinity focus reference is very accurate, at least true for the copy I own. AF works smoothly and quietly (not tested at night, I only use MF and liveview on stars). At max aperture, F1.4, the vignetting is obvious and still visible but acceptable at F2.8 and so is the coma of the stars in corners. But all are gone stopped to F4. Impressively sharp from the center to outer region.I compared the Sigma 24mm to its rival, Samyang or Rokinon 24mm which is said to be the best for astrophotography especially for its unparalleled control on comatic aberration and found that, frankly, the Samyang does fairly better for this purpose than Sigma but, unfortunately, at the price of losing sharpness.After all, I'd surely like to recommend this lens to anyone who is looking for a wide angle prime lens for some night photography stuff.

I like it so much it looks cool and faster when triggered. Although my camera is old but still it works for me. I’m gonna use it in many events specially indoor shoot with a low light surroundings.

Almost 5 StarsThe Sigma 24mm f1.4 Art is an outstanding lens, sharp and well built. I also own the 20mm f1.4 and 14mm f1.8 Art lenses. From my experience you absolutely must have the Sigma USB Dock. None of these 3 lenses focused properly out of the box with the 20mm being the worst of the three. And you really do need a focusing target like LensAlign or something similar. From my experience, Sigma Art lenses really aren’t calibrated to any standard so it’s important to use Sigma’s optimization software and calibrate your new lens at each of the distances shown in the software. Making adjustments at infinity is the hardest part. I found a distant object outside that had enough detail, so I could check the sharpness. But without a focus scale I found manually adjusting the focus as I looked through the viewfinder helped me determine if the lens was front or back focusing. This may seem like a lot of work, but I’ve found that once calibrated, those settings transfer to other Nikon bodies. Once adjusted on one camera body using the USB dock I can use the lens on other Nikon bodies. However, with each new body it’s still important to use AF fine-tune to tweak the focus for that body. AF fine-Tune may be more important with these lenses due to their shallower depth of field.As others have said, these lenses are sharp, well built, and heavy compared to similar lenses from Nikon. My main reason for purchasing these fast prims is for star shots, the advantage being the 2 or almost 2 extra stops of light. I can shoot at much lower ISO resulting in much less noise, no more star stacking to reduce noise. Previously, I’ve been using Nikon’s 14-24mm f2.8 and while it’s surprisingly sharp even compared to the sigma primes, f2.8 is too slow for astrophotography.So, what’s not to like? First you must calibrate the lens yourself. From all the testing I did, I also found the Sigma lenses don’t focus as consistently as the Nikon’s do. I could see this visually in the series of tests shots I took, and it was even more obvious when I used FocusTune software in conjunction with the LensAlign target. When FocusTune analyzes a series of shots, it produces a plot of the variation within the test group. In many of the Sigma test there was an inexplicable outlier or wild shot. Even at their best the Sigma lenses had larger groups than the Nikon lenses. Weather sealing isn’t great either. Of the three lenses I own, only the 14mm f1.8 has a gasket on the flange and all were purchased since July 2017. I also discovered during a trip to the southwest, that a small grain of sand found its way into the focusing ring of the 20mm f1.4. I could feel the roughness when I turned the focus ring. Fortunately, I could see the tiny piece of grit and I was able to remove it with a brush and compressed air. In terms of astrophotography, I can’t say the 14 and 20 have reduced coma relative to other lenses like the Nikon 14-24mm. In particular, stars in the corners develop some interesting shapes particularly the 20mm, but I kind of like them since there shape reminds me of alien space craft. FX Corners on both the 14mm & 20mm when shot wide open are decidedly soft and don’t really become sharp until f8 or even f11 at the expense of reduced center sharpness. Also, at those f-stops you begin to encounter diffraction limitations.My only real reservation with this lens and the others is focus consistency. I find I need to double check focus manually when focus is particularly when the aperture is wide open.