The very next day I got the lens I took a bus to Rome with it on a 2 days trip, I took over one thousand photos and 1 hour of video clips during my stay, so here’s my first impression of this lens:
1.It fits perfectly with Sony A6300/A6500 series, I have gorilla pod and rode mic go on camera, and the entire setup just feels right, the lens is a bit long if you are used to kit lens or pancake lenses but for me it’s perfectly balanced, it’s smaller and lighter than the 18-105mm G lens, so it was pretty comfortable to shoot vlog and selfie with it even though I dont have a lot muscles on my arm.
2.The lens at 1.4 aperture is crazy bright, usually when I shoot vlog I shoot with the 18-105 f4 lens, I use aperture priority mode and set aperture at maximum and the camera will do all the exposure job and I dont have to worry about anything, but with this lens there actually is a problem, during brightest day at noon the video will be overexposed at f1.4 even if you set ISO at minimum and shutter speed at highest 1/4000s, so very often when I shoot directly under sunlight I had to manually adjust aperture, stop down to maybe 2.8 or 3.2 so that the exposure will be fine again. That’s something you need to keep in mind, if you must have the nice bokeh of f1.4, bring a ND filter.
3.Auto focus was fast, accurate, smooth, without a noise, not that can be compared to the noise on the street anyway, don’t worry about the autofocus, it’s gonna work fantastically on Sony. I like it.
4.The field of view with 16mm is pretty nice, equivalent to 24mm on fullframe, it is wide enough to shoot nice selfie style vlog, it was proven to be in handy when I had to shoot portrait in crowded tourist attraction sites, when there are a lot of people and not much space, a wide lens can get your subject in frame easily but that also means a lot of unwanted background. It is more often than not to be sufficient to shoot landscape, most of the time it does a great job include everything in the shot, you don’t need a crazy ultra wide angle like 10mm to get everything in shot, but they are pretty different in style.
5.No image stablization, so far I don’t see a problem, as it’s 16mm, wide enough to subsidize the shake you have, I shot all my videos handheld without stablization (it was on a6300), but the image turns out to be totally fine, better than expected I would say, as long as you be careful when you shoot, I have a video done and you can find it in the link in the description to see for yourself how does it look without any stablization, not even in post, so you have an idea before you invest in this lens for vlogging.
6.I enjoyed the wide angle and fast aperture so much that even though I brought the 18-105mm G lens with me, I did not use it almost at all, now I feel bad that I won’t use the zoom lens as much since I got this crazy good prime lens. But i guess it’s a good thing. The bokeh is very beautiful when you shoot up close or selfie, when there’s a distance between you and subject the bokeh is much less noticeable, well, it’s a wide angle lens so, can’t complain here.
7.Focus ring is super smooth, I did not shoot on manual but only tested a bit with it and it seemed work fine, much better than other sony lenses fly by wire manual focus system, i also like the rubber feel of the focus ring.
Some other thoughts: Now i got this lens and it has become my favorite lens among all, I have now 3 lenses dedicated to crop body a6300, the 18-105mm, the canon 10-22mm, and this 16mm, so it’s gonna be a bit of a hassle if i wanna switch among different lenses. I don’t think i will always bring all three lenses on my future trips so there will be some sacrifices made, I may just choose one or two lenses to bring with me like this time to Rome.
That’s my initial thoughts on the sigma 16mm lens and hope it’s been helpful.
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