New Gear

Sigma’s latest ultra-zoom is available in Sport and Contemporary models

The hot new releases on show at Photokina, including a pair of Sigma 150600mm ultrazooms, an update to Nikon’s 20mm wide-angle, fantastic new filter and tripod designs, and plenty more!

£1600, $1999

Lenses with bigger-thanaverage zoom ranges are popular with amateur sports and wildlife photographers. This is unsurprising due to the one-lens-fits-all design. As part of its continuing overhaul of its lens range, Sigma has announced two hyper-telephoto lenses which could get confused because the specifications are almost the same.

The new Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 comes in both Sport and Contemporary versions, which

www.sigma-imaging-uk.com

have optical as well as more obvious physical differences.

The designations of Sport and Contemporary fit into Sigma’s current lens categorisation system, which consists of Art, Sport and Contemporary. The idea is that you can use these labels to make a better decision about what lens you need. This duo is the first to be released where, although the lenses’ specifications are very similar, they have been designed for different uses.

The C (Contemporary) version is optically less complex, and it’s smaller and lighter. It’s designed for handheld and more general use. The S (Sport) version is larger, heavier and more advanced, with a diameter of 121mm, compared to 105mm for the Contemporary version, which makes it substantially larger. It also adds an extra 3cm to the length. It’s designed to give maximum image quality. Both can be used with Sigma’s new 1.4x and 2x teleconverters. They are both ‘DG’ lenses, and so can be used on both fullframe and APS-C cameras. Both have Sigma’s optical stabilisation system built in.

The full specs for the Contemporary version have yet to be announced, but the Sport version weighs in at 2.86kg – roughly the same weight as the hefty new Nikon AF-S 300mm f/2.8G ED VR II.