Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art
A sharp portrait lens that’s made for mirrorless
A high-quality, super-sharp lens for Sony E-mount and Leica L-mount cameras
Sigma’s 85mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art lens has become a favourite of many portrait and still life photographers who shoot with Canon and Nikon full-frame cameras. Sigma also offers the lens in an E-mount option, for use with Sony mirrorless bodies. At 95 x 125mm and 1,130g, however, it feels a bit of a mismatch for relatively slimline Sony cameras, resulting in a distinctly front-heavy package.
The new Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art lens is built purely for mirrorless cameras and represents a complete redesign, with an all-new optical path and autofocus system. It’s much smaller and lighter yet packs a lot in with a raft of high-end handling features that are absent in the older DG HSM lens. As such, it’s ideal for use with Sony and Panasonic mirrorless full-frame cameras.
The optical path includes five SLD (Special Low Dispersion) elements, along with one aspherical element and no fewer than four high-refractive-index elements. The overall aim is not only to deliver exceptional sharpness and contrast, but also to minimise both lateral and axial chromatic aberrations.
Performance
The lens lives up to Sigma’s claims of fast and virtually silent autofocus. Also as promised, sharpness is exceptional across most of the frame, even when shooting wide-open at f/1.4. Indeed, it eases ahead of the larger DG HSM lens in this respect, although the older lens is slightly sharper towards the extreme edges and corners. Vignetting in the DN lens is also more pronounced at f/1.4, but this can actually be a desirable attribute for portraiture and still-life photography, focusing the attention on the main subject.
At least as important as sharpness, and arguably more so for this class of lens, is the quality of bokeh (appearance of defocused areas within images). The lens scores very highly here as well, with buttery smooth bokeh. Matthew Richards