[shuttertalk]

Looks like something interesting is going on in the Sigma camp. Firstly, they've reorganised their lens lineup as follows:
- Contemporary ©: your standard zooms
- Art (A): Short / normal primes, wide angles, macros
- Sports (S): Telephoto and long zooms

All their lenses moving forward sport a rather handsome new design, along with a C/A/S badge on them to differentiate between.

The second change is that they seem to have acknowledged their Quality Control issues in the past, and are now offering software and a USB Dock to allow users to connect their lenses to their computers to perform calibration and fine tuning. So hopefully there will be less of "buying and hoping it's not a dud" and "returning copies until you find a keeper"...

http://fstoppers.com/sigma-reorganizes-l...c-measures

Additionally, there are 3 new lenses being offered with the new badging, one in each of the respective categories above.
- 17-70mm F2.8-4 DC MACRO OS HSM
- 35mm F1.4 DG HSM
- 120-300mm F2.8 DG OS HSM

[matthew]

I shouldn't read these things in the middle of the night – I saw this in the wee hours of the morning and thought that it must be a prank.

The 35/1.4 looks good, though, and – assuming that it's not a joke – the idea of the lens-calibrating dongle is a very interesting one. I'm intrigued to see how/if they'll keep it cheap enough to be accessible while still having it good enough to be useful.

[shuttertalk]

Yeah with the lens calibrating thing - most people probably wouldn't have a use for it unless they had a large stable of Sigma lenses.

Most people would probably bring bad a bad copy to the shop. Perhaps the shops would have more use out of it, so they can do (1) a quick calibration for the customer, either before they walk out the door after buying, or (2) a if a customer has a problem, instead of giving them a new copy and RMA-ing the dud back to Sigma, they could potentially fix it up on the spot.

Either way, it should help eliminate a lot of wastage and cost for Sigma, and hopefully improve the whole perception of quality for their brand too.


Yeah the 35mm looks very nice and it's full frame too!