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Message: <blockquote data-quote="john-henry" data-source="post: 1440948" data-attributes="member: 15559">All I seem to hear about the Sigma 150-500 lens, mainly from people who haven’t got one or used one, is it’s ‘soft’ at 500mm wide open, well it is compared to the high end lenses (those costing several times as much) but on the other hand it’s not a bad lens for those who can’t afford these. It’s got a useful zoom range, good auto focus and an image stabilising system that works well.It’s not my intention to try to persuade anyone to buy this lens but to give a more realistic opinion on its quality by someone who’s using one. I’ve been using one for the past few weeks and it’s not so soft that you can’t get some decent images out of it at 500mm by stopping down to f8 or f11. The improvement in quality is immediately seen and the 4 stop OS system makes up for the lower shutter speeds to help hand-holding.Considering the price of this lens it’s great value for money for someone who doesn’t want to carry several lenses around or can’t afford to spend a fortune on professional quality equipment, and still get good enough quality to make decent A4 prints.The photos below give some idea of the quality throughout the zoom range of the lens, all hand-held, taken in Raw, converted to 16bit Tiff then Levels and USM applied (mainly 70% with a Radius of 0.5 applied twice) in PS7, cropped to 7”x 5” at 300ppi then cropped smaller again at 100ppi and Saved for Web at about 80%.Mallard 2166             150mm, 1/400th @ f8, ISO 400, -0.33EVCanada Goose 2310    200mm, 1/640th @ f8, ISO 400, -0.33EVRook 2032                250mm, 1/125th @ f8, ISO 400, -0.33EVCanada Goose 2308   300mm, 1/500th @ f8, ISO 400, -0.33EVRook 2054                400mm, 1/160th @ f8, ISO 400, -0.67EV</blockquote>

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