15mm Test:
Nikon Prime, Sigma Zoom
Nikon
15mm f3.5 AIS v
Sigma 12-24mm f3.5-4.5
As
King Solomon advised: "Don't say: 'Why were the olden days so
much better than these?' It is not due to wisdom that you have asked
this." Proverbs were so much better then.
Yet
for Nikon users it's true: in many cases the classic AIS series
manual focus primes are unsurpassed by modern designs.
You can point the finger at company politics, cost and corner cutting,
or the appetite of the convenience generation for AF zooms, but the
fact remains unaltered that - ironically - the best partner for a state
of the art
digital
SLR
(Canon or Nikon) is
often a 20
year
old lens.
Here
then, head to head, is the very shiniest of the nu-skool up
against a relic of the cold war era: the Nikon an exotic vintage throughbred,
the auto everything Sigma 12-24mm zoom freshly fêted as Lens of the
Year,
mass
produced
by a
third party
manufacturer with bleeding edge tech and the cheapest possible
materials. Plastic? Yes. Fantastic? We'll see.
All
images shot in RAW focus bracketed in constant daylight (wind almost
nil) with a Canon 5D, processed into 8 bit TIFFs via C1 and converted
for web with BoxTop Pro.