LensTip.com

Lens review

Sigma 18-250 mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM

Sigma 18-250 mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM
12 April 2011
Arkadiusz Olech

1. Introduction

Originally posted 2011-03-23 on Optyczne.pl

Even several years ago lenses with 10-15x zoom multiple were those products I wouldn’t recommend to anybody. Often shoddily made devices (with the exception of the Canon L-series lens), they provided images of average or weak quality. The situation has changed significantly lately, though, and two factors contributed to that change. Firstly a lot of Far East factories came into existence so the price of glass and elements of special kind (low-dispersion, aspherical) decreased considerably and they could be used even in cheaper lenses. Secondly, the increase of the computing power of contemporary processors has made the design of complex optical constructions with a wide range of focal lengths much easier.

Small wonder in last 2-4 years we saw several quite well-made 18-200 mm constructions launched on the market. The producers didn’t stop at that – in fact they moved one or even two steps ahead. The record belongs here to the Tamron 18-270 mm with the 15x zoom multiple, which fared quite well in our tests. Sigma didn’t go so far and it offers the 18-200 mm OS lens, tested by us long time ago, and the 18-250 mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM model, launched in January 2009, which avoided our test procedures for quite a long time. Finally it found its way to our editorial office and we checked its performance in practice.


Please Support Us

If you enjoy our reviews and articles, and you want us to continue our work please, support our website by donating through PayPal. The funds are going to be used for paying our editorial team, renting servers, and equipping our testing studio; only that way we will be able to continue providing you interesting content for free.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - advertisement - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

We would like to thank the K-Consult company for lending us the lens for our tests.

You are also invited to get acquainted with our test procedure, described in the article "How do we test lenses?" If you feel it’s still not enough, please go to our FAQ section where you can find some further explanation.

Sigma 18-250 mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM - Introduction