Thinking about getting one. Are they worth it? How about some real life testimony. I've read on another forum they can make ART lenses out of any Sigma lens, really?
One thing I should point out about Sigma's focus calibration, you are calibrating the lens using a single body. So it will be spot on with the body you calibrate it for, but that may cause it to be slightly off for any other body you put it on. How off depends on the lens and the differences between the bodies. Suffice it to say if you're going to take the time required to calibrate a 150-600mm make sure you do it on the body you're going to have it on most of the time. If that's a D7200 and you upgrade to a D500 then you'll need to recalibrate.
Unfortunately, no. The calibration settings are written to the lens firmware directly via the dock and there is no option to save the configuration anywhere but to the lens itself. The best thing I can think of would be to keep a written record of the specific settings you want for each camera but you'd still need to connect the dock to the lens to switch the settings from camera X to camera Y, or vice versa.Just curious, is there a way to back up the setting so you could in essence calibrate for two cameras just switch profiles?
Seems like it would be a nice feature.Unfortunately, no. The calibration settings are written to the lens firmware directly via the dock and there is no option to save the configuration anywhere but to the lens itself.
Just curious, is there a way to back up the setting so you could in essence calibrate for two cameras just switch profiles?
One thing I should point out about Sigma's focus calibration, you are calibrating the lens using a single body. So it will be spot on with the body you calibrate it for, but that may cause it to be slightly off for any other body you put it on. How off depends on the lens and the differences between the bodies. Suffice it to say if you're going to take the time required to calibrate a 150-600mm make sure you do it on the body you're going to have it on most of the time. If that's a D7200 and you upgrade to a D500 then you'll need to recalibrate.
It's not hard to manage multiples but to my knowledge you cannot save a lens-camera profile. Easiest thing to to is write them down or do a screen shot of the calibration screen. You don't have to physically recalibrate, just enter the 4 or 16 numbers on the screen. But you would need to connect to the doc to apply the changes.
Although I don't have any Sigma lenses that work with their docking station, I certainly wasn't aware of only one body's info being saved to the lens. But it makes sense since it would require firmware of the Nikon body to be compatible with these Sigma lenses - and we know that isn't going to happen.
Don't get mixed up here - no body information is saved to the lens. You are simply calibrating it's internal focusing mechanism at 4 different distances (for primes) and at 4 different focal lengths (for zooms). This is done using a camera body but it doesn't care what body you use because it's the lens' AF that's being calibrated. The body goes along for the ride, so it makes sense you do it with the body you're going to put it on. You may see little difference between a pair of D500's, or you may find that it works fine for close focus but introduces softness at distance, and vice versa. In this case you might actually be able to use Nikon's single point calibration on the second body to adapt and not have to worry about it.