published August 2018

Introduction

The lower price tag of the Sigma 100-400mm f/5-6.3 HSM DG OS Contemporary has more reasons than just the speed. The quality of the construction is very good but it is not a professional grade lens. That's hardly surprising because it's a member of Sigma's "Contemporary" lens lineup which is targeting consumers rather than professionals. The lens body seems to be made of plastics based on a metal mount. There's also no weather sealing nor a dedicated tripod mount. The simpler construction has an advantage though - at 1160g it is comparatively light-weight. The zoom is a little stiff whereas the focus ring operates smoothly. A barrel-shaped lens hood is also provided.

The AF is reasonably fast but it stays short of native Canon lenses here. Typical for HSM lenses the autofocus is also near silent. During our testing, we had no love affair with Sigma's image stabilizer (OS). Unlike "normal" image stabilizers, it doesn't really stabilize the viewfinder image but it is activated upon firing. It is supposed to give you a gain of 3-4 f-stops. In real life, we didn't even come close to this figure. At best we are talking about 2 f-stops. That all being said, it is possible to change the OS characteristic via Sigma's USB dock. We did so and activated "visual stabilization" (stabilized viewfinder image). That worked to some degree but not quite as much as we'd hoped for. The OS efficiency is supposed to suffer when using this mode but the efficiency isn't high in the first place anyway.