After my recent purchase of the Nikkor 70-300mm lens – which was intended as a cheap way to find out if I would like a zoom lens – I now purchased an upgrade on this based on my experience with it – the Sigma 28-300 Hyperzoom.
The Nikkor is a good lens though it suffers from heavy Chromatic Aberrations, especially at 300mm and in high contrast areas. The problem with a 70-300mm lens is that it does not start wide enough for holiday or walk about type shots, I often found myself wanting to change lens to my 18-70mm to get certain objects in frame that was too close or too big.
The 28-300mm is a good middle ground lens, I used it a bit today and found that I was unable to produce any CA and that I was not tempted to swap to a wider lens ever. Lens swapping on DSLR’s are notorious for getting dust on the CCD which requires rather scary cleaning using expensive CO2 based systems or cleaning swabs. The 28-300mm gives the equivalent of a 10x magnification when quoted in the typical digital camera speak. The lens was a bit hard to find, but eventually I found a dealer with stock and paid £200 for it.
View the full entry for a photo of the lens, also my first attempt at a studio type shot using some black cloth and a desk lamp, will need to get some velvet.
