dmoore wrote:
However, I have read a couple of on line articles that really pan Sigma lenses as being very inconsistent in quality. And then there are Tamron and Tokina, which both make 11-18mm lenses that sell for about $580.
I've been using a Tokina 12-24mm f/4 that I've been *very* happy with on my Nikon D200. I picked it by scanning photo.net and places for the various candidate lenses and seeing what pictures people took with them -- partly for the pictures themselves, and partly to see what lenses people who took impressive pictures chose, since they probably knew something :-). For a long, long time I was of the opinion that the top 3rd-party zooms were clearly better than the camera manufacturer zooms; but that hasn't been nearly so clearly true since the late 1980s. Still, the better lenses from Tamron and Tokina that I've worked with have been really extremely excellent. I've only owned one Sigma, a fixed-focal-length macro; it's been fine, no complaints, but I don't feel it gives me any real basis for an overall opinion of the company. Both the third parties and the camera manufacturers make some rather low-end lenses these days, and strangely those often aren't as good :-).
-- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
