Wide Angles Indoors

Wide Angles Indoors - The Test

Nikon 20mm f/2.8D AF and Sigma 20mm f/1.8 EX DG Aspherical DF RF

compare to Tamron SP AF24-135mm F/3.5-5.6 AD Aspherical (IF)

Major Screwup: While I made sure to vary the f stop on each lens to get a feel for how they would do at the different apertures, I failed to adress the ISO speed. I had been experimenting with the ISO in my darkened kitchen the night before and had turned off the auto ISO and set the ISO to 1600. So I shot the entire test at ISO 1600. This makes these shots sort of a worst case indoor scenario, so be warned that the pics for all the lenses would be better at a more reasonable ISO.

The links below show large thumbnails as links to full size photos taken by each of the lenses. The links are divided by the item photographed. This test was not rigorously conducted by a professional photographer, I just snapped similar photos to help decide which lens to buy. In retrospect not carefully aligning the camera to the subjects makes it hard to make a solid call about corner sharpness between the lenses. Wide angle lenses wide open have a large field of view and smallish depth of field, so a more oblique angle to a large flat subject puts some of the subject off the focal plane.

Click the photo at the left to go to the page containing the comparison photos.

These photos are hand held shots from inside the camera store toward the hallway of the mall. This is the kind of shot I am interesting in improving on (over my Tamron 24-135) so performance on this shot carried a lot of weight even though hand holding the camera introduces some more variability into the different lens' results.

These photos are hand held also shot inside the camera store toward a rack of camera bags. Some of the shots are with flash, some are flashless. The rack was pretty close up so DOF is pretty short for these shots, particularly on the large f stop samples.

These photos were taken with the camera sitting on the counter, pointed relatively flatly at the glass enclosed shelves behind the counter, about 3 feet away. The scene was pretty brightly lit but reflections in the glass are an issue.
These photos were taken with the camera sitting atop the bag shelf from previous photos, pointed at angle to the wall shelves that hold the tripods. flatly at the glass enclosed shelves behind the counter, about 3 feet away. The scene includes glare from overhead lights off of plastic packaged goods, so that glare is an issue.

	These photos are hand held shots from inside the camera store toward the hallway of the mall. This is the kind of shot I am interesting in improving on (over my Tamron 24-135) so performance on this shot carried a lot of weight even though hand holding the camera introduces some more variability into the different lens' results.
	These photos are hand held also shot inside the camera store toward a rack of camera bags. Some of the shots are with flash, some are flashless. The rack was pretty close up so DOF is pretty short for these shots, particularly on the large f stop samples.
	These photos were taken with the camera sitting on the counter, pointed relatively flatly at the glass enclosed shelves behind the counter, about 3 feet away. The scene was pretty brightly lit but reflections in the glass are an issue.
	These photos were taken with the camera sitting atop the bag shelf from previous photos, pointed at angle to the wall shelves that hold the tripods. flatly at the glass enclosed shelves behind the counter, about 3 feet away. The scene includes glare from overhead lights off of plastic packaged goods, so that glare is an issue.