Testing the image stabilisation on the sigma 150-500

gblades

gblades

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Name
Gareth
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My sigma 150-500 arrived on Monday and yesterday I played with it in low light to see what I could get away with and I found its image stabilisation to be much better than I expected so I thought I would share my findings.

Shot details :-
Focal distance 500mm
Aperture f/6.3
Shutter speed 1/15 !
ISO 3200
Distance to target 6M
Spot focus was used on the string round the branch.
Pictures taken hand held
Final image was cropped to about 1/3 of the original area to preserve the detail as I don't upload full resolution photos to flickr.

So first the photo taken with the optical stabilisation turned off and no surprise it is terrible.

Sigma 150-500 OS Test Shot #1 by grblades, on Flickr

Next I switched on the optical stabilisation and took another photo.

Sigma 150-500 OS Test Shot #2 by grblades, on Flickr

And finally the same photo after being processed in Lightroom.

Sigma 150-500 OS Test Shot #3 by grblades, on Flickr
 
Most of the extra sharpness in the third photo has been lost during the rescaling and uploading to Flickr.
 
The IS will certainly allow you to slow things down asuming you're shooting something static that wont result in motion blurr.

PS - I can see a slight difference between 2 an 3. Looks like some soise reduction has been applied as whilst the background is cleaner - there's some detail being 'smoothed' out on the bark - most evident on the vertical branch top right of the shot.
 
Hi,

on the sigma 150-500 OS it has os1 and os2.
Can anyone explain what these are and usage scenarios?
thanks
 
OS1 is for handheld and OS2 is for panning shots on a tripod.
 
That IS is quite impressive.
 
I have also tried this lens on my D700 in the camera shop, and was very surprised at how low of shutter speed you can use hand held at 500mm. I do intend buying the 50-500mm version, which they did not have in stock.
 
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