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If you shoot APS-C and want a bright telephoto zoom, your options have been thin, and on most mounts they haven't existed at all. Sigma's new 50-120mm f/2.8 arrives for Fujifilm X, Sony E, and Canon RF at a size and price that make it a realistic addition to a small kit.
Dustin Abbott has spent years telling people that Fujifilm's 50-140mm wasn't worth the money, and he never had an alternative to point them toward. He tested the Sigma 50-120mm f/2.8 DC OS Contemporary on a Fujifilm X-H2, and the physical gap between it and the Fujifilm XF 50-140mm f/2.8 R LM OIS WR is hard to ignore. The Sigma weighs 390 g, compared with 995 g for the Fujifilm, and it's roughly half the length, though it does extend as you zoom toward 120mm. At $799, it also costs far less. You give up 20mm at the long end, which leaves you with a 75-180mm equivalent on Fujifilm and Sony and a little more reach on Canon's tighter crop.
The build has some thoughtful details. There are 11 rounded aperture blades, compared with seven on the Fujifilm lens, which shows up as 22-point sunstars when you stop down. The aperture ring is clicked with no declick option. The detent between f/22 and automatic is soft enough that you can roll past it without meaning to. Weather-sealing starts with a gasket at the mount and continues through at least six more seal points. Sigma's optical stabilization carries an actual rating: 6.5 stops at 50mm and 4.5 stops at 120mm. Close focus changes across the range. At 50mm, you can get to 23.1 cm from the sensor for 0.33x magnification. At 120mm, the distance grows to 55 cm and magnification drops to 0.21x, though Abbott found that end easier to work with for close-ups.
This lens completes a set. Paired with the Sigma 10-18mm f/2.8 DC DN Contemporary and the Sigma 18-50mm f/2.8 DC DN Contemporary, you get a constant f/2.8 from about 15mm to 180mm equivalent on Fujifilm or Sony, and all three lenses together weigh less than the Fujifilm 50-140mm alone. A kit like that was hard to picture a few years ago, before Sigma brought its lenses to X mount and before Canon opened RF to Sigma's APS-C lenses in 2024. Those openings have changed what an APS-C system can be. Many people pick a crop-sensor camera to travel lighter, and then discover that most fast zooms were designed for full frame bodies and feel lopsided on something like an X-S20 or an R7. A set of lenses scaled to the format lets the camera stay small through the whole bag. On Canon RF, Abbott notes there's no first-party equivalent to this lens at all, so this is a new option rather than an alternative.
Autofocus runs on Sigma's HLA (High-response Linear Actuator) motor, and in stills it was quiet, quick, and accurate during walkaround and street shooting in Salt Lake City. Video is harder to judge on Fujifilm, where touch-to-focus barely responded and the camera sometimes racked focus the wrong way. Abbott puts those problems on the body and its focus algorithm, and he expects the lens to do better on Sony and Canon. Focus breathing is very low during manual pulls. The lens isn't parfocal, though, so focus drifts and has to readjust as you zoom while recording.
The optical design uses 18 elements in 13 groups, including three SLD elements, one FLD element, and about four aspherical elements. Pincushion distortion and vignetting grow as you zoom in, and at 120mm, Abbott had to push the vignetting slider all the way to get a near-complete correction. Profiles handle this automatically, but even at base ISO, the corrected corners show extra noise, and raising the ISO makes that worse. Longitudinal and lateral chromatic aberration both stay well controlled, with almost no fringing on shiny edges or high-contrast transitions.
Abbott's sharpness tests at each focal length and more are in the video above.
English (US) ·