Sigma 14mm f1.4 DG DN Art Review: A Bright Lens For Dark Nights
- The brightest 14mm lens ever made
- Unbeatable for astrophotography in its focal range
- Robust design
- Good value compared to the competition
- Stellar image quality
- Special features for astrophotography
- Arca Swiss mount compatible tripod foot
- Big and heavy
- Limited to L-mount and Sony E-mount
For capturing breathtaking nighttime landscapes, a wide and bright lens is paramount, and ultra-wide lenses don't get any brighter than the Sigma 14mm f1.4 DG DN Art lens. For comparison, the average kit lens you buy with a mirrorless camera is unlikely to be brighter than f4 (the smaller the number the brighter the lens), and they usually aren't wider than 24mm. While it's possible to get shots of the milky way with a long enough exposure or a motorized star tracker using such a lens, there are severe limitations to these tactics. A long exposure without a star tracker will cause the stars to smear across the sky and leave trails behind them, and a star tracker is an expensive and highly technical tool that isn't great for shooting dynamic nighttime landscapes.
The Sigma 14mm f1.4 is wide enough to encompass a large percentage of the milky way, bright enough to freeze the stars in place with a shorter exposure, and includes extra features that are highly attractive to astrophotographers. On paper, it's a mouthwatering optic, but does it offer enough of an advantage over other bright, wide-angle lenses to justify a lens so clearly focused on a particular niche?
Sigma provided us with a sample of the 14mm f1.4 to test and review.
Designed for use in the great outdoors
This lens offers absolutely rock-solid build quality. It's largely composed of metal, with a metal lens mount, and has a more rugged heft to it than many other modern lenses from other camera brands. It's built of polycarbonate TSC and magnesium, which are materials used for being both strong and relatively lightweight, though the Sigma 14mm f1.4 is still quite heavy at 1170 grams for the L-mount version we tested (the Sony E-mount version weighs 10 grams less). The lens features a water and oil-repellent coating, and the body of the lens is water and dust-resistant, thanks to extensive weather sealing.
When we first took the Sigma 14mm f1.4 out of the box, the quality of its construction was immediately apparent. All this attention to build quality is essential for a lens designed to spend its time in rugged environments where it's certain to encounter dust and moisture, as well as the inevitable bumps and bruises.
Truly stellar image quality
Put simply, the optical performance of the Sigma 14mm f1.4 is absolutely stunning. It's razor-sharp, even shot wide open at f1.4, so that even on a demanding 60MP sensor it can take full advantage of a high-resolution camera. Sigma has managed to practically eliminate the optical flaws which typically result in problems for astrophotographers. You don't have to worry about axial chromatic aberration or lateral chromatic aberration with this lens, and we found vignetting and distortion to be shockingly minimal for such an ultra-wide lens.
Andy Zahn/SlashGear
In terms of character, the Sigma 14mm f1.4 has a gorgeous look to its images. The 11-blade aperture makes for buttery smooth bokeh (out-of-focus areas). You have to get really close to your subject to make the background disappear, even at f1.4, but the lens is capable of focusing very closely with a minimum distance of just 30cm, and when doing so you can get some amazing effects.
Andy Zahn/SlashGear
The Sigma 14mm f1.4 produces lovely sun stars, which is important for landscape photography, and images look great even when you stop it down all the way to f16. Autofocus is smooth, quiet, and effective, and overall there's just nothing bad to say about how this lens performs. It's stunningly good, even compared to the other excellent ultra wide-angle lenses it's competing with.
Special features for capturing the night sky
Beyond being optically ideal for astrophotography, the Sigma 14mm f1.4 has a number of attractive features tailor-made for capturing pictures of stars. First, there's the manual focus lock switch. When you're capturing photos of stars, you don't want to accidentally jostle your focus out of whack, as this can ruin an otherwise amazing shot or many shots, should you not notice the error. Being able to lock the focus is a big deal. Similarly, there's also an aperture ring lock switch.
Additionally, the Sigma 14mm f1.4 has a built-in lens heater retainer, which makes attaching this common astrophotography accessory more convenient and prevents it from accidentally entering your image frame.
Other features non-specific to astrophotography include an AFL button, a physical auto/manual focus switch, and a switch to make the aperture ring clicky or de-clicked. The lens supports rear gel filters and — uniquely — has storage space for those filters in the lens cap, which is itself superior to other lens caps we've used. You'll need a square filter holder if you want to use front filters.
Perhaps most significantly as well, the removable tripod socket has a built-in Acra Swiss-compatible quick-release plate. This is something photographers have been asking for to be included by default on lenses with tripod sockets for years. It may seem like a small touch, but it's one of the things we love best about this lens.
The complete Sigma astrophotography setup
From an astrophotography perspective, the Sigma FP L paired with the Sigma 14mm f1.4 is ideal, as the camera is so small and light that it makes the whole system easy to balance on a tripod. By shaving off so much size and weight from the camera, it makes this lens/camera remarkably portable considering the size of the lens.
The camera on its own can be a bit awkward to use handheld, but if you want to make it more hand-holdable, there's a really nice grip extender available. Realistically though, given the high megapixel count and the subject matter to which this camera and lens are best suited, you're likely going to be using it on a tripod most of the time anyway.
There's also a detachable, articulating electronic viewfinder (EVF) which is ideal for astrophotography, and much welcome given the lack of a built-in EVF. This plugs into the ports on the left side of the Sigma FPL, offering passthrough and a physical switch to swap between the primary LCD and the EVF. When we had the camera setup on a tripod low to the ground it was much easier to use the EVF by pointing it upwards than it would have been a traditional fixed EVF. Having an articulating EVF also compensates for the lack of an articulating screen on the Sigma FP L.
Sigma FP L captures enormous detail
Testing the Sigma 14mm f1.4 with the Sigma FP L camera was a sublime experience in many ways. The Sigma FP and FP L cameras are the smallest full-frame cameras available, yet are no less capable for their size. The Sigma FP L is particularly impressive and desirable from a landscape photography perspective, given its 60MP sensor. We were able to capture stunning detail with this camera and lens setup. The sheer amount of detail we were able to capture is breathtaking when you start pixel peeping, and the photos have a particular look that's unique from other camera systems we've used.
There are limitations to this system necessitated by its size, most notable of which is the frustrating need to dive into menus on a frequent basis, but for methodical, landscape photography, this issue with the system isn't so much of a concern. More of a dealbreaker is the lack of built-in timelapse video recording functionality in the Sigma FP L. Interval shooting is available and will yield great results for those willing to do the work in post-processing. However, having the ability to record internal timelapse video with this camera would be great for the sake of workflow efficiency.
Picking the right lens
If you're new to astrophotography, it can be difficult to decide on the right focal length lens to start with. While a zoom lens offers flexibility of focal length, they are also usually more expensive, have lower optical performance, and typically don't capture as much light. With this in mind, a bright, sharp prime is ideal, but that means you've got to either pick one focal length, or buy multiple prime lenses.
An ultra-wide angle lens like the Sigma 14mm f1.4 is what you want if you want to include close foreground features and a big chunk of the night sky. It's ideal if you want to have as much of the milky way in your photo as possible. However, it also makes more distant landscape subjects appear less prominently in your image. For example, when we traveled into the mountains to photograph the predicted aurora, the lens ended up being too wide to frame the phenomenon properly when it appeared low on the distant horizon. In this case, a bright 20mm, 24mm, 28mm, or 35mm lens would have been more useful, so you may want to consider also picking up a longer focal length to pair with the Sigma 14mm f1.4.
It's also important to note that if you're shooting with a crop sensor camera you need to multiply the crop factor by the focal length of the lens to get the effective focal length with your camera.
Great value at a high price
At $1599, the Sigma 14mm f1.4 is not cheap by any means, but when you consider that's the same price as a Sony FE 14mm f1.8 GM lens, then you're getting a brighter lens with unique astrophotography-focused features for the same cost. When comparing it to ultra-wide f2.8 zoom lenses from Sony, Nikon, and Canon, all of which cost well over $2000, then the Sigma 14mm f1.4 is relatively affordable by comparison, and overall it actually provides better than average value for money.
With that said, if you don't mind giving up autofocus, a super bright aperture, and the extremely useful special features of the Sigma 14mm f1.4, then there are a number of good third-party options at significantly lower price tags. Perhaps the most attractive of these alternatives is the Laowa 15mm f2 Zero-D, which offers impressive quality and a brighter aperture than a zoom lens for only $649. It's also available natively for a wider selection of camera mounts. However, even considering budget options, the Sigma 14mm f1.4 is still an attractive value when you add up all the benefits it offers, particularly to astrophotographers.
Conclusion
There's no doubt in my mind that the Sigma 14mm f1.4 DG DN ART is the best 14mm lens ever made, and for astrophotography, it's absolutely an object of desire. The incredible optical performance alone would be reason enough to recommend it; just achieving an f1.4 aperture at this focal length makes it remarkable. With the added benefit of unique and useful features and its tank-like construction, the Sigma 14mm f1.4 seems destined to become a legendary lens.
While it's big and heavy, there really would be no way to make it meaningfully smaller and lighter. The only real downside is that the lens is only available in L-mount and Sony E-mount, meaning that if you want to use it on other systems you'll need to use an adapter. Fortunately for Nikon mirrorless camera users, there is a large selection of good options for E-mount to Z-mount adapters, but Canon shooters are sadly out of luck.
The Sigma 14mm f1.4 DG DN ART is an absolute triumph, and it's hard to imagine how it might ever be improved upon.