I am very happy with this lens and I will use it for both Canon and Nikon and when I need something really a 85mm lens , I use my Zeiss 85f1.4ZF2.

Lastly, I compared all the lenses at f/2.8. We expect nearly the best results, and all the lenses are really sharp now. The Canon 85mm f/1.8 seems like the softest one.The bokeh (quality of defocused areas) can be equally important as sharpness for portraiture and still life photography. This facet of performance is sublime, with a wonderfully creamy smoothness in blurred regions, and excellent quality in the transition between focused and defocused areas.

Sharpness– Definitely gives the Canon 85L a run for its money and blows the Sigma 85 EX DG HSM out of the water. The image quality is a bit of a mix between near as good as the L.... to... better than the L. It seems about as sharp as the L while the CA and fringing is much better controlled than the L. The bokeh is Signature Sigma 9 blade smoothness, like the EX50/1.4..It's very similar to the L. Very nice...Also....handles flare like a champ using the suplied hood. The big difference is that the in-camera AFMA calibration is very limited. You can only enter one value (for one focal distance). My Canon EF 135/2.0 for example needs very different AFMA values depending on the focal distance. By heart, the AFMA values change from around -10 at 3m to 0 at 9m. I really want to have a good copy of this lens in my photography equipments, so I have been trying 3 copies. The Sigma 85mm Art lens goes down the traditional route, designed around a fast f/1.4 aperture, and delivering stunningly sharp image quality. The Tamron 85mm is two-thirds of a stop slower, at f/1.8, but still produces fabulous image quality with very good and highly consistent sharpness across the entire image frame, in a much smaller and more lightweight build than the Sigma lens. Crucially, the Tamron also adds image stabilization, or VC (Vibration Compensation) as Tamron call it. Canon’s latest portrait primes aims to beat both competitors at their own game. FeaturesShivani wants to live in a world where laughter is the cure to pretty much everything. Since she can't claim "Serial Bingewatcher" as an occupation, she'll settle for wedding/portrait photographer at Lin and Jirsa & marketing coordinator here at SLR Lounge. For those rare moments when you won't find a camera in her hand, she will be dancing, eating a donut, or most likely watching Seinfeld.

Since the Samyang lenses are manual focus, I personally prefer not to use them. I wear glasses and I don’t trust my eyes, and I’m also not very fast at focusing with manual lenses. Anyway, for this lens I’ve used Canon 5D Mark III’s 100% manual focus feature to focus on the subject. This was a most surprising result for me: the Samyang is really sharp after f/1.8. Great lens for the price, but just not one for me. While 85 AF-S is a bit sharper and has better corners , (but not by much) is it also 700 euro more expensive than the Sigma. While the Canon 85L wasn’t designed for peak sharpness, it has an almost ethereal fade from sharpness to blur. The “bokeh balls” do have more of an ovular characteristic to them compared to Canon’s circular appearance. Both have a soft transition due to their wide apertures and the difference is negligible. The Sigma had less lens flare (which could be a good or bad thing depending on your artistic tastes) Both lateral and axial (or longitudinal) chromatic aberrations are extremely negligible, even when uncorrected in-camera.Haven’t seen one yet, but I’m guessing the sigma will be sharper, they will be similar in other ways including Bokeh, but some big time Canon fans will say the Canon has better Bokeh simply because the other one is a sigma. Now, if aesthetics are your thing, know that this lens is bulky once on a camera body and adds an extra bit of weight that you usually don’t expect from primes, especially the Sigma Art collection. At 85mm for a full frame, to get it to be as bright as 1.4 means it has large glass elements, and likely a lot of them, and thus heft and added weight. So here, the choice of making it f/1.4 has led to the engineering issue which requires it to be a more heavy-set lens. [LEARN: Free Engagement Photography Guide] Auto-focus Next was the AF....I was really amazed at how fast the AF was (after owning multiple 85L's). It's twice as fast as the mkII and maybe more importantly....Just as accurate. Sigma 85mm f / 1,4 on the field is not inferior to Nikon 85 / 1,4G, has a beautiful soft bokeh, good design, accurate and fast AF, a beautiful rich color. Photographing a great pleasure, you do not want to remove from the camera. This is a wonderful lens!

There is a certain finesse to this specific Art lens that you don’t find in the others, and maybe it’s the size speaking here, but the 85 Art is truly in a class of its own. Weighing in at 39.9 oz, Sigma’s new release is heavier than both its predecessor, the Sigma 85mm f/1.4 EX DG HSM, and the Canon 85mm f/1.2L. With 14 glass elements contained within this beast, its weight is no surprise, however, this may deter folks from purchasing it considering the Canon equivalent is more compact and weighs in around a not-entirely-significant 3.74 oz. less.

Typical of Canon’s up-market L-series lenses, this one’s solidly built and weather-sealed. Like most modern prime designs, it has a complex optical path, based on 14 elements in 10 groups. Canon’s specialist ASC (Air Sphere Coating) is applied to combat ghosting and flare. The Sigma 85mm Art is a great lens with quality optics and body. It’s a little bit heavy and big, but the lens feels more professional with these attributes. This is the success of Sigma’s marketing department: we photographers now believe that Art lenses are high-class lenses rather than lesser alternatives to Canon or Nikon lenses. We've almost completely stopped recommending fast third-party lenses because the AF is inconsistent. Yes, the optical quality of the Sigma Art lenses is UNBEATABLE... but every single time we've tested them against native lenses, they miss focus far more. In our 85mm f/1.4 comparison, the Sigma missed focus so much that it was more accurate to simply manually focus it. Same applies to the Sigma 18-35 and 50-100 f/1.8 lenses. Focus calibration can't fix it; it's the result of camera manufacturer's not testing and optimizing the camera bodies for those lenses.