Today Sigma officially announced the development of a new lens – the Sigma 16mm f/1.4 DC DN Contemporary – for Micro Four Thirds and Sony E mounts. If you are interested in and very familiar with the two systems, you already know, that both of them lack fast primes with this focal length. Micro 4/3 lacks a super-bright lens for all those fans of the good, old reportage focal length. If you are not familiar with the term, it is essentially 35mm on full frame – a focal length which was very popular among photojournalists in the days of analog photography. Relating to Sony E it is those “wide, but still normal wideangles”, those lenses whose focal lengths fall into the 21-24mm range, which are sorely missing. Excluding the mediocre 16mm f/2.8 the choice in this focal length range is limited to manual focus Cine lenses.
The Sigma 16mm f/1.4 DC DN Contemporary is therefore filling a gap and thus has the potential to come as a real bombshell – of course, provided that optical performance is good and the price is fair. Concerning price: Sigma hasn’t announced it as of yet.
Optical performance, on the other hand, is not an unknown quantity. The optical formula, consisting of 16 elements (3x FLD, 2x SLD and 2x Asph.) in 13 groups, is extremely ambitious and should ensure very good performance.
The MTF chart confirms this. It looks more uniform than the one of the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 DC DN Contemporary, which ranks among the best standard primes for micro 4/3 and Sony E.