As part of Sigmas high-end lineup, the 85mm Art isnt a slouch when it comes to build and durability. The lens body is largely constructed with metal – the area holding the focal length display window and manual-to-autofocus switch is one exception. The focus ring uses a rubber grip with ridges that’s easy to grasp.
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The lens ships with a nice carrying case, lens hood, and lens cap – all three matching the high-end construction of the lens.
Compared to other 85mm lenses, the Sigmas front element is quite large, necessitating an 86mm filter thread size. This size isnt very common, which makes it a little tougher to find filters; its not impossible, especially at the higher end, but these filters will be relatively expensive. As expected for this level of lens, the front doesnt rotate as the lens adjusts focus – a helpful feature when shooting with a polarizing filter.
The entire lens measures around five inches and tips the scales at nearly 2.5 pounds. While the 85mm Art is a prime lens, the size and weight make it feel like shooting a telephoto zoom — Nikons 70-200mm f/4 is half a pound lighter. To some degree, thats simply what happens when you combine a large f/1.4 aperture with quality construction, but its worth noting that this lens is on the heavy side.
Switching between Nikon and Sigma lenses throughout two portrait sessions was seamless. One fear with third part lenses, even optically excellent ones, is that they wont focus as quickly or accurately as first-party options. The 85mm Art didnt miss a beat, with autofocus that was both fast and quiet.
With an f/1.4 aperture, the narrow depth of field leaves little room for focusing errors, but we were pleasantly surprised at how few images we had to throw out, even shooting wide open. The autofocus system worked very well with the D7200.
Image quality
The 85mm Art offers a beautiful blend between sharp subjects and smooth booker. While that f/1.4 aperture produces a narrow enough depth of field to get the eyelashes sharp with the eyes a bit soft, we were impressed with the images the lens was able to capture, even using a wide open aperture. Although the lens doesnt have a macro classification, it was sharp enough to zoom in and differentiate single snowflakes clinging to those eyelashes.
Chromatic aberration, or that green and purple fringing in high contrast scenes that often plagues wide-aperture lenses, was minimal. While we didnt have the chance to use the lens in full sun during mid-winter, we tried to achieve a lens flare inside a dark room with a lamp and couldnt get any flaring.
Since we were using the lens on a crop sensor, we cant confidently say how the lens performs at the most extreme edges, where any softness is usually more pronounced. But within that 1.5X crop, there was no light fall-off or vignetting, and edges were still impressively sharp.
We were surprised to see a slightly warmer color balance in the images shot with the 85mm Art than similar shots from a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 (settings werent changed between shots, including automatic white balance). Shooting a color card with a preset produced identical colors, but in auto white balance under the same cloudy sky, the 85mm Art tended to perform a bit warm.
During post-editing in Adobe Lightroom, the two Sigma lens actually had the more accurate white balance inside the snowy scene. We actually preferred the colors coming from the Sigma as well, although this was a matter of personal opinion.
The 85mm Art produced sharp, detailed images with soft bokeh and is a fantastic portrait lens. While it would be the most expensive lens in this writers kit, the image quality alone — with a wider aperture and less chromatic aberration — justifies the higher price when compared to other prime lenses. Its also worth noting that the lens is actually less expensive than both Nikons 85mm f/1.4 and Canon’s 85mm f/1.2.
