OK. I must admit I've been on a bit of a crying jag lately about the way Canon treats their customers. Big company Canon is. Successful company Canon is. Lot's of customers, Canon has but in terms of customer service and satisfaction they leave more than a little to be desired.

            Before I start serving cheese with my whine though, I'd much rather focus on the positive so this is NOT about Canon. Many years ago, when I was wearing 34 waist jeans and was still combing my hair frequently, I was raising a family while working many hours and didn't have lots of scratch for new lenses. When the time came to purchase a new lens I was looking at the 'thrift" brands.  Among those, at the top of my list was Sigma. You see, Sigma made a bunch of lenses in a bunch of focal lengths at prices that were even affordable to photographers like myself that were a bit financially challenged. In those days the quality of those bargain lenses was not as good as the expensive designer brands but the results were good enough to be good enough.

            Well many years later my bank book grew along with my waistline and I started purchasing those designer brands. The quality was outstanding and the impact to my savings was also outstanding (not in a good way). Seems as though I have moved up in the world. So it may seem odd that I've migrated back to Sigma lenses. All I can say is " they're not your fathers Sigma"!

             First about the company. They are family owned and managed. They actually have a terrific attitude about their employees and their customers. Seems they realize that you build a business one customer at a time (and the same is true for going out of business). Recently the new CEO Kazuto Yamaki who took the reigns after the death of founder Michihiro Yamaki, announced the companies move to "World Vision" in which they broke their lenses up into three categories: Art, Contemporary and Sport. They also announced they would retrofit any of these lenses to a new mount in case you decided to move to a different platform (hmmmmm). But the biggest change, in my opinion, was their decision to take on the big guys glass to glass. 

           I recently had the pleasure of hearing Sigma Pro Roman Kurywczak speak about the lenses and their abilities. I had already purchased the 150-600MM Sports lens to replace a 100-400 L which had become a liability because of a broken lock with a prohibitive repair cost. I knew, from my own experience that the quality of these lenses had been raised to the level both in build and image quality to compete successfully with the big manufacturers so it didn't take Roman very long into his talk to influence me to purchase the 180 macro. I have not been disappointed. These lenses are awesome. I won't go into any technical double talk but the proof is in the results and the results are terrific. The fact is, I love these lenses and they have become my go to lens company.

          Just sayin'.