The Worst Lens I Ever Owned – Moving Pictures

I have bought and sold a few lenses in my day. Many of my favorite lenses, like the beautiful manual-focus Nikkor 105mm f/1.8 and Nikkor 24mm f/2.0, simply wore out, a testament to the fact that they were so great, so I used them all the time.

Other lenses were not as great, some were not even close, and once in a while, a lens would stand out as being one of the worst I ever used.

The early-1980s Sigma 28-85mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens sits on my kitchen table this week. It's a good-looking lens. — The early-1980s Sigma 28-85mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens sits on my kitchen table this week. It’s a good-looking lens.

Sometimes you want a lens that will do everything. As years went by, lenses got better and better, and when I travel, I lean heavily into lenses that do a lot of things: wide angle, telephoto, and macro into one package.

My favorite ended up being the small but mighty AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G. It is a jack of all trades, master of none. I would never try to shoot sports and news with it, but if you were, for example, strolling through Bricktown for a day of picture-making, a lens like this would be a great choice.

Many years ago, I had a similar idea. During my second newspaper internship in the summer of 1983, I decided a wide-to-telephoto zoom lens would be a problem-solver: it could camp on one camera while a big telephoto, a 180mm or 200mm, could reside on my other camera, and I would be ready for anything.

I shopped the camera stores and the back pages of Modern Photography and Popular Photography. I saw that Sigma was offering a 28-85mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom for a bargain price, and grabbed one.

The Sigma 28-85mm sits next to one of its contemporaries, the Vivitar Series 1 28-90mm. Series 1 was a premium offering from Vivitar. It is better than the Sigma by a long shot in terms of sharpness, but it is much heavier.

From the first day, I was disappointed in the images I made with it. Even during the very start of my career, when I would only afford three Nikon lenses, a 28mm, a 50mm, and a 105mm, those lenses were absolutely amazing, sharp, well-made, and good-handling.

The Sigma was decently built, but while Nikon took pride in making the world’s greatest lenses for 35mm photography, Sigma was known for being cheap. A 28-85mm zoom lens is optically complex, and cheaping out on optical glass and optical design was a bad recipe.

I tried to make it work all summer long, but by August, when I had only a couple of months with it, I traded the Sigma 28-85mm for a well-used Nikkor 135mm f/3.5, and never looked back.

It was a good lesson in being patient when we are considering buying something that we hope will last a while and will provide quality use, from furniture and stereo audio systems to cars.

I always remembered the Sigma, so when I was scouring Ebay for vintage photo gear, I came across one for just $27, I couldn’t resist the temptation to revisit this item from my long-ago photography.

In 2012, Sigma introduced its “Art” series of lenses, and went from the bargain basement to top of the mountain, so I definitely recommend looking at these lenses today. I’ve seen some pass through my photography classes, and they are very capable lenses.