I've got a new lens the "Sigma Art 35mm F1,4 DG HSM" and this took me to the idea to do a test. How will my new Sigma Art 35mm lens compare to my other lenses?

Lenses to compare

• Sigma Art 35mm F1,4 DG HSM
  
• Canon EF 50mm 1:1.8 II
  
• Canon EF-S 18-135mm 1:3,5-5,6 IS
  

Setup

The following picture shows the setup of my EOS 70D and my example objects. My camera was installed on my tripod with a small top to bottom angle focused on my example objects. As example objects I used a selection of my Whisky bottles and glasses to build a colored setup. At each of the following pictures - I focused the left glass close to the red book, having this same setup for each lens. Placing some coins, bottle corks, labels, etc. will face differences later (hopefully). For each lens I started with the lowest possible aperture up to f8 and then in larger steps ending by f22. That's the idea.

Before I will give some results of my test - I introduce each lens with a picture of the lens and the slideshow of all shot example pictures.

Sigma Art 35mm F1,4 DG HSM

Canon EF 50mm 1:1.8 II

Canon EF-S 18-135mm 1:3,5-5,6 IS

Compared

How I did the pictures? I used my smartphone with the "Remote EOS App" to trigger the pictures. This was done to avoid changing the setup during shooting the series of different apertures for each lens.

Now let's have a look at the next three example pictures limited on the lowest shared aperture, which was f4,5 from the Canon 18-35mm lens.

What I see, is that the "Sigma Art 35mm F1,4 DG HSM" and the "Canon EF 50mm 1:1.8 II" both are similar - only a few sharpness details at the bottle cork or at the labels can be found with a lot of zoom. But for me that don't make the big price different worth. The "Canon EF-S 18-135mm 1:3,5-5,6 IS" does the job as well good, but you see less details/sharpness. I could imagine this shows the first different between zoom and fixed lenses and the advantage of the fixed lenses regarding the low light conditions I had.

Well, let's take a second look at the lower apertures.

I can recognize the strong colors and the sharpness of the "Sigma Art 35mm F1,4 DG HSM" with an aperture of f1,4 it's amazing. This gives a lot of possibilities - Playing with the settings under low light conditions without getting impacted to much - for me that's quit powerful.

Additional I had a deeper look compared of the "Sigma Art 35mm F1,4 DG HSM" and the "Canon EF 50mm 1:1.8 II" using an aperture of f2,8 for both to compare them.

Using the aperture of f2,8 I think that the colors and the sharpness of the "Sigma Art 35mm F1,4 DG HSM" is ahead compared to the "Canon EF 50mm 1:1.8 II". Checking the bottle cork, the labels and colors shows that the sigma does better on the same settings and setup.

My results

What can I take away from this test? Well, I really like all of these lenses and the test points to pros and cons of each lens.

• The "Sigma Art 35mm F1,4 DG HSM" is the strongest lens providing great colors and sharpness, but it has it's price with 750€. I just can say it was worth to spend that. :)
  
• The "Canon EF 50mm 1:1.8 II" is a good and cheap (85€) lens, but has some weakness compared to better lenses and the auto focus (AF) is not very fast. I would recommend this lens to every beginner based on the price value balance!
  
• The "Canon EF-S 18-135mm 1:3,5-5,6 IS" is lightweight and a good compromise of being flexible and getting good results. I us it all time on vacation trips, when I have no time to swap lenses.