Legacy Lens Review, Sigma Mini-Wide 28mm 1:2.8

A retro look at the Sigma-Mini Wide 28mm F2.8 prime, a retrofocus close-focus wide-angle lens acknowledged for its sharpness.

A very interesting lens that came through my mail recently was the manual-focus Sigma Mini-Wide 28mm 1:2.8, a close-focus wide-angle lens with a retrofocus design. A nice and very neat well-made 28mm, the lens is a later version of the original Sigma Mini-Wide. The retrofocus design was first seen with Sigma's very first 28mm lens, the Sigma 28mm F2.8 Widemax.

All-in-all, the close-focusing capability of this lens is what I am most delighted with, making it an extremely useful lens for capturing those macro shots that I am always after.

The lens was a product back when there was a high demand for 28mm and 135mm primes for users to add to their existing 50mm primes which was the standard for 35mm SLR film cameras. The Sigma Mini-Wide was well accepted and stayed close to the top among favorites, not only because of its excellent design, small and compact but also because of its reasonable pricing.

The lens itself is light and compact, it is of all glass and metal construction, weighs in at 210 grams, comes with a 6-blade diaphragm, an aperture range from F2.6 to F22 at half-click stops, and a close focusing distance (CFD) of 22cm from the film plane, with a focus rotation of about 200°.

My copy of the lens, which comes with an OM-mount, fits well to the Micro4/3 Olympus E-P5 and the OM Adapter MF-2 is a pleasure to use. Focusing, for a lens that is about 30 years old, is silky smooth, and aperture changes were also firm and clicky.

Image quality, on the 2x crop sensor, is equivalent to a 56mm full-frame lens, and is very good, with nice color rendering, good contrast, and nice out-of-focus rendering. The lens is very sharp even wide open. With the macro shots that I am doing, flare is something I do not worry too much about.

A later version of the lens, the Mini-Wide II, is a redesign of the original with one element less and was in production from 1985 to 1995. Subsequently, the lens comes with a plastic ring and a diagonal pattern on the focus ring, with comments that these are more difficult to open up to clean.

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