To paraphrase James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been the Bigma. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. Sigma has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But the Bigma has marked the time. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh… people will use it, Ray. People will most definitely use it.”

There’s a couple of reasons we don’t stock the ‘newer’ Sigma telephoto zooms that have Vibration Reduction: quality control isn’t good, they’re even heavier than the Bigma, and they aren’t EX lenses, meaning they just aren’t quite as sharp as the Bigma is. Other lenses have come and gone, but the Bigma has been a consistently popular lens for a very long time. There’s no other lens that does what it does.

The Bigma gives a range not matched by any other telephoto zoom, it’s reasonably sharp throughout its range, has a very reasonable price. And it’s been around for years so the quality control seems superior to the other Sigma telephoto zooms. Yes, I wish it had IS (but not if that means a $500 higher price and increased failure rate), and I wish it weighed a bit less (but not if that meant giving up some of the range). At the end of the day, it just does the job you want it to do. And it has some very nice touches: the ‘handle tripod mount’ is something I wish other manufacturers would copy.