A wonderful birthday gift. Definitely my favorite lens at the moment. (quick snapshot with Galaxy S4)
I love mine, after trying it along with the 1.4. i decided to get it over the 1.4. way less money, the weight is awesome and IQ is quite amazing. that thing is sharp as f*ck! wide open at 1.8
the lens is sharp to begin with, with shutter speed over 1/100 (on a full frame) and steady hands, there is no reason why you wouldn't get sharp image with that lens.
Another thing, make sure you fine tune these lens to go with your body. when i got them, they where not that sharp, i had to manually AF fine tune in body. both my d600's and my d7000.
there some chart out there you can use, but i found its not the best way to do it. i used batteries aligned up on an angle on my kitchen table to validate the settings. your lens might be front focusing or back focussing, all my lens where at some point so thats why i always fine tune them, no matter what. if the lens if front focusing, you correct it using -value in AF tuning in your camera settings. if its back focussing, you use the + value. do this until whatever you focus on is tack sharp. setting will be kept for that lens, you can add up to 20 lens (not sure)
Very very jealous, that's next on my lens list to get into portraiture and as a general use short tele. Sent from my Verizon Galaxy S III using Tapatalk 2
Absolutely loving the lens. I haven't yet gotten to go out to shoot with it, but I did what I do with every lens I get: I took some photographs of my dog. I took the photographs at f1.8 to really enjoy what the lens can do: It's so sharp! I really enjoy how closely it can focus too for a non-macro. The great news is focus seems to be just about perfectly matched with my D5200. http://imageshack.us/a/img593/374/pux6.jpg http://imageshack.us/a/img820/6518/h9y1.jpg Next on the list is a Yongnuo 568ex flash.
Congrats! I dig my 85 1.8G too, and like has been mentioned, fine tune it if you have a body that can, mine needed a little AF fine tune as well, its not very uncommon for fast lenses like this to need some minor adjustment. in fact almost every AF prime I have needed at least a little adjustment, except for both the sigmas, they were spot on at zero adjustment across the board.