[stoppingdown]

I was going to buy it in the past January, then decided to wait a bit for the reviews, then the lockdown started and made it meaningless to buy a new lens. When the lockdown ended some jobs had been cancelled and payments for others were postponed, so I suspended non-essential purchases. BTW, for a number of reasons I wasn't able to go out for a single flower trip: in June I had to work hard to regain some job loss, in July the few dates I picked for a trip offered very bad weather in the Alps. September flowers, such as Colchicum autumnale, were likewise a failure (busy with many stuff I wasn't able to go to the Alps). So even though I had bought it earlier, most likely I hadn't used it at all so far.

Now that the situation is partially normalised and I have some hopes for October, I got the lens.

I've just done a few test shots at home, just to practice with it. The minimum distance is incredible. The autofocus is really slow, as reviews anticipated: it looks like I'm back at the times where auto-focus was not the business of silent motors. No problems for landscapes, but I think it is really an annoyance for macros, for instance for moving critters. On the other hand, I'm not seeing the "jumping" problems of the manual focus that some talked about, but I really need to test it on the field.

Open wide bokeh seems pretty, pretty good. Unfortunately bokeh circles start to be not rounded already at ƒ/4.

I'll keep you updated as soon as I manage in doing some real shot.