Home · Register · Join Upload & Sell

Moderated by: Fred Miranda

New fredmiranda.com Mobile Site

New Feature: SMS Notification alert

New Feature: Buy & Sell Watchlist

FM Forums | Canon Forum | Join Upload & Sell

3 … 11 12 end

Archive 2021 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

Jesse Evans
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.2 #1 · p.2 #1 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

stanj wrote:
Basing image quality judgement on adjustments made with the manual sliders, compared to "proper profiles" for other lenses, is flawed at best. Either wait for LR with the profiles, wait for people who post photos processed with beta profiles, or make your own profiles (I have the required Adobe targets in my garage, very much to my wife's bewilderment, and the now discontinued software in my archives). I know you're doing the best you can right now, but it's really not an objective comparison.

The corrected files that I’ve compared and uploaded are all processed with DPP, for both the 14-35 and 15-35. They appear to have been perfectly corrected by Canon. I think some others were somewhat confused because I wrote too much and people glazed over.

Aug 29, 2021 at 12:40 AM

Jesse Evans
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.2 #2 · p.2 #2 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

stanj wrote:
Indeed I may have a crappy 15-35, but I can assure you that the 14-35 when corrected the way I have it corrected (that I can't post) it's pretty darn sharp at 200% in the corners wide open... I have some super attractive high voltage power lines in my back yard that are actually bringing power to your neighborhood, and when I put them in the upper left corner of the frame at f4 they look better than real life

I understand the math and physics enough to know that there's no replacement for displacement, I mean once you...Show more →

I think it’s easily a keeper for folks like us who are price insensitive. For others it’s quite a trade off. Tomorrow the air around the bay is supposed to be less toxic, so I’m going to go out to the coast and do some proper shooting with the lens and see if I fall in love.

Aug 29, 2021 at 12:44 AM

stanj
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.2 #3 · p.2 #3 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

Jesse Evans wrote:
The corrected files that I’ve compared and uploaded are all processed with DPP, for both the 14-35 and 15-35. They appear to have been perfectly corrected by Canon. I think some others were somewhat confused because I wrote too much and people glazed over.

Ah, yeah, guilty as charged. Then again, you lost me at DPP

But at least it's consistent.

Good luck at the coast! Can't wait to hear what you find under real life testing. I won't get out of the house for another week for sure.

Aug 29, 2021 at 12:53 AM

khurram1
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.2 #4 · p.2 #4 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

What I don’t get is that wasn’t the whole point of changing the lens mount, was to improve to have more coverage and improve the optical performance- not just the digital performance??

Jesse Evans wrote:
On this, I disagree. The 15-35 when shot side by side has an obvious advantage outside of the middle 30% of the frame. Not only in distortion and vignetting but in detail, mostly due to the distortion correction required to cover the sensor on the 14-35. Maybe you do have a particularly bad copy of the 15-35 but it’d have to be very decentered to look like the 14-35. When distortion is left uncorrected, the 14-35 is every bit as sharp as the 15-35 tho.

At this point I’m not really sure what about this lens justifies the price tag,...Show more →

Aug 29, 2021 at 01:43 AM

brad-man
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.2 #5 · p.2 #5 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

khurram1 wrote:
What I don’t get is that wasn’t the whole point of changing the lens mount, was to improve to have more coverage and improve the optical performance- not just the digital performance??

While the new mount surely has some advantages, they do not include bending the laws of physics (see what I did there?). Evidently Canon felt that folks wanted the smallest w/a zoom possible with a flat front element for filters above all else. There are compromises made for such a design. There is (was) a reason you've never seen a 14mm lens without a bulbous front element before. We are now in the age of optical manipulation augmented with digital manipulation, for better or worse...

Aug 29, 2021 at 08:06 AM

Jesse Evans
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.2 #6 · p.2 #6 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

khurram1 wrote:
What I don’t get is that wasn’t the whole point of changing the lens mount, was to improve to have more coverage and improve the optical performance- not just the digital performance??

While it’s true that changing the mount opened up new lens design possibilities, especially for wide angle lenses, Canon made a lens that has truly never been seen before, in a very light package… They leveraged the improvements in different dimensions than purely optical performance.

Aug 29, 2021 at 10:11 AM

Jesse Evans
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.2 #7 · p.2 #7 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

brad-man wrote:
While the new mount surely has some advantages, they do not include bending the laws of physics (see what I did there?). Evidently Canon felt that folks wanted the smallest w/a zoom possible with a flat front element for filters above all else. There are compromises made for such a design. There is (was) a reason you've never seen a 14mm lens without a bulbous front element before. We are now in the age of optical manipulation augmented with digital manipulation, for better or worse...

Well, I really don’t want to risk turning this in to a brand wars thread, but Nikon already has the 14-30 f/4 S for Z mount. This lens ALSO leverages heavy distortion and vignetting correction (it doesn’t cover the sensor at UWA, it’s also lighter than the Canon RF 14-35, but lacks IS.

Nikon also already released the 14-24 f/2.8 S. This lens covers the full image sensor, still has some distortion, but not very much, and covers the entire sensor with very little vignette. It also only weighs 100g more than the Canon 14-35, and 200g less than the Canon 15-35. It also does not have a bulbous front element, but comes with the trade off that it requires a 112mm filter.

Aug 29, 2021 at 10:22 AM

stanj
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.2 #8 · p.2 #8 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

khurram1 wrote:
What I don’t get is that wasn’t the whole point of changing the lens mount, was to improve to have more coverage and improve the optical performance- not just the digital performance??

You now have a tiny 14-35 compared to a pretty big 16-35, no? Some (me) may argue with better performance at that. I see that as a benefit. As a consumer _of the image_ I don't care if it was made possible by "purely optical" performance or digital help, just as much as I don't care if a book was written on a "honest typewriter" or "cheating with a word processor."

Aug 29, 2021 at 10:41 AM

brad-man
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.2 #9 · p.2 #9 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

Jesse Evans wrote:
Well, I really don’t want to risk turning this in to a brand wars thread, but Nikon already has the 14-30 f/4 S for Z mount. This lens ALSO leverages heavy distortion and vignetting correction (it doesn’t cover the sensor at UWA, it’s also lighter than the Canon RF 14-35, but lacks IS.

Nikon also already released the 14-24 f/2.8 S. This lens covers the full image sensor, still has some distortion, but not very much, and covers the entire sensor with very little vignette. It also only weighs 100g more than the Canon 14-35, and 200g less than...Show more →

Sorry if my post was unclear. What I meant to say is there is (was) a reason you've never seen a 14mm lens without a bulbous front element using only optical manipulation. The Nikon 14-24 does have a bulbous front element, they simply built into the lens a small "hood" which projects out and will accept filters.

Aug 29, 2021 at 10:51 AM

khurram1
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.2 #10 · p.2 #10 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

I would like to see what they could have done to reduce the size (length), but maybe more width and go with a 82mm filter. I also would have been happier with a less extreme range, like if they’d stuck with a 16-35, but sharper, or 15-28 (keep some overlap with thr 24-70).

brad-man wrote:
While the new mount surely has some advantages, they do not include bending the laws of physics (see what I did there?). Evidently Canon felt that folks wanted the smallest w/a zoom possible with a flat front element for filters above all else. There are compromises made for such a design. There is (was) a reason you've never seen a 14mm lens without a bulbous front element before. We are now in the age of optical manipulation augmented with digital manipulation, for better or worse...

Aug 29, 2021 at 11:03 AM

stanj
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.2 #11 · p.2 #11 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

khurram1 wrote:
I would like to see what they could have done to reduce the size (length), but maybe more width and go with a 82mm filter. I also would have been happier with a less extreme range, like if they’d stuck with a 16-35, but sharper, or 15-28 (keep some overlap with thr 24-70).

Do you actually own the lens, and found it to be not good enough? If not, I believe there are still alternatives available for you; if yes, I believe you're within the return window. What if it turns out that with proper correction the lens is indeed sharper than the 16-35, but with a more extreme range and in a smaller package? Or will the software aspect overshadow that possible happiness, similar to modern masking, sky replacement, noise reduction take away from "proper" image composition or sensor characteristics?

I think we're at the beginning of a new era, of computational photography, and personally I think that's a good thing, just like the word processor was in the 80s.

Aug 29, 2021 at 12:37 PM

Emyr
Offline
•
Upload & Sell: Off

p.2 #12 · p.2 #12 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

Many thanks for doing the review, Jesse.

I really like this lens having looked at your RAW files.

It's essentially a 12–35mm lens and you get to crop down to 14mm at your choice (so long as you're not in DPP).

Sure, 12mm looks bad in the corners, but you can crop landscape-wise and get the benifit of 12mm with no penalty.

It sharpens up nicely too.

BTW, a Lightroom distortion edit of +45 with Constrain Crop box ticked got me to practically exactly where DPP left me with its mandatory correction.

Aug 29, 2021 at 01:18 PM

stanj
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.2 #13 · p.2 #13 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

Here's my unscientific comparison that I'm willing to do today. Again the air outside is toxic and I'm supposed to be in bed post surgery, but here's my neighbor's house at f4, which means the 15-35 has the unfair advantage that it's stopped down one stop. Both images corrected with a profile that may or may not exist. Apparently I wasn't able to dial in exactly 15mm so you have the license plate at 14 and 16mm. All other LR settings are identical. At what feels like half the weight and much smaller volume I definitely see a place for this lens. I no longer have my 16-35 but I am sure other people will be able to make that comparison. I can't wait for DXO to get this lens characterized.

Aug 29, 2021 at 03:42 PM

khurram1
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.2 #14 · p.2 #14 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

Don’t have the lens. Going by reviews, and impressions of others, and trying to understand how it compares to the 16-35 F4L lens I had, or my current 11-24L.

I’m not sure if I can pick up this lens locally anytime soon - Canadian retailers haven’t even received their allotment yet and they expect the lens will come in batches of 4 to 8 a month. I’m on three pre-order lists, but doubt it will be available locally for another 2-3 months considering where I am on the list. I think I have a better chance of getting it shipped from Eastern Canada, but the return process from photo retailers isn’t as easy as it is in the USA, if you aren’t dealing with a local shop.

The point I was making though, is I’d rather have an optically superior lens that has less range (ie 16-30, 15-28, 14-24), which may be a little heavier and fatter, but smaller in length than the 14-35. Could Canon have used the entire image sensor if the range was 15-28 or 15-30, and been able to reduce the size on a F4 version?

The lens is $2250, while the 15-35L with promos and discounts is available for $2750 right now. I would prefer a smaller lens, but based on what I’ve seen (which is limited feedback from those lucky enough to to get early copies), I’m leaning more towards the 15-35L - which I wasn’t really even considering until the imaging resource review came out.

From the feedback to date, it soundslike the edges are softer with the corrections. I also like to see what I’m seeing be consistent with what I see in LR (or DPP - which is what I was using until around 2017-18). With my 11-24L, I can see vignetting and get a sense of the distortion. I don’t want to suddenly discover that he. Processing the file.
I would have also thought that DPP would have the best corrections for a Canon lens. My experience is limited with raw processors though. Used DPP since going digital in 2005, until making the switch to LR I. 2017-18.
stanj wrote:
Do you actually own the lens, and found it to be not good enough? If not, I believe there are still alternatives available for you; if yes, I believe you're within the return window. What if it turns out that with proper correction the lens is indeed sharper than the 16-35, but with a more extreme range and in a smaller package? Or will the software aspect overshadow that possible happiness, similar to modern masking, sky replacement, noise reduction take away from "proper" image composition or sensor characteristics?

I think we're at the beginning of a new era, of computational photography,...Show more →

Aug 29, 2021 at 04:56 PM

aut0maticdan
Offline
• •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.2 #15 · p.2 #15 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

This was an awesome post! I was really curious about FOV comparisons with the 15-35. TBH, I’m a little weirded out that focal lengths are no longer a measurement of focal length but rather an approximation on FOV resulting from correction. This is especially a little off putting on expensive L glass. In the end it is just about taking photos and having a good time. For many that is mostly about it lugging around lighter gear. This looks like a neat lens.

@khurram1 - it is possible this lens does perform much tighter on a narrower range of like 16-28, so it may be just what you are after with ‘options’

In other comparisons, the 15-35 seems to destroy it in the 28-35 range, so if that is important for you…

Aug 29, 2021 at 05:15 PM

stanj
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.2 #16 · p.2 #16 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

Well, if you want one lens that does it all and you're willing to pay for it, both in price and weight, then maybe the 15-35 is better. However, as a general rule, the whole "real pixels" on the sensor is going to be an increasingly challenging domain for puritans. It's not just the number of pixels in an image, it's also their quality, and it's not just "digital pixels" that get stretched, if you look at any UWA lens you'll see that there's some odd shenanigans going on in the corners, because even optical correction creates interesting artifacts; in some cases worse ones. But each their own.

As for "Canon having the best correction" - that's not really true, just as DPP doesn't have the "best" colors (arguably C1 rules), and so on. Get a demo of DXO PR and send some of your choice wide angle shots through it and compare it to what DPP or LR or C1 produce, and you'll see what I mean. Next thing you know you're sending a hundred bucks to France.

Aug 29, 2021 at 05:16 PM

khurram1
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.2 #17 · p.2 #17 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

stanj wrote:
Here's my unscientific comparison that I'm willing to do today. Again the air outside is toxic and I'm supposed to be in bed post surgery, but here's my neighbor's house at f4, which means the 15-35 has the unfair advantage that it's stopped down one stop. Both images corrected with a profile that may or may not exist. Apparently I wasn't able to dial in exactly 15mm so you have the license plate at 14 and 16mm. All other LR settings are identical. At what feels like half the weight and much smaller volume I definitely see a place for...Show more →

Thanks for providing these - and good luck on your recovery!! I thought the air quality for most of the summer was bad in Calgary with the wildfires we had through most of the summer - looks like it is much worse in California!!

Your sample shots do favour the 15-35L - seems to be more detail and contrast, albeit the test shots give the 15-35L an advantage by stopping down. These shots are showing the blow up from the centre right hand corners. I would imagine that performance of both lens would drop at the extreme bottom and top corners.

I think if those differences were the same at F8, F9 and F11, I'd probably go with the 15-35L - despite it being bigger than what I was hoping to get.

Aug 29, 2021 at 05:20 PM

stanj
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.2 #18 · p.2 #18 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

aut0maticdan wrote:
In other comparisons, the 15-35 seems to destroy it in the 28-35 range, so if that is important for you…

Right, so on the topic of that destruction, let's look at something that a "typical landscape shooter" may care about, meaning f8. The respective areas are synchronized across the frames, so if they're somewhat offset it has to do with the fact that both 35mm frames aren't exactly 35mm.

Aug 29, 2021 at 05:26 PM

khurram1
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.2 #19 · p.2 #19 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

aut0maticdan wrote:
This was an awesome post! I was really curious about FOV comparisons with the 15-35. TBH, I’m a little weirded out that focal lengths are no longer a measurement of focal length but rather an approximation on FOV resulting from correction. This is especially a little off putting on expensive L glass. In the end it is just about taking photos and having a good time. For many that is mostly about it lugging around lighter gear. This looks like a neat lens.

@khurram1@ - it is possible this lens does perform much tighter on a narrower range of like 16-28,...Show more →

I think that both Stan and Jesse's photos show that the 14-35 is clearly wider than 14mm, and what you see corrected in camera may indeed be close to what you get corrected out of the software. One of the questions is going to be how much effort you have to do in post processing to get it there.

I'd like to get the widest lens I can. the following shot is with the 16-35 F4L, and it was this trip that convinced me I needed to get wider than 16mm, because, I couldn't capture all that i wanted.

The second shot is with the 11-24 f4L, and is also at 16mm. While i love the 11-24L lens, the size of the lens is a pain. The bulbous lens design and the size of the SW150 ND Grad filters, it was almost impossible to clean the spray off the lens and filters. A smaller (regular flat lens surface and smaller filters would have been much easier to clean. I only had 5 to 8 minutes of the having the light, the sun where i wanted it, waiting for people to walk out of the frame, AND wipe away the spray on the lens and the filter. Bulbous lenses are a bxxch to clean, and the huge Lee filters are just as difficult to wipe.

I actually took more shots from the same location as the second shot and shot at 15 mm as well to get my kids in the shots, and could see how far off to the side I could have them, before distortion would be a factor having people in the shots. I loved being able to go wider - the extra mm helped to get those shots.

WIth the 11-24, I can see that with the Lee adaptor it will vignette between 13-14mm, so I know I have to zoom out to around 14mm to play it safe. I just want to make sure I can do the same with the 14-35L and 15-35L that have in camera corrections.

The other question is which has the better sunstars with the 14-35 and 15-35?? WIth the two shots i posted, for both the 16-35 F4L and the 11-24, i had to stop down to F16 - which softens things up with diffraction to get the sunstar i wanted. I find the 16-35L to be much better stopping down to F16 than the 11-24 does. the 16-35 f4L was also steller with the sunstars. Wondering if there is any difference between the 14-35 and 15-35?

Ideally, i'd like to get the widest lens as i can - but in the past I had the TSE 17, TSE 24, 16-35L, 11-24L, 24-70L, 85L, and 70-200L. Going forward, i don't want as many overlapping lens. Prefer to go with the EF 70-200 f2.8L III, RF 24-70L, RF 85L and one of 14-35L or 15-35L. Maybe sometime down the line, I may add a TSE back in the mix, but I'm trying to go with a more limited set of lens going forward.

5ds with 16-35 f4L at F16, 1/3 sec

5dsR with 11-24 F4L at F16, 0.8 sec

Edited on Aug 29, 2021 at 06:17 PM · View previous versions

Aug 29, 2021 at 06:09 PM

khurram1
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.2 #20 · p.2 #20 · Canon RF 14-35 f/4L IS USM Ongoing Review

stanj wrote:
Right, so on the topic of that destruction, let's look at something that a "typical landscape shooter" may care about, meaning f8. The respective areas are synchronized across the frames, so if they're somewhat offset it has to do with the fact that both 35mm frames aren't exactly 35mm.

So the 14-35L looks wider - i"m assuming its probably around 32 or 33mm? the 15-35L seems to have a bit more punch and contrast when looking at the roof and net, but that could be because it looks to be a larger focal length.

Aug 29, 2021 at 06:16 PM

1 2 3 … 11 12 end
FM Forums \| Canon Forum \| Join Upload & Sell 1 2 3 … 11 12 end

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.