AmbientMike
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 p.2 #6 · p.2 #6 · Ultra wide lens for Canon - Manual or auto? Canon or 3rd party ? | |
moondigger wrote:
I used the 17-40 f/4L for several years. I was a bit wary of it at first, because I had heard the edges/corners were “bad,” but it was all I could reasonably afford at the time. (I wanted something wider and with better contrast than the 20-35 f/3.5-4.5 USM I had been shooting landscapes with.)
It turned out the “bad” edges/corners were greatly exaggerated. Stopped down a couple stops, the lens was reasonably sharp edge-to-edge, falling apart only in the far corners at 17-20 mm. Because it was primarily my landscape lens, I typically shot with it at f/8 or f/11, and only rarely had anything in the far corners that wasn’t already well outside the focal plane (foreground foliage close to the camera) or with little/no edge detail anyway (blue, grey, or cloudy sky). On those rare occasions when I had noticeable detail in a far corner, it was typically unimportant content that could be cropped or cloned out.
If you were a Canon shooter in those days, there really wasn’t a native lens wider than 24 mm with truly sharp corners. If you were dead serious about that one attribute, you were looking at adapted third-party lenses. As you mention, the Zeiss 18 and 21 were well-regarded, but crazy expensive. The Zuiko 21 f/3.5 was a reasonably-priced option, and the 21 f/2.0 was a very expensive option. For a zoom, the only game in town seemed to be the Nikon 14-24 (?) which was also expensive. The only one of these that I personally tried was the Zuiko 21 f/3.5. It delivered sharper corners than my 17-40, but also lower contrast and less color ‘pop.’ It also lacked the flexibility of the zoom, so if my preferred framing was wider than I could get at 21 mm, I had to use the 17-40 anyway.
So while any of these adapted lenses would give sharper corners than the Canon ultrawides, they all came with the obvious disadvantages of using adapted lenses — manual focus and aperture, no communication with the body, etc.
That finally changed when Canon released the 16-35 f/4L IS. Finally there was a native lens, with autofocus (and image stabilization!) that delivered corner-to-corner sharpness. And because it wasn’t one of the premium f/2.8 zooms, it was actually cheaper than most of the adapted options previously mentioned. Even now, in 2024, it’s one of the best-performing ultrawide lenses available for Canon bodies, which is why it was so frequently recommended earlier in the thread....Show more →
That's the thing, I need good performance into the corners on landscape but like you say, so much of the time 2 of your corners are sky  and it doesn’t really matter. If you look at the Photozone.de/Opticallimits test, the 17mm on 17-40 is OK at f/11, more than I like to stop down but you might be OK before then, too, if you don't need absolute sharpness in the extreme corners, and by 20mm things are better so you might be OK from there.
21/3.5 OM may have been my most used lens on film, really loved that lens, just didn't do well on digital on the 40D & maybe 5D, though, possibly because I had to pull it apart one time after it got wet. Also it's the older single coated, 24/2.8 single coated us really good though. I probably prefer a zoom at this point, but adding <21mm to, say, 28-70 or 24-105 would probably work really well
I'd much prefer image stabilization, Dustin Abbott reported 40% or some really high number good at 0.6 sec at 35mm on the 14-35!!! Definitely a plus, but the 17-40 is one if the lighter zooms, too, for just occasional use.
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