I went to the camera store today and they happened to have four used Canon lenses that just came in. All were in excellent condition with just the slightest wear. Of course, while trying them out my mind starting figuring out a way to afford the 24L. I was sure it would end up in my bag I spent a few minutes with each lens, trying a couple indoor and outdoor shots at different apertures. I couldn't wait to get home and see the results, and get the wheels turning to buy the 24L. I'm posting this on the alternative forum because that's what I am using for comparison of these lenses.
Canon 24/1.4. My first impression was WOW! What a nice lens. I felt very lucky to give this lens a go outside. I took pictures of the same scene outside from f/1.4-11. The picture quality is much poorer than I expected. Nowhere near the results Hubsand gets with his 24/1.4. At f/1.4 sharpness is OK in the center, but the focus plane isn't flat and the only thing really in focus is the center of the picture. At f/2.8 center sharpness is a better, but the plane of focus is still poor across the frame. The right and left edges of the horizontal frame don't hold up (forget about the corners). Stopped down further the lens shows excellent center sharpness but the sharpness across the frame is still lacking. Even at f8 and 11 the right/left edges of the frame aren't nearly as sharp as the center. At all apertures there is CA, that's not completely correctable, and purple fringing that remains after the best CA adjustments. If you need f/1.4 this is the lens to have. Stopped down, my excellent Tamron 24/2.5 does better (better sharpness across the frame, less CA, almost no PF, and better corner sharpness stopped down). I also prefer the colors, micro-contrast, and 3D look of the Tamron.
Canon 24/2.8. Not as bad as I thought it would be but didn't have the sharpness across the frame at any aperture. Less PF than the 24L, but less sharpness and more CA to go along with it. Colors seemed muted.
Canon 50/2.5 Macro, with the Life Size Converter. I've heard a lot of good reports about this lens. I tried it first without the Canon converter. It's not bad, but it's not stellar either. Resolution didn't hold up as well in the corners as I expected. At normal distances it didn't have the whole frame performance of the Zuiko 50/3.5 macro or the Zuiko 50/1.2. At macro it didn't have a flat field of focus (I'm not talking about geometric distortion). With the Life size Converter, the lens was able to reach 1:1 macro, but the results were average. My Vivitar Series 1 90/2.5 with it's 1:1 converter would kick major but here. Even my Sigma 50/2.8 macro does macro better, and doesn't need a converter to go to 1:1.
Canon 28-135 IS. I had the least hope for this lens, as I've heard it's just average for FF digital. I was surprised with better than expected performance. Corner performance was poor at 28mm, but much better by 35mm. Easily correctable CA and not too much PF. IS was nice, as I was able to get decent pics at 28mm 1/8sec, and 135mm 1/50sec. Considering the price, focal range, and IS this isn’t a bad choice for a travel lens.
I'm not bashing Canon. I know they make their share of excellent lenses and cameras. I just wanted to share my experience. I have RAW files from all lenses and can add some images here if anyone wants to see some samples. After looking the Canon 24L images at home on my monitor I had to go out and shoot the Tamron 24/2.5 to see if I was being harsh on the 24L. I wasn't. I was hoping to find the equivelant of Hubsand's copy. This copy didn't come close.
That's really interesting Paul - thanks for sharing it. Hubsand's 24 did get me thinking, but as he said, YMMV. Could it be that Canon have heard the wideangle criticism and rapped the knuckles of the manufacturing and QC operations? Hubsand's 24 was a new one, I recall. Was the 24f1.4 you tried new or used and old? I would be interested to know.
I take it this comparison was done on the Kodak SLR/c? Would it give the same results as a Canon FF body, all else being equal?
I'm interested in how the Sigma 50 macro measures up to the Canon equivalent for general photography. What's your opinion? Any need to go "exotic" also in this case (like you I always thought the Canon 50 macro was a sure buy)?
Could it be your camera rather than all the lenses. What is the point other than maybe there is
a difference from lens to lens. Most test contradict your test of the 50 macro and although the 24L is
not as good as the 35L most people would not rate it as low as you have.
I think that one has to use a lens for a period of time to get a feel for it.
I am not shocked by any of the results. The 50mm canon micro is a highly touted lens. In the defense of the 50mm canon macro it is a 20 year old design. My copy was extremely sharp. In fact it is only infintesmially less sharp than my contax 60mm. BUT the the distortion of the 50mm canon macro is simply unacceptable for flat field work. The distortion on mine was so bad that correcting it in PS took the bite out of the sharpness. The contax 60mm is exemplarly in this respect.
I tested several canon 50mm macros. While sharpness varied from copy to copy The distortion was the same in all. In fact even the sigma 50mm macro is better than the canon. It is as sharp and with less distortion. But the contax is king. I think the fact that canon doesn't have a relatively distortion free 50mm macro for their full frame shooters is, well, embarassing.
Each lens is like a person, very individual and unique. Some are sharp some are not. You need to shoot with a bunch of the same type of lenses and pick the sharpest. Some lines of lenses have a tendancy to be consistently sharper than others, primes being sharper than zooms...but all primes are not sharp. Finding a "Tack Sharp" lens is difficult.
After reading stories like this, I would never trust nor buy a Used Canon AF lens. It seems worth the bucks to buy new so you have a much better chance of winning the Canon lens lottery and not ending up with someone elses loosing lens. I must say that I'm not bashing Canon in saying this either as the only two Canon lenses I own are really amazingly sharp and were purchased new in the past two months. They were the 85mm 1.8 and the plastic wonder 50mm 1.8.
It took me five years to work up the enthusiasm to bother trying the costly 24L, so widespread are reports of its mediocrity. Only in the interest of completeness did I reluctantly track down an ex-demo 24L from Adorama to include in the 24mm World Cup - I was as surprised as the next man to find it so good.
I've just tested it against the CZ21 by using 4 feet of foot zoom: the results will be online soon.
Your experience with the lens seems to coincide with Klaus Schroff's, and the consensus view. Better ones (or at least one!) must be out there . . . .
Yes, the results are not shocking, although I think that must have been a particularly bad copy of the 50 Macro. The distortion that several of you have mentioned is not apparent at all to me on 1.6x crop. Does it turn that bad beyond the crop? Or are you speaking of field curvature?
I was most surprised was to see the sharpness drop off at the edge of the horizontal frame, far from the corner, "B" area - center of image: http://www.imaginenature.com/Can24L_mid.jpg
Edited by pdmphoto on Feb 25, 2007 at 10:11 AM GMT
Edited by pdmphoto on Feb 25, 2007 at 10:11 AM GMT
I dunno...Makes me wonder where the dealer got ALL bad lenses of different lots and different types...If I got 4 bad-uns in a row I'd worry a little about the camera, unless I suspected the lenses where coming from an aggregator of 2nd quality culls...Very interesting posts...Most of all it makes the point that if a certain lens is critical to your work, you really should look through it and test in on your own equip before throwing down big $$$ for the L and other glass.
And here's the excellent copy of the Tamron 24/2.5 adaptall I'm often raving mad about. also at F8, but this lens does even better up to f/16. I took this about an hour later, with the "sun" in the same direction (behind me). Both this and the Canon 24L shot have 100, 0.6 unsharp mask applied. That's a little extreme (especially on my SLR/c), but it does help me to judge sharpness across the frame better:
eddyboy wrote:
I dunno...Makes me wonder where the dealer got ALL bad lenses of different lots and different types...If I got 4 bad-uns in a row I'd worry a little about the camera, unless I suspected the lenses where coming from an aggregator of 2nd quality culls...Very interesting posts...Most of all it makes the point that if a certain lens is critical to your work, you really should look through it and test in on your own equip before throwing down big $$$ for the L and other glass.
I don't think the lenses I tested were necessarily bad. I've been obsessing over alternative lenses for almost two years now and have aquired some excellent ones. The lenses I tried just don't meaasure up to that standard. I thought the 28-135 IS did pretty well once you got past the 28mm mark - considering it's range, features, price, and IS.
As you can see from the cheap Tamron 24mm shot, and many I posted over the last year - there's nothing too wrong with my camera
Sorry...not dissing your camera...Just not a likely event to run into a bunch of Canon lenses that you don't like....Personally, however, I use Nikkor and Leitz lenses on a 5D. Because they're great and, I already own em
So Paul, your tests are with your Kodak SLR/c? Is that correct? What do you think would be the possibility that there might be some sort of incompatibility with the sensor in that camera and the Canon 24. I say this particularly noting the extreme corner CA and having heard horror stories about the Kodak SLR sensor and this very issue with certain wide angle lenses which do not show this issue with say a full frame Canon body.
Tiraq, Purple fringing and CA is a lens issue. The only issue that is specific to the SLR/c (and SLR/n) is the color shift issue across the frame. The Canon 24L did not have this problem. The Canon 24/2.8 did show some of this to a small degree. For some reason it tends to happen with cheaper lenses, but not the known better ones. The only reason CA may look worse on a Kodak FF vs a Canon is that there is no AA filter on the Kodak. An AA filter may help mute CA (due to the edge being less defined), but the lack of one (or anything else with the Kodaks sensor) doesn't make CA or PF. All known good wide angle lenses perform superbly on my SLR/c. I had the Tamron 14, Zuiko 18, Zuiko 21/2, 21/3.5 and more 24mm lenses than I can count. all performed as reported by Canon FF users - with the exception of color shift seen one one or two of them.
Edit: there is the possibility that Canon do some things in firmware to correct for CA or PF with some of their lenses. Of course, the same thing could be done in PP.
Edited by pdmphoto on Feb 25, 2007 at 10:24 AM GMT
I have a theory regarding the quality of used lenses found at photography stores. Note that I'm saying this in general, as opposed to in specific.
I hypothesize that the best performing used lenses are sold to and through friends and acquaintances, then through specialty sites like FM's B&S Forum, where quality and reputation are rather important, as opposed to lens condition and price.
Concordantly, "duds", as it were, would be sold on eBay, where one can get a good price because of the mint condition of a lens, regardless of its optical performance, or lack thereof. Then, one would attempt to sell or trade it in to the local camera store that, again, will pretty much care about the physical condition of the lens, as opposed to its optical performance.
Although you wouldn't get as much money for your lens selling it to a store, or even on eBay sometimes, you don't have to worry about having a dud; you merely pass it on and make it someone else's problem, with the store or eBay getting a cut of each transaction.
So, basically, buying a used lens on eBay or from a camera store, without knowing the seller which would imply a sort of heads-up about the optical quality, you're pretty likely to get a mediocre sample. The best samples would be either kept, or sold to friends, or go through places like the FM B&S Forum.
When I buy a lens on eBay, I make it a point to play the New-In-Box Lottery(tm).
I spent a few minutes with each lens, trying a couple indoor and outdoor shots at different apertures. I couldn't wait to get home and see the results, and get the wheels turning to buy the 24L. I'm posting this on the alternative forum because that's what I am using for comparison of these lenses.