Canon 11-24mm f4L-an unscientific review

 

I just received my new Canon 11-24mm f4L ultra-wide angle lens.  This is Canon’s widest lens to date, and Canon claims it has the widest view of any rectilinear lens currently on the market for full-frame cameras. The reviews I have read of this lens are very good so far.   I thought I would share some of my own results, and some comparisons to my 16-35mm f4L, which is an excellent performer.

Here are some examples of the 11-24mm f4’s field of view.  The difference between 16mm and 11mm was pretty surprising to me.  Even the difference between 11mm and 14mm is quite noticeable.

 

Here is a corner comparison with the Canon 16-35mm f4L.  Once again, this is very unscientific.  I did use a steady tripod, a level camera, mirror lockup and ISO 100 for each shot.  I noticed a tiny bit more chromatic aberration with the 11-24mm, which to me isn’t a big deal.  I corrected for this, along with white balance.  If you look closely, at least to me (especially in the horizontal lines) it looks like the CA corrected better with the 11-24mm f4L.  No sharpening or noise reduction was added.  All images were shot in Raw, corrected for white balance and chromatic aberration in Lightroom, and resized in Photoshop.  These examples are all the extreme lower right corner, cropped in from the left and top.   The first image is an example of the setup.

 

 

This test gives me a rough idea of corner performance, and it looks to me like the 11-24mm f4L results are pretty similar to the 16-35mm f4L, with a slight advantage to the 16-35mm f4L.  Both lenses are very sharp in the center.  I did some test shots with both lenses at 16mm and the 11mm-24mm  f4L came out ahead (zooming in a little helped with resolution for this test).  Also, I did tests at f16 and f22, and the results were similar just with diffraction added to the equation.

Here’s a quick comparison of the extreme upper right corner of each lens, with a bit more distance from the target.  Both images were shot at f8, ISO 400, 11mm with the 11-24 and 16mm with the 16-35.

This lens is heavy, expensive, and awesome.  I have a feeling many photographers are going to find a way to get a hold of one.  I am not much of a gear guy, so take this review with a grain of salt.  If you want to read some more technical reviews, they are starting to pour in.  Here are a few good ones:

youtube

petapixel.com

Northlight-Images.co

I like to mostly focus more on the picture taking aspect of photography, and am excited to take this lens out into the field and see how it performs in real world situations.