Canon RF mount The two cheapest lenses are really good 20 April 2022

 

If you have lots of money to spend on high end RF mount Canon lenses, Canon  has you covered and will gladly take your money in exchange for some of the best glass you can buy.

Right at the top sits the recently announced RF 1200mm f8 which in Australia can be pre-ordered for around $35,000.

But Canon’s product development people are very well aware that in order to entice buyers into the mirrorless RF mount system they also need to offer convincing options at the budget end of the price spectrum.

The two smallest and least expensive Canon RF mount lenses are the 50mm f1.8 at around AUD330 and the 16mm f2.8 costing around AUD550.

Some reviewers and some contributors like to dismiss these little lenses as being unworthy of serious consideration. On what basis they do this is not always clear.

I used both of them to photograph a recent day at the Sydney Royal Easter Show and was very pleased with the results obtained.

You can read my review on this blog of the 50mm here

And the 16mm here.

For this post I take one photo made hand held with each lens. I crop each image severely and treat the crop with Adobe Super Resolution then output the resulting image as a JPG which you see here. 

This little experiment shows that each lens can transfer an enormous amount of clear, sharp detail from subject to image file.

The first photo is of the woodchop stadium.

This was made hand held with the RF 16mm f2.8 at f7.1.      I show the full frame then the crop which is 3 Mpx , representing 6.6% of the full image. Running this through the super resolution process doubles the resolution to 6 Mpx. This does not magically add real information but does clean up edges and reduce jaggies.  You can see that even at this huge level of enlargement good detail and clarity are retained.  At this aperture excellent sharpness covers about 95% of the frame excepting only the far corners.

 

 

 The second photo is a general crowd scene, handheld with the 50mm f1.8 at f11. The crop is of people watching a horse handler. It is 2.5 Mpx which represents 5.5% of the whole frame. Running the crop through Super Resolution doubles the image size to 5 Mpx .  Again you can see that good detail and clarity are retained, testament to the quality which can be delivered by this very inexpensive little lens. 

 

 

 

 Conclusion

Canon’s budget RF mount lenses can deliver remarkably good results if used thoughtfully. Yes both the lenses discussed here fall short of absolute perfection particularly at their widest aperture. But at smaller apertures (larger f stop numbers) they are capable of very high sharpness, resolution and clarity.

Both these lenses are highly recommended.