Excellent Image Quality, with Optical Compromises
The Garden Magazine Guy โ 4 out of 5 stars
The Canon RF 14โ35mm f/4 L is a compact, lightweight professional wide-angle zoom lens that delivers excellent image quality, with impressive sharpness, contrast, colour and fine detail. It's particularly well suited to landscape, architecture and garden photography, and the extra-wide 14mm focal length is very useful. However, Canon giveth and Canon taketh away! Compared with the older EF 16โ35mm f/4 L, Canon extends the wide end to 14mm by relying heavily on software correction instead of fully correcting the lens optically. At 14mm, severe barrel distortion and vignetting call for substantial digital correction, stretching the image edges and reducing effective corner resolution. At the other end of the zoom range, 35mm is slightly soft at f/4 and needs to be stopped down to f/5.6 for better sharpness. Despite these compromises, the lens produces beautiful, detailed photographs across most of its zoom range, with excellent flare resistance and the convenience of a relatively compact design. It's a very capable L-series wide-angle zoom, though the reliance on heavy software correction is disappointing for a premium lens. Nevertheless, it's one of Canonโs sharpest wide zooms and one of the better value options in the Canon range!