excellent for high quality travel pictures
For starters some background: In June this year I bought the new 40mm pancake which reminded me that prime lenses are preferable in many cases. Their discrete size and the lightweight prove beneficial when walking around; but also the fact that they force not to be lazy about image composition I like.
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Whilst the 40mm is so affordable that it was a risk free just-for-fun purchase, this is certainly not true for the 28mm. It is simply expensive. Up to now I keep wondering what else I could have bought for the money.
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The key question is, is it worth that price? My first thought when I got it was 'what a bore'; it is rather unexciting in particular when mounted on my 5DII (the pancake is different in this respect). But how does it perform?
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And that is excellent. Sharpness is just great starting at f2.8; you may find reviews stating that full open the extreme borders show some problems, but these are minimal - they appear just a bit softer. Remember, this is a wide angle lens! Chromatic errors are nearly absent. Color rendition is good as well, albeit perhaps a bit cool. The stabilizer works as advertised, although at 100% I can see some blurring as of 1/6th. Vignetting (up to f4.5) and distortion are visible, but readily corrected in Lightroom.
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However correct the distortion? Any wide angle lens distorts a face towards the outer edges by their extreme perspective. However the distortion characteristic of this lens tends to mitigate this effect... I will not correct such images, I like the distortion characteristic of this lens!
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This lens really shows its benefits when shooting video. Although I am not into video and the 5DII remains a bit awkward for this purpose I've shot my most professional looking videos since I purchased this lens.
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For me the bottom line is that is does what I want it to do. It is a lightweight walk around lens which handles low light well and has excellent image quality. I bought it for travel photography and that is what it is excellent for. The price? Well, I will forget about it once in the future.
February 24, 2013
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