Review: Canon EF 16-35mm F4 IS L USM

The Canon EF 16-35mm F4 IS L USM is Canon's new wide angle zoom lens. Why is it new and what is better or different from the 2.8 version? Richard went to Ibiza and did on-the-spot research. As Camera, he used the Canon EOS 1d Mark IV.

‘After all the hustle and bustle of recent times, I finally had a week's holiday. Just to shoot some nice pictures of beautiful Ibiza. Everyone knows this island as a party island, of course, but it is also a very beautiful island with a very nice capital (Eivissa). An ideal location to test the new 16-35.

As mentioned, I had the 1d4 with me, this Camera has an APS-H sensor, which means it has a crop factor of 1.3. That puts this body just in between the new Full frame Canon EOS 1DX Mark II and the crop sensor (1.6x) Canon EOS 7D II.

Now for the lens! Canon itself says the following: ‘This high-quality ultra-wide-angle fixed aperture zoom lens combines excellent optical performance with flexibility and delivers bright, sharp, expansive images with very low Distortion, making it ideal for shooting landscapes, architecture, photojournalism, travel and general use.’ And actually, this one sentence perfectly sums up the Lens!

But to go deeper into how I experienced the lens, I'll start with its appearance. The lens has fine dimensions (the Lens hood is also a lot smaller than that of the 2.8 version) and feels super nice. Lies well in the hand and feels very compact.

And then optically. The sharpness of this lens is top notch! Where the 2.8 version certainly isn't at the edges, this 4.0 has that completely under control. Another strong point of this lens is that it has very little Distortion along the edges of the photos. This is nice to see when shooting a panorama consisting of several photos. The photo above consists of 6 separate photos and were just automatically stiched in Lightroom CC. Distortion of straight lines when shooting buildings or alleys as in the photos below is also bizarre. Distortion correction is disabled in Lightroom in these photos.

The image stabiliser in this lens is also very nice. If you want to take a photo somewhere in a city at night, at 16mm you can even go as low as 0.5 sec (if you already have a reasonably steady hand) and at 35mm, 1/6 sec usually works as well. Here's a photo of a little square in Ibiza town.

Conclusion

I really like this 16-35 lens. I haven't used another one for almost the whole week. The range is fine in a city like Eivissa. Even in small spaces you can make a complete picture without getting a lot of Distortion. The stabiliser ensures you can still take sharp photos even in lower light. And the sharpness completes it.

Online and in conversations with some photographers, you read and hear reactions as if the one stop less Aperture is an insurmountable loss. I totally disagree. Lens sharpness and minimal Distortion are much more important. You hardly use the lens at 2.8.

Even in my event photography jobs, this is my default lens these days. If you shoot groups, at 2.8 all the people in the photo are never in focus. So you shoot at 4.0 (or sometimes even 5.0) to have everyone in focus.

Best of all, compared to the Canon 16-35 mm 2.8 USM II, this lens is 8 euros cheaper to rent!

If you want to experience this lens yourself, rent it now: Canon 16-35mm F/4L IS USM