The 24-105mm Changed my View!

[Loupey]

You’ve probably heard me preaching the use of prime lenses before . Despite owning 3 Canon zooms (17-40mm, 24-70mm, 70-200mm), I’ve never been overly impressed by them.

With the above or my 28mm and 50mm primes, I did not have what I considered a versatile walk-about lens. I’ve been eyeing the 24-105mm f/4L IS for a while now for it’s wider zoom range and the IS. The f/4 was a bit of a turn off (why I originally went with the 24-70mm f/2.8L).

So I purchased the 24-105mm a few weeks ago and WOW what a lens! The first thing I did was shoot it wide open for a while. The resolution, contrast, and color rendition are outstanding. Stopping it down grains some improvement but the difference is very hard to see. There is a slight loss of resolution in the corners at the wide end and some distortion and vignetting is apparent when used with a full-frame camera. The lighter weight and smaller size compared to the 24-70mm is a welcome change for portability.

In fact, the resolution is so good that it was difficult to see the difference compared to the 28mm f/1.8 and 50mm f/1.4 primes. These primes in particular are quite soft wide open and I typically stop them down to no larger than f/2.8 – so much for fast non-L primes . So I promptly sold off those two in addition to the 17-40mm and 24-70mm and bought the 5D to go with the 24-105mm.

Here are two examples shot WIDE OPEN and HAND-HELD. The first one at 24mm with the 30D and the second one at 105mm at 1/15s (thank you IS!) with the 5D.