Canon RF 16mm F2.8 STM Review | Fun, Flawed, and Useful

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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott and I'm here today to give you my review of the Canon RF 16mm f2.8 STM
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This is a very welcome addition to the Canon RF catalog for a couple of reasons. First of all
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It is one of the very rare prime lenses that has come to the platform
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There's about 11 prime lenses, I think, that have come to the platform at this point
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with only about half of those falling under $1,000 and even fewer of those falling underneath $500
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This happens to be one of them, however, and it comes right after the RF 50mm f1.8
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as being, I think, probably the cheapest lens on the platform at $299 US dollars
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Obviously, that's going to make it a very welcome addition. And by the way, it shares a whole lot with that RF 50mm f1.8, which we'll talk about in just a moment when we talk about the build and the design
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Also very welcome, however, is the fact that this is a very wide focal length and covering almost 108 degrees field of view, which is quite wide
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and thus gives you a really nice wide-angle perspective with which, because the lens is so compact and lightweight, easy to bring along and easy to complement other lenses
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even if this probably won't be your primary focal length on most of your shooting outings
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Like many of Canon's wide-angle lenses, however, it is not without some optical flaws
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and we'll detail those in just a moment. First, however, a word from our sponsor
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So let's talk about the build and the design of this lens. As noted, it is, as you can see, very similar to the RF 50mm f1.8
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and is within a fraction of a millimeter in all of its dimensions
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And so this particular lens is 69.2 millimeters in diameter and right over 40 millimeters in length
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And so that is 2.7 inches by 1.6 inches. Both of them also weigh very close together
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This particular lens is 165 grams or 5.8 ounces, while the 50 millimeter is, I believe, 160 grams
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And so within just a few grams of each other, both of them share a 43 millimeter front filter thread
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which is not a very common one, but obviously it helps to be more common if you keep making lenses
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that share that particular filter size. It also is identical in terms of the outer housing and the
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build, the accent rings, and the fact that rather than having an AF-MF switch, it uses a control
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slash focus switch that designates what the control ring is going to do. So obviously in control mode
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it's going to basically do anything that you assign your control ring to do on a Canon RF lens
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And in focus mode, it in theory is going to make that same ring become the manual focus ring
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However, it is not a flawless transition. You still have to manually select manual focus
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somewhere else. And I would really prefer this design to be to where if you're in the
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focus mode that it automatically would switch to manual focus mode. Unfortunately, it doesn't do
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that. And I will note that when it comes to the focus action, it is not a delightful experience
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You can get the job done, but there's kind of a feeling of drag on the lens whenever
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particularly if you're making a major focus change. And so it is not the smoothest in operation
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Like many of the, well, basically all of Canon's non L series lenses, this comes, well
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without much of anything. It has the front and rear caps, but it doesn't come with a lens hood
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that'll set you back an additional $35. It has no weather sealing. It comes with no case or
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anything like that. What you see is what you get. You get just the lens. However, it's a little more
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reasonable at a price point like this versus a lens that's, you know, $700 or $800 as some of
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Canon's lenses that fall into that same kind of category. So I'm a little more critical of them
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Like the 50mm it has seven aperture blades which gives you a rounded aperture but when you stop you can get a decent looking sunburst 14 sunburst effect as you can see here This also has a very close minimum focus distance You can focus as closely
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as 13 centimeters, which as you can see, gets you very close to your subject, and it gives you a
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quite high 0.26 times maximum magnification. However, I will note with a wide angle lens like
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this getting so close to your subject, you do get some definite field curvature, and so only a little
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bit is going to be in focus at a time, and so you're going to have to use it judiciously
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At the same time, however, it is a genuinely useful thing and gives you some high degree
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of magnification and some interesting shots and the ability to defocus a background, even
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though you have a very wide focal length and obviously not a huge maximum aperture
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So when we talk about the focus motor here, this is an SDM focus system, and as already
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noted that comes with a bit of a drawback when it comes to the manual focus action. It's focused by
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wire and routed through that focus motor. And because the focus motor isn't entirely smooth
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or incredibly fast, you end up with that kind of manual focus drag. You'll also see that focus
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changes during video are quite slow. And so you have a very definite transition between one subject
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to another. There is some focused noise during operation. Fortunately, it's not extremely loud
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or extremely annoying, and I can only faintly hear it during video recording, so it probably
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won't be an issue for that. Now, on a positive note, this is going to be a very excellent focal
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length when it comes to doing something like vlogging, for example. This is obviously going
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to be an attractive option for vlogging for a lot of reasons, biggest one being the focal length
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which obviously is nice and wide and it gives you a great focal length for being able to record even
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a relative close distance away from the camera itself. As you can also see we have good tracking
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of the eye and thus autofocus is able to keep up here. So the combination of the focal length
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and the autofocus capability makes this I think a natural one to use for vlogging situations
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I'll also note that it does a stable job of tracking the eye and so that tends to be more
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of a strength for the lens. It's more major focus transitions that aren't so good. And even
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transitioning, for example, from my hand to my eye, you can just see that it's a very definite
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transition, not a fast transition, even though it does do a good job of picking it up
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Now, when it comes to ordinary operation, I had no issue with focus acquisition. I reviewed this
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on the Canon EOS R5. It has a great focus system, and I got great focus results. And so even though
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focus isn't the smoothest, it got the job done with reasonable speed and with very good accuracy
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And so at the end of the day, you know, it gets the job done much like the 50 millimeter f1.8
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It's not top tier, but you know, it works. And so I'm not going to complain too much about that
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So that leads us to a discussion of the actual image quality. And so let's dive in and take a
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look at what is a nuanced optical performance. So we're going to start by dealing with the elephant
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in the room, and that is that this lens is wholly dependent upon electronic corrections
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profiles to give it any kind of reasonable, usable optical performance. The vignette and
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the distortion are extremely heavy, as you can see, and if you had to manually correct them
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which fortunately you're not going to have to. If you did, however, you can see that it is a
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non-linear type distortion that you really can't, at least with the tools we currently have in a
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program like Lightroom, you really can't do a clean job because you end up with this kind of
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mustache pattern. Now, fortunately, being a first-party lens, profile correction is excellent
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which we'll get to in just a moment. But first of all, let's just take a look at what we've got here. This is a plus 70 to try to straighten out that bulge of the barrel distortion, which is
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maybe the highest figure I've ever had to dial in before. And you can see also with the vignette
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I'm having to max out the slider to illuminate the corners. And so this is a lens that needs a
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lot of correction. Now, here's a look at the correction that we get if we use the new standard
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profile here in Lightroom. And so you can see it's done a much better job with the distortion
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whereas it's not flawless. It is certainly very acceptable at this point. And the vignette
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you probably might want to correct even a hair more, but overall it has done a good job
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Now, what's strange is that this is what I saw in the viewfinder. This is the in-camera corrected
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JPEG. And as you can see, I was obviously trying to frame as I always do to fill the frame with this
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You can see that even after correction for the RAW image, there is a lot of room that is left
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And so this is a lens that in many ways is beneficial to shoot in RAW because for the
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simple reason, you're going to actually end up with a much wider angle of view. Obviously
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Canon has left a lot of room for correction And I don frankly know why it is correcting so much or cropping so much in camera to give you that JPEG result Now you going to want to really avoid putting people near the edge of the frame
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As you can see here, even after the correction or maybe because of the correction, you end up with some really weird distortion
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And so something to watch for here with someone on the basketball court
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You can see looking here that they are really, really stretched. And even this far into the frame, you can see that there's some unnatural stretching that is taking place
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So if you're going to take people shots, keep them towards the center of the frame and away from the edges
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Now this shot, for example, because I've composed with, you know, the little boy near the center of the frame, it's natural
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And his dad there, no problem there. But you can see that the door probably has been stretched
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But you can get away with that with doors. Doors are far less likely to be offended than what people are
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here's the uncorrected raw for an interior type space you can definitely see all of the bulge in
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the lines but i will again say that the correction profile does a really nice job of straightening
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out those lines and you know there's going to be a little bit of stretching towards the edges of the frame for interiors you might be able to get away with it however there is obviously going to
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be better options if your goal is just to shoot interior spaces now when it comes to chromatic
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aberration there is one type of chromatic aberration that it does very well with another
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that it doesn't. So in this case, longitudinal chromatic aberration, which shows up before and
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after the plane of focus is reasonably well controlled. You can see a little bit of fringing
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after the plane of focus, but, and maybe a hair before the plane of focus, nothing too bad there
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That's not going to be your problem. Now, lateral chromatic aberrations are going to be a different
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story. And even with, you know, corrections enabled here in Lightroom, you can see that
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there's still some leftover fringing that is there along the edge of the frame. Now, if I just go to
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a crop of that area and I have clicked off that correct for lateral chromatic aberration or correct
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chromatic aberration, you can see that that fringing is very, very strong. So that's obviously
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a weakness of this lens. Basically, all of the weaknesses are near the edge of the frame
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So next, we'll take a look at our resolution and contrast. Now, just again, to show what was
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originally there. This is what I saw in viewfinder when I was framing with this lens. So this is the
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JPEG of this raw image. And so you can see how much it has been corrected. And even though the
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Lightroom correction profile has been used on the raw image on the left, you can see just how tightly
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Canon is cropping in on that. And so this is a lens that is probably considerably wider than 16
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millimeters if you're shooting in raw. So we're looking at the 45 megapixel Canon EOS R5, and this
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is at a 200% magnification, so torture testing. But you can see that this lens passes the center of the frame with flying colors
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Very sharp, very nice contrast. Likewise, mid-frame looks very, very good. No issues there
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And as I kind of move towards the corner, you can see that there is some drop-off towards the edge
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but sharpness is not a weakness for this lens. This is a very sharp little lens
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Stopping down to F4 gives an inexorable amount of improvement in the center of the frame
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If we look out at the mid-frame, it's maybe a little bit brighter and a little bit more consistent there
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But if we pop down to the corner, we can see that the corners are definitely looking better
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Not necessarily with a lot of additional resolution, but with some additional contrast and just a better uniformity of your bright and shadow area
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Stopping on down to F5.6 produces very little improvement. And moving on to F8 doesn't really show much improvement there either
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And so you're going to achieve the max performance somewhere around F4 to F5.6
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And you can only, if you want to stop down further, you can use it more for depth of field than the need for increased sharpness
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Our minimum aperture is F22. But as you can see in the f2.8 to f22 comparison, there's definitely a lot of contrast that is lost, an acuity that is lost due to diffraction on a high resolution sensor like the EOS R5
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Now our minimum focus distance is only 13 centimeters here or 5.1 inches
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And as you can see, that means you're pretty much on top of your subject. However, you do get a nice high magnification figure of 0.26 times
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And while we can see some field curvature here, we can also see that performance is actually quite good up close with good contrast and good resolution, at least in the center of the frame
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And that is usable, I should say, out in real world results
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And as you can see here, there's nice detail here in the center of the marigold blossom
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And so plenty of resolution there. The background isn't blown away, but this is a 16mm wide angle lens
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Likewise in this image where there a little bit more room to the background we can see that we got good detail on the mushroom which is the subject And as we look up here you know the bokeh is you know fairly good You can definitely see some kind of odd deformation towards the edges of the frame
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but pretty circular over most of it with only a little bit of fringing. The transition zone is fairly busy, however
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And, you know, this is not going to be a lens that you're using to blow away backgrounds anyway
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And so under the circumstance, you know, that's certainly a usable addition to the lens
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Now I found in real world landscape type use that I was perfectly happy with the lens
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It provided a lot of punch and detail, rich colors. And you can see that the center is sharper than what the edges are here
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But overall, I mean that is a nice looking image and it is on a very high resolution body
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And even in low light situations, I was very happy with this
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It was a painless lens to use and I had a lot of fun using it
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Here's another landscape image where you can see that colors are nice and rich
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The detail throughout the frame is really excellent even on a high resolution body
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And so I think that that is the area that this lens excels for. Another area of real strength is flare resistance
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And you can see here wide open that there's basically nothing to point to in the image frame even though very bright sun is in the frame
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And as I pan back and forth wide open, you can see just the tiniest little flare or ghosting pattern
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Nothing to be concerned about. If we stop on down to f11, there's just a little bit more of ghosting artifacts
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But again, completely unobtrusive. And again, panning back and forth in video, you can see that there is very, very little to be concerned about
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Finally, a quick word on astrophotography. Obviously, this is going to be interesting for Astro because of the wide focal length
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and reasonably wide maximum aperture. So as you can see, you certainly can pick up a lot of star points
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And in the center of the frame, things look quite good. As we move off towards the edge of the frame, there is a little bit of stretching
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You can see some comb on the side. Now, I did note when I caught some brighter stars like here
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we got a little bit more of comb effect, as you can see here. But, I mean, at the end of the day, you can certainly use it for this purpose
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I would say that maybe the most challenging thing is going to be the fact that that really heavy vignette and its correction, you may have to tweak that a little bit
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Because I find that on an all-night sky like this, it tended to overcorrect, and so I had to play with that
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And even so, I still don't feel like I have the most even of illumination. However, I can't determine whether that's due to some environmental conditions
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You know, you can see some of the kind of cosmic dust of the Milky Way here that's impacting that
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But I did shoot multiple images and I felt like I had to play with vignette to try to get it somewhat appropriate
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And so anyway, certainly I think it's usable, particularly if you're on a tight budget and have no options
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But it wouldn't be a topic of mine either. So at the end of the day, there are obviously some real strengths and some real weaknesses for this lens
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You're definitely going to be relying on the optical corrections. or I shouldn't say optical corrections, but digital corrections that come either in camera
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or in post-processing software to make this a usable focal length. And as noted, you're probably
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going to want to avoid putting people near the edges of the frame for pretty obvious reasons
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But for landscape purposes, it produced beautiful images and highly detailed, great contrast
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and had no problem dealing with the 45 megapixel sensor of the EOS R5. And so I think for most
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practical purposes, it's going to be a very useful lens. I wouldn't necessarily reach for it for
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interiors, even though it does correct reasonably well, but certainly for landscape and some of the
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other type things you do with wide angle lenses, I think it's going to be very useful. And even for
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environmental portraiture, as long as you compose with your subject nowhere near the very edges of
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the frame, it should be just fine. But at the end of the day, this is, despite its flaws, going to be
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a very intriguing lens. Why? Because it's a great price point and it's a great size. And that means
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that it's going to be easy to bring along. And it's already on my personal wish list, even though
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I don't love the optical flaws, but there are very few, basically no lenses to compare with this
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particular lens. If you want a wide angle prime that is lightweight and easy to bring along
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So that makes it a desirable lens. Even if you know, you recognize it comes with a little bit
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of baggage. Isn't that true of so many things in life? If you want more information, you can check
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out my text review, which covers everything in detail. There's an image gallery there if you'd
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like to look at the photos that I've personally taken during my review period. And of course
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there's buying links if you'd like to pick one up for yourself. Link is to follow myself or Craig
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on social media to become a patron, to get channel merchandise. And if you haven't already
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please click that subscribe button right here on YouTube. Thanks for watching. Have a great day
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and let the light in

Canon RF 16mm F2.8 STM Review | Fun, Flawed, and Useful

Dustin Abbott

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Canon RF 16mm F2.8 STM Review | Fun, Flawed, and Useful

Dustin Abbott