Canon RF 28mm F2.8 STM Pancake Lens Review | Big Fun in a Tiny Package!

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Hi I'm Dustin Abbott and I'm here today to give you my video review of the Canon RF 28mm f2.8 STM
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This is Canon's first RF mount pancake lens and I have to say it is a winner. It's less than an
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inch long but with very good optics and a price point of about 300 US dollars which ties for the
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cheapest full-frame RF lens in existence at the moment. Now I recognize that a lot of people are
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not going to be excited over a a 28 millimeter lens and b a lens with a maximum aperture of f2.8
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but the combination as it applies to this particular lens makes for a much more interesting
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lens in practice than maybe what it does on paper and there are a lot of reasons to consider this
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little lens. We're going to dive into all of them right after a word from our sponsor
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So we'll start by taking a look at the overall build and design here
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This obviously is a very unique lens for its incredibly compact size
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It is less than an inch long. It is 24.7 millimeters and it is right over 69 millimeters in diameter or 2.7 inches
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It weighs in at just 120 grams or right over four ounces
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making it the lightest lens that we've seen in a long time from Canon with very few exceptions
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I think only maybe the EF-M 22mm f2 is a lighter lens than what this one is
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And so you would be tempted to think that this is maybe another plastic fantastic
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but really the build quality here is fairly nice. There's not a lot here, but what is here is fairly nice
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particularly when you consider the build quality that we used to see on lenses like, you know, Canon's EF 50mm f1.8 back in the day with a plastic lens mount
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and they call it the plastic fantastic for a reason. This lens doesn't feel plasticky necessarily, although there are engineered plastics there in
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the barrel. It feels like a decently made lens and definitely unlike say the focus ring or the
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switches on those old cheap lenses from Canon, everything here feels fairly substantial
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Now, unfortunately, what has not improved is Canon's policy for non-L series lenses. And so
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no included lens hood here, nothing like weather sealing or anything like that. Canon's approach
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continues to be bare bones for its non-L series lenses. So if you want a lens hood for it, one does
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exist and it unfortunately costs an additional $45 and that is Canon's EW55C lens hood. I have
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really harped on the design with the RF 50 millimeter and RF 16 millimeter lenses in that
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they have a switch that allows you to choose between the lens functioning as a manual focus
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ring and then a control ring. However, what the switch did not allow you to do is actually choose
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to go right into manual focus. And so you had a choice between basically focus and control
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but if you switched into the focus mode, you still had to select manual focus elsewhere
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And I found it to be a fidgety process. Fortunately, Canon has listened to the advice
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And our revised switch here is very helpful in that it's a three position switch, AF on one side, in the middle it is control, and on the far left it is manual focus
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And so you finally have the ability to directly control manual focus right from the actual switch there itself
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They've also cleverly designed the switch to be a transverse way in the way that it's mounted and so that it fits into that narrow barrel a little bit better
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And I would say that the feel of the switch overall and this raised area is a little bit nicer than on either the 16 or 50 millimeter lenses
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I have only one complaint here and that is that there's not maybe a strong enough detent at the control position
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So it's not hard with the amount of force you need to start from either the AF or the MF position
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It's not hard to go right past that center position and a little bit harder to control it to stop there in the center
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So I would have liked that center detent to be just a little bit stronger But that a very mild complaint because overall we have got a vastly improved process here So as noted you can choose to manual focus You can choose for the ring to do nothing in the AF position
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Or if it's in the control position, whatever value assigned from within the camera
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be it controlling ISO, controlling exposure compensation, aperture control, whatever you want, you can program into that from within the camera
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And so it just gives you another area of ability to control the camera
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And so it is a very useful function. And I will say that the ring here, while it's very, very tiny, it's just a few millimeters wide
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the way that they have designed it is that it has a really good grip to it, and it also has some nice damping to it
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And I do find that compared to either the 16 or 50 millimeter lenses
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that the actual manual focus process is better. I could see some real visible steps in manually focusing those older lenses
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This new lens, it seems to be a little bit more responsive, and so the manual focus process is
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much better. And I will note that I love Canon's focus guide that they have for manual focus
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It works really, really well, and I just appreciate the process. You'll automatically
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magnify if you have it set up for that, any of those kind of things. And so anyway
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just a better executed process here. Up front, we have a 55 millimeter front filter thread
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and if you do happen to have the lens hood, it's a very narrow hood and those filter threads will be
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replicated at the front of that and so that you continue to have the ability to filter the lens
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The aperture iris itself is seven blades. It keeps a reasonable circular shape but as you can see
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here even at f5.6, just two stops down, you can pretty clearly see the seven aperture blades and
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their shape there. Minimum focus distance is useful here. It can focus as closely as 23 centimeters
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or 9.1 inches and gives you a useful 0.17 times magnification. That's obviously not any kind of
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record setting, but it is an extremely useful figure and allows you to get some decent up-close
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shots. It just adds to the variety of the images that you can take with this particular lens and
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up-close performance continues to be very good. Now autofocus comes via Canon's SDM or stepping
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focus motor. And in this case, it's a reasonably well executed one. Canon in its marketing language
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which makes it sound as if it's silent. It's not really silent. You will hear some light whirring
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as it goes back and forth about its business. And in a quiet environment
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you will hear mild focus sounds, but at the same time, it's not noisy
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It shouldn't be disruptive even for video capture with the onboard microphones
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As you can see here, focus speed is fairly good. There's just a bit of a split second pause
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while inertia builds before the focus actually changes. And so if you're going from one big focus change
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in one direction or the other, there's a little bit of a split second spool up and then it moves
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fairly quickly. As you can see, you can also might've noticed that it was a little bit more
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responsive outside and brighter light than what it was indoors and in lower lighting conditions
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I did find that focus stayed nice and sticky on the eye and Canon has gotten very good at that
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And so both in the practice of tracking the eye, but then also in focus results, say of the
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pets, you can see that autofocus delivered very crisply focused results. Now when it comes to the
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video side of things, that minor pause that we saw for stills autofocus becomes a little bit more
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pronounced in video mode. And that I found that the lens was not super responsive for video pulls
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And you can see quite a bit of a lag before focus starts to move. Focus pulls are not super fast
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The other thing that kind of really draws your attention to it is the fact that there is a significant amount of focus breathing. So unfortunately, you can really see the focus
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change taking place. And so it's not as smooth or well damped as what you might like. I also found
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that when doing my hand tests, that it just really wasn't all that responsive to the change. So when
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I removed the hand, it's like there was just this pause before it decided to move on to my eye and
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vice versa. And so I would say that the focus appears to be fine. Like if I was just out shooting
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video clips. It seemed to be fine for when I'm moving along and it's more minor focus changes
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but if you have to do any kind of major focus pull, it's not a fantastic video lens. And so it
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doesn't respond well to abrupt action. And so for that reason, it's not going to be maybe a top
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video choice and probably not a top choice for photographing action, even in stills mode either
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At the same time, however, autofocus was good enough in situations. I had very good focus
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accuracy. For shooting photography, I had very, very little complaints to point to. I just didn't
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love it so much for video capture. Though again, if you're shooting a static shot or something with
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minor focus changes, not going to be any problem. Now the optical design here is eight elements in
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six groups. And as you can see from the MTF chart, this points to a pretty strong optical
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performance And even though I reviewed on the current highest resolution point of Canon RF bodies the 45 megapixel EOS R5 I found that the lens was a great match for that sensor and produced really really great looking
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results. Let's dive in and let's break it down to show you just how good the actual optical
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performance is. So let's start by taking a look at vignette and distortion. As you can see
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there's definitely some significant barrel distortion. So this lens, when I framed it
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It shows the JPEG in the camera, and so it shows it actually framed up tight, more like what you see here on the right
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You can see the actual raw image has left plenty of space for correction
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My manual corrections had a plus 21 to correct for the barrel distortion
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You can see that that does a good job inside here, but towards the outward edges, there's a little bit of kind of a horn that starts to come up as it peaks there a little bit
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And you can see vignette, however, required me to max out the slider. So pretty much four stops there in the corners
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And you can see that if we switch back here, this has been corrected with the correction profile
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You can see that the lines are a little bit cleaner, if not perfect there
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Now the lens actually does a pretty good job of correcting for aberrations
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particularly when it comes to the longitudinal type. You can see there's just a tiny bit of green fringing after the plane of focus
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and before the plane of focus it's really quite neutral and so that's not a bad performance at
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all here's a secondary look you can see here even on this text that it really holds up quite well
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now the more probable type of just of aberrations with something like this are going to be the
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lateral type near the edge of the frame and if corrections are turned off you will see just a
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bit of fringing here in this area you can see a little bit of purple a little bit of green there
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But this is the one-click type that's very easy to clean up and will pretty much automatically be corrected when you bring it either into a JPEG or you bring it into your editing software with a RAW file
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Nothing too critical so far. And if we take a look at our resolution, we saw from the MTF chart that, first of all, it's a very strong lens consistently across until just really the outside edge
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And so we'll take a look to see if that's the case. Again, this is the 45 megapixel ESR5, and I'm showing the results at 200% magnification
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In the center of the frame, it looks really, really strong. Good contrast, good detail there
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Mid-frame also looks really excellent. And as we pan down here towards the corner, we can see we've got good detail there
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And as we get off towards the corner, really, I actually think it looks quite good
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I don't see any kind of significant drop-off there, and as far as corners go, that's pretty strong
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Now that great contrast in detail shows up in an image like this, that if I punch into a pixel level, you can see the amount of just fine details that it's captured there
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You know, you talk about line pairs. Well, this is resolving really, really fine details here, and it shows how strong the lens actually is in real-world use
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That's important because it enables you to shoot in very low-light conditions
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this was ISO 1600 but only 125th of a second and so I mean I was already pushing on down there very
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dim lighting conditions you can see because it's sharp wide open I could shoot at f2.8 I can get a
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nice looking image without being too concerned about needing to for example stop down to get
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additional sharpness which causes you to raise the ISO etc etc another f2.8 shot and so it shows a
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pretty good three-dimensional subject delineation there. And if we punch into a pixel level
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you can see the detail and contrast is really good. No bleeding at the edges there
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Likewise here, this is at f2.8 and more of a landscape type image. And you can see that really
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it's right off to the corners. I think that that overall looks really quite good. There's not a lot
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there for me to complain about. Now, if you compare f2.8 to f4 and stop down that stop
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we can see just a little tiny bit more contrast in the center of the frame
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Not a significant difference there. The mid-frame, however, you can see that contrast has really stepped up
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And if we look down here towards the corner, you can see there's also a significant improvement there
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We'll check elsewhere for centering, and you can see here that over on this left side, everything looks good
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Up into this upper left corner, consistent performance, and up into the upper right corner also looking good
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And so we have got a lens here that is nicely centered
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And so this is a really strong sharpness and contrast performance from f4 to f5.6
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Let's see if there's any additional gains there. In the center of the frame, tiny bit more contrast, but we're already at really fantastic levels
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Likewise, in the mid frame, it was already really good. It's just a little bit better there
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Pop over on this side and you can see that the detail is really great down here in the corner looking at Sir
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Winston looking really sharp the Queen Detail is just really looking good a little bit extra, you know
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Contrast there and the hair that you can see so the darks are just a little bit darker Darker the light area is just a little bit brighter but already we at really really strong levels Now from f5 to f8
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you won't get any more real additional gains because diffraction is just going to start up
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here and so it holds about its own it's about equal but if you move past f8 you'll get increasingly
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dropping levels of contrast and detail due to diffraction. Minimum aperture is f22, but you can
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see the image is significantly softened by that point due to the effects of diffraction. Now we
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can see at our minimum focus distance that if we take a look at those results, the detail and
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contrast is still really, really good. So that's going to help with our up-close performance
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And I found that in real-world shooting conditions, even with these shiny surfaces here that would be
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affected by any kind of aberrations we can see that the detail holds up really nicely
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another shot here this represents minimum focus as close as i could get and still focus but i could
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see up close that the detail looks really really good and you can see that if you can get this close
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and you get your background a little bit away you can get a reasonably blurred out background now
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even here the background being not all that far away the bokeh i think looks pretty good
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in this situation you can see some outlining first of all I want to point out the detail
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there looks great and if we look towards the bokeh bokeh is okay it's not fantastic but it's
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certainly not bad either here's another image where the background is further away and I think
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that the quality of the bokeh looks pretty good I've also seen some situations where it can get
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a little busier if you're closer to the background and it's more complex this shot here shows a
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little bit of what I'm talking about in that, again, I think the subject looks fantastic, but
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if you look down in this area, these branches that have hard edges, there's outlining to them
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There's some outlining in the bokeh and this transition zone. You know, it doesn't look
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fabulous, but again, it's a pancake lens with a maximum aperture of f2.8. Overall, that's pretty
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great. One very positive I would point to for the bokeh is that it handles specular highlights
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pretty well. I don't see any kind of onion bokeh. There's not any kind of aberrations
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fringing in there. And so that looks pretty good and allows you again to produce nice looking
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images. I'm always reminded of how much I enjoy Canon colors. And you can see here that in this
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image, detail and contrast look great, but also the colors are nice and rich. Another shot here
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and you can just see the nice saturation levels, nice detail. And again here, fairly decent bokeh
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but overall the image is just pleasing due to the good color. Now one final area to evaluate and it doesn't come off so well and that's when it comes to
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flare resistance. As noted the lens hood is not included and Canon probably should include it for
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reasons like this. There are just a lot of different ways where I saw various flaring
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ghosting artifacts and as we see here if we pan with the camera across the sun that there's
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definitely different things that show up whether we're shooting at f2.8 or if we stop down a bit
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it just doesn't ever quite go away and so that's certainly an area of one vulnerability for the
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lens. So in conclusion this is an intriguing lens because not only is it so handy to bring along and
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unique amongst all of the Canon lenses and it can be somewhat transformative about the way that your
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camera actually acts or performs here in that the lens is really only as deep on my R5 as what the
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actual grip is. So it means that you can fit this camera all of a sudden into some spaces that you
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certainly couldn't before. And so it makes it much easier to bring along. Some people will love it
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for that attribute. I think it's a great option for APS-C because that focal length of 28 millimeters
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translates to 45 millimeters on APS-C. And there really aren't a lot of RF lenses on APS-C to look
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to. This is one that's going to fit well on the smaller bodies and optically it's going to work
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really well. And as we saw the optical performance means that even that little bit that gets a little
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bit softer at the edge of the frame is completely cut off on the crop sensor. And so this is a lens
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that holds up really well for APS-C use. So if you're looking for a lens that is portable, that's
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discreet, but still high performing optically and won't break the bank, I think the Canon RF 28
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millimeter f2.8 STM is a great option to consider for your EOS R system camera. You may also find
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that your appreciation for the 28 millimeter focal length grows as you use it because it may
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just be better than what you expect. I'm Dustin Abbott and if you'll look in the description down
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below you can find linkage to my full text review also to the image gallery and there are buying
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links there if you'd like to purchase one for yourself. As always thanks for watching have a
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great day and let the light in

Canon RF 28mm F2.8 STM Pancake Lens Review | Big Fun in a Tiny Package!

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Canon RF 28mm F2.8 STM Pancake Lens Review | Big Fun in a Tiny Package!

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