Well, you can't draw that conclusion because its not an equal comparison. The better optics in the L-series lens would actually resolve a higher level of detail. There are reports that the images from software corrected lenses look worse on lower megapixel cameras, such as the R6 compared to the R5, because a higher megapixel sensor will capture much more data for the same part of an image, When you start with more accurate data, or more data, a fixed amount of image degradation due to software correction wont mess us the photo as badly, that's all we're seeing here.Both the RF 16 and RF 14-35 have substantial uncorrected geometric distortion. After correction, corner sharpness of the RF 14-35 is very good, while the RF 16's is only fair. This tells me that distortion correction alone does not substantially reduce sharpness.
The simple way to objectively test how much the software correction affects the image quality of the lens is to compare the RF 14-35mm f/4 lens to itself, by checking what happens to the periphery and corners when the lens is stopped down. Typically, lenses get sharper edge to edge when stopped down to a narrower aperture. Try the lens comparison below, which compares the sharpness of the lens at f/4 to the sharpness at f/8:
Canon RF 14-35mm F4 L IS USM Lens Image Quality
View the image quality delivered by the Canon RF 14-35mm F4 L IS USM Lens using ISO 12233 Resolution Chart lab test results. Compare the image quality of this lens with other lenses.
www.the-digital-picture.com
What is curious is that stopping down just reduces the vignetting, brightening up the image a bit, but does not improve sharpness at all!
Why? Like I said earlier, you can't stop down to sharpen pixels that were never captured in the first place but were added in after the fact.
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