EF-S 10-18mm - a few early photos on SL1 & Sony a6000

[sdsr]

I received mine a couple of days ago and briefly tried it on two successive days walking home from work via City Hall in Philadelphia, the first day with it attached to the Sony a6000, the second to the Canon SL1. Here are a few photos from each day, mostly within parts of the building. All off-the-cuff, hand-held tourist-dodging stuff, mostly at 10mm, nothing fancy:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/125326482@N07/sets/72157644720350428/

In some there's a bit of flare and ghosting (in a couple of the outdoor shots on the Canon the lens was aimed at the sun), some of which may be related to the cheap filter that Adorama threw in for free (I'll try it later with no filter and then with a better quality one). All are raw files processed via lightroom 5; a few had shadows lightened (the outdoor light was hideous each day), but otherwise the tweaks were minor.

I'm amazed by how little distortion the lens creates - most of the time I saw nothing that needed correcting, though just for the heck of it I applied the lens profile for the 11-22mm EOS-M (it worked better than the profile for its predecessor; there's no profile for the new lens yet, of course). It's miles better in terms of distortion at 10mm than the 24-105L is at 24mm, for instance, and better than any other similar wide-angle lens I've tried (if my memory is right, that is).

I included a few Sony a6000 photos to show the far-corner vignetting I mentioned elsewhere. (Aside from that vignetting - which only shows up at 10mm, varies with the light and often disappears completely with minor distortion tweaking - I'm inclined to think that the photos it makes on the Sony are on the whole slightly better when viewed closely, but it would take controlled testing to reach a firm conclusion either way; I'll leave that to someone else....)

Anyway, make of them what you will....

 

[Dylan777]

Thanks for sharing sdsr.

Very nice photos, like the composition.

 

[EatingPie]

... All off-the-cuff, hand-held tourist-dodging stuff, mostly at 10mm, nothing fancy:

Anyway, make of them what you will....

Wow, those look pretty darned fancy to me! Love the indoor column shots.

-Pie

 

[sdsr]

Thanks for the kind words, Dylan & Pie. The quality/price/weight combination of this lens is pretty impressive.

 

[ashmadux]

According the the digital pictures image quality post, this lens is...good only if you dont want to pay for the 10-22, and lose a fair amount of zoom capacity.

Sharpness is pretty much the same as the old bird. corners are smushy. Ive used the 10-22 on a 7d, t2i, and an eos m...there's only so much sharpness you can expect of of that lens. So if this is the same, its pretty pointless.

at this point since i mostly use my 10-22 on an M, id gamble on getting a 11-22 EFM. I f the image qulity is thta much better (its not listed on TDP) , then it woudl be worth it. I think i saw it in japan for about 550 or so.

 

[Random Orbits]

According the the digital pictures image quality post, this lens is...good only if you dont want to pay for the 10-22, and lose a fair amount of zoom capacity.

Sharpness is pretty much the same as the old bird. corners are smushy. Ive used the 10-22 on a 7d, t2i, and an eos m...there's only so much sharpness you can expect of of that lens. So if this is the same, its pretty pointless.

at this point since i mostly use my 10-22 on an M, id gamble on getting a 11-22 EFM. I f the image qulity is thta much better (its not listed on TDP) , then it woudl be worth it. I think i saw it in japan for about 550 or so.

Or you can get it from Canada for less than 400.

 

[sdsr]

According the the digital pictures image quality post, this lens is...good only if you dont want to pay for the 10-22, and lose a fair amount of zoom capacity.

Sharpness is pretty much the same as the old bird. corners are smushy. Ive used the 10-22 on a 7d, t2i, and an eos m...there's only so much sharpness you can expect of of that lens. So if this is the same, its pretty pointless.

I've no clue how they compare first-hand as I've never tried a 10-22, but photozone states that "[t]he MTF results are nothing short of astounding." But even assuming they're optically "the same", the 10-18 is half the price and has very effective IS, so I don't think "pointless" is quite the right word unless you already have the 10-22 and don't care about IS, or don't do APS-C - which isn't everyone.

 

[Mr_Canuck]

I've often wondered what the real advantage of a 24mm apsc sensor is. But this lens hits it right on the head. Previously, I'd look at, say 16-50/f2.8 cropped lenses and wondered why they were almost the same price as a 24-70/2.8 full-frame lens, still took 77mm filters, etc. And so, what's their size advantage really? But this little ultra-wide tells the story of the apsc advantage. For 300 bucks, you can have the same focal range as the new 16-35. And you get it for one-quarter (one quarter!) of the price, almost one-third the weight, and pretty much all of the image quality. Yeah it's not as well crafted, and it has tighter apertures, but for an ultra-wide, where it counts – image quality at middle apertures – it's apparently close enough.

I still love the look of my full-frame images (they are different) and you can't match the viewfinder, which impacts every photo taken. But for travel, hiking, easy of use it seems that an SL1 and one of these babies is the cat's meow. If Canon only kept pace with Nikon with, say, a 35mm 1.8 for cropped sensor, they'd be getting somewhere.