Here is the Canon RF 16mm f/2.8 STM

Last edited:
Upvote 0
Jul 21, 2010
31,023
12,776
Then what about the height of the hood?
What about it? It’s a petal-shaped ultrawide hood. The hood for the RF 15-35 is similarly shallow. Look at hoods for EF ultrawides, they’re shallow, too. The long petals of the built-in hood on my 11-24 extend just 5 mm past the front element.

I’m pretty sure Canon can correctly determine the appropriate size and shape for a lens hood. Further, I’d hazard a guess they know more about optical design than you or me.

Also, what about the size of the front element? Optical vignetting will deem to be massive if the lens is for ff!
Again, what about it? Yes, the lens will probably have significant vignetting. Many RF lenses do. It’s readily correctable in the resulting images (yes, there’s the consequence of increased peripheral noise). Consider the awful distortion and substantial vignetting of the 14-35/4L, bad enough that Canon forces the corrections for in-camera JPGs and in RAW conversions with DPP (i.e., unlike other lenses those corrections cannot be turned off). They do that on a $1600 L-series lens, why would it be a surprise on a $300 non-L lens? However, we actually don’t know anything about the optical performance of the 16/2.8 yet.

As I said, it’s a FF lens. Period.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 2 users
Upvote 0
What about it? It’s a petal-shaped ultrawide hood. The hood for the RF 15-35 is similarly shallow. Look at hoods for EF ultrawides, they’re shallow, too. The long petals of the built-in hood on my 11-24 extend just 5 mm past the front element.

I’m pretty sure Canon can correctly determine the appropriate size and shape for a lens hood. Further, I’d hazard a guess they know more about optical design than you or me.


Again, what about it? Yes, the lens will probably have significant vignetting. Many RF lenses do. It’s readily correctable in the resulting images (yes, there’s the consequence of increased peripheral noise). Consider the awful distortion and substantial vignetting of the 14-35/4L, bad enough that Canon forces the corrections for in-camera JPGs and in RAW conversions with DPP (i.e., unlike other lenses those corrections cannot be turned off). They do that on a $1600 L-series lens, why would it be a surprise on a $300 non-L lens? However, we actually don’t know anything about the optical performance of the 16/2.8 yet.

As I said, it’s a FF lens. Period.
Then I have nothing to say but feel sorry for that. In the EF, FD, and even FL eras, canon lenses used to be very usable even without much in-camera or post processing. Now cutting-cost seems to be its mainstream business ...
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0
Jul 21, 2010
31,023
12,776
Then I have nothing to say but feel sorry for that. In the EF, FD, and even FL eras, canon lenses used to be very usable even without much in-camera or post processing. Now cutting-cosy seems to be its mainstream business ...
Fair enough. The good thing is that you’re not being forced to buy these lenses.
 
Upvote 0
Looks like it would be very useful for real estate interiors. I'm assuming that as a prime lens that it would have less barrel distortion than an equivalent zoom.
With all due respect to Canon, I think this is a consumer-grade rather than a professional-level lens. As a hobbyist, I will prefer using the lens for snapshot, landscape, and particularly vlogging. I think it will do a great job there.
 
Upvote 0

gruhl28

Canon 70D
Jul 26, 2013
209
92
Is it really a ff 16mm lens? The hood just doesn't seem to make sense for such an ultra-wide angle!
Are you saying the hood looks too deep for an ultra-wide angle? It does look deeper than I expected. I have to admit it did cross my mind that maybe this actually only covers a cropped area of the sensor. But I would expect some kind of designation on the lens if it weren’t a standard ff RF.
 
Upvote 0
Jul 21, 2010
31,023
12,776
Are you saying the hood looks too deep for an ultra-wide angle? It does look deeper than I expected. I have to admit it did cross my mind that maybe this actually only covers a cropped area of the sensor. But I would expect some kind of designation on the lens if it weren’t a standard ff RF.
Given the small size of the front element, a deeper hood is logical.

You’re correct that Canon would not call this the RF 16mm f/2.8 if it didn’t cover a FF image circle.
 
Upvote 0

danfaz

Coffee Fiend
Jul 14, 2015
907
1,703
www.1fineklick.com
Am I understanding correctly that you believe this 16mm lens will be an APSC RF lens, not a full-frame RC lens?
If so, would you care to elaborate on the reasons?

If it were an APSC lens, would we expect to see some sort of designation for that on the lens? I don't see any indication of APSC on the lettering in the image from Nokishita.

View attachment 200124
Another question is why would they be announcing an RF APS-C lens when there's no RF APS-C camera for it???
 
  • Like
Reactions: 2 users
Upvote 0
Also, what about the size of the front element? Optical vignetting will deem to be massive if the lens is for ff!

Uh, you might want to take a look at the vignetting of... *checks notes*... literally every RF lens released to date. Every lens is about a stop darker than the nearest EF equivalent. Canon, regardless of whether anyone thinks they're right or not to do so, have decided vignetting is one of the aspects of a lens they do not need to correct optically any more.

I'm assuming that as a prime lens that it would have less barrel distortion than an equivalent zoom.

Same deal here. While the distortion on RF primes hasn't been so different to EF as the vignetting has been, in general they still requiring a little more correction. I can't imagine, for one second, that Canon would make this small 16mm have less distortion than, for example, the 14-35mm f/4L which they're charging about, what, six times the price for? Though, yes, all other things being equal you would expect a prime to have less distortion than a zoom, considering the price and size they've gotten this lens down to and how loose they've been with optical corrections so far, the smart money is betting on this lens being practically fisheye uncorrected.

For reference, Fuji's compact 16mm f/2.8 also has heavy barrel distortion which relies on mandatory opcode corrections, and that lens only has to generate an APS-C image circle. The old EF 20mm f/2.8 has strong wavy distortion, and that's a much larger lens and a narrower angle of view.
 
Upvote 0

FrenchFry

Wildlife enthusiast!
Jun 14, 2020
484
603
Since this lens is probably going to have some heavy distortion uncorrected, it would have been fun for Canon to add an option to the lens so that you can choose between fisheye and rectilinear when taking photos. Maybe this could be done in the menus, and it can certainly be added in post as a "correction" option, but it would have been really fun to see a switch to toggle between the two so you can see the final fisheye effect while shooting as well (not just the final rectilinear effect).
To me, at least, this extra feature would have been far more valuable and useful than the SA control that was added to the 100mm macro.
I fully understand that this lens is being offered at a lower price point. Just pointing out a way that Canon's marketing could make the software corrections more interesting and could sell it as a feature that can be leveraged for interesting results rather than something that most people will complain about even if the final product looks great.
 
Upvote 0
^^ In the same fashion I've long wanted them to change the in-camera vignette correction to offer reduced levels of correction, since a little bit of vignette can sometimes help to make a center or just-off-center subject really stand out. Natural-looking vignette is one of the effects that lightweight phone and tablet editing apps don't do very well, so for those times when you want to throw an image up online quickly, being able to correct some but not all the vignette on an in-camera jpg would be useful.
I do also often find distortion correction is too strong and ends up 'over-correcting' into the opposite type of distortion, so any kind of choice in exactly how distortion correction was applied for any lens, not just these quasi-fisheye wide angles, would be nice. Maybe they could offer no correction, one third correction, two thirds correction, full correction. Doesn't have to be a full Lightroom- or Capture One-style distortion control, but yeah, any kind of additional options are always good.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 user
Upvote 0
^^ In the same fashion I've long wanted them to change the in-camera vignette correction to offer reduced levels of correction, since a little bit of vignette can sometimes help to make a center or just-off-center subject really stand out. Natural-looking vignette is one of the effects that lightweight phone and tablet editing apps don't do very well, so for those times when you want to throw an image up online quickly, being able to correct some but not all the vignette on an in-camera jpg would be useful.
I do also often find distortion correction is too strong and ends up 'over-correcting' into the opposite type of distortion, so any kind of choice in exactly how distortion correction was applied for any lens, not just these quasi-fisheye wide angles, would be nice. Maybe they could offer no correction, one third correction, two thirds correction, full correction. Doesn't have to be a full Lightroom- or Capture One-style distortion control, but yeah, any kind of additional options are always good.
DPP4 offers Digital Lens Optimizer and peripheral illumination correction on a slider. It's a terrible program, but I love how Canon renders its images and feel like using other programs makes all the cameras look sort of the same, whereas using DPP4 makes it such that you can do RAW processing, but still get Canon algorithms, processing, and rendering.
 
Upvote 0