Review - EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 STM IS

[ahsanford]

The peach UWA zoom of the EF-M lineup finally gets reviewed:
http://www.photozone.de/canon-eos/963-canon_m1122_456?start=1

The sharpness figures are strong as expected, but vignetting was very high:

"Unfortunately there's a skeleton in the closet ... vignetting. It's shockingly high and in fact it's the worst that we have ever seen in an APS-C format review. A light falloff of 2.9EV (f-stops) at 11mm f/4 is immediately obvious in most scenes."

- A

 

[Loswr]

Vignetting aside (which is easily correctable in post, unless you're already at high ISO), it's quite a good little lens that spends a lot of time on my M2.

 

[Rocky]

If you shoot Jpeg, The M will do an EXCELLENT job for the correction. In my own opinion, this is the 2nd best EF-M lens ( after the 22/2)

 

[crashpc]

Do not forget that wa lenses vignette more on M3. Short flange distance and high res sensor together make trouble....

 

[AvTvM]

EF-M 11-22 reviewed by Klaus on photozone.de

http://www.photozone.de/canon-eos/963-canon_m1122_456

he's quite happy about it, except for heavy vignetting. And speculates as to why it is so:

Vignetting
Unfortunately there's a skeleton in the closet ... vignetting. It's shockingly high and in fact it's the worst that we have ever seen in an APS-C format review. A light falloff of 2.9EV (f-stops) at 11mm f/4 is immediately obvious in most scenes. Stopping down to f/8 is advisable to reduce the issue to a more manageable degree of ~1EV. The falloff is still pretty bad 15mm @ f/4.5 but, again, quite Ok from f/8 onward. The situation has eased a bit at the 22mm setting.
Given these findings and similar tendencies from the EF-M 22mm f/2, we are beginning to wonder whether we are really facing lens issues here. The 24mp sensor of the camera may have a substantial share in all this. It is likely that Canon simply took the unmodified sensor used in some of their DSLRs and this may not have been the best idea after all. Mirrorless lenses tend to be a more picky due to their difficult light transmission characteristics (=non-perpendicular light rays unless you are using a so-called tele-centric design). We'll see whether this behavior is confirmed once more in our next EF-M review.