Specifications

Construction Quality       

Distortion       

Distortion is pretty good.

Full-Frame

It has a mild, but complex, signature on my full-frame Canon 5D.

I'd leave it as-is. There are two little higher order dips in the wall on the top middle left and right. Overall (first-order) it's dead-on.

I see no DxO module for it, and Photoshop CS2's simple first order corrections can't fix what little distortion is here.

I really have to go out of my way to find a boring wall like this to show what little distortion the Canon 28mm f/1.8 has.

Canon 28mm f/1.8 on Full Frame Canon 5D at f/7.1.

Horizon, Canon 28mm f/1.8 at f/6.3 on 5D Mark II. bigger.

1.6x Cameras

The Canon 28mm f/1.8 has a simple, easy to correct distortion signature on 1.6x cameras like my Canon Rebel XTi.

Canon 28mm f/1.8 on 1.6x Canon Rebel XTi at f/7.1.

Roll your mouse over the image to see after correction in Photoshop CS2's lens distortion filter at +1.25.

Ergonomics       

Perfect! Nothing gets in your way. 

Exposure Accuracy      

Perfect, I see no problems. 

Eyeblow      

back to Performance or back to Introduction.

None. The rear group moves, but not enough glass is moving far enough to make any wind blow out my camera's eyepiece. 

Falloff (Darker Corners)      

I never saw any falloff in real photos, except if I was looking for it at f/1.8 on my full-frame Canon 5D. Due to the crop factor, this will be invisible on 1.6x cameras most people use.

Here are shots of an Expodisc. Shooting flat fields and laying them on another flat field is a devious test which exaggerates even the slightest falloff. You'll never see it this bad in normal photography.

Canon 50mm f/1.8 II falloff on full-frame, no correction. f/1.8 f/2 f/2.8 f/4 © 2010 KenRockwell.com. All rights reserved.

The slight falloff remains regardless of aperture; there is no point in stopping down past f/2.8 to improve it. This is quite excellent, better than my fast manual focus Nikon wide angles.

 Flare and Ghosts       

Flare isn't a problem, even if you deliberately try to cause it. As shown above under filters, the Canon 28mm f/1.8 incorporates an internal rectangular flare blocker to help avoid flare and ghosts from light coming from outside the 35mm full-frame image area.

Ghosts also aren't an issue. I really had to push this and get lucky in this shot on my Rebel XTI. This is the mid-afternoon sun reflecting off reflective windows.

Just a hint of a ghost under extreme conditions. Canon 28mm f/1.8 at f/8 on Rebel XTi.

Hint: if you can't see the ghost, look for a violet apparition on the right side covering the dark windows.

Here's another extreme example, the 3/4 full moon directly in the image, and there's no problem.

Moonlight. Canon 28mm f/1.8 at f/4, 15 seconds at ISO 400, full-frame Canon 5D.

The Canon 28m f/1.8's lack of flare and ghosts make it ideal for use in available light where you may be facing a window indoors or have stage lights shining at you.

Looking through the front of the lens I see an internal rectangular shade to help this even more. Canon knows what they're doing!

Macro      

Close focus is fine, at less than a foot. It's as sharp as it is at regular distances and focus is right on.

Canon 28mm f/1.8 at closest focus, f/7.1, full image, Rebel XTi.

100% crop from above, no extra sharpening.

Of course if you shoot at f/1.8 it will have a bit of a soft focus effect, which would serve you right for shooting at f/1.8 in daylight.

Canon 28mm f/1.8 at closest focus, f/1.8, full image, Rebel XTi.

100% crop from above, no extra sharpening.

At f/1.8 the watch's face is in focus, but the hands are not. Depth of field is about zero this close at f/1.8.

See how the face is sharp, with some veiling? That's longitudinal spherical aberration, and it's normal for this lens wide open. Stop down to f/2.8 or smaller and it goes away.

Sharpness       

This part got so big that I made a new page showing the sharpness of the Canon 28mm f/1.8.

Sunstars        

The straight 7-bladed diaphragm makes for excellent 14-pointed stars on brilliant points of light at smaller apertures.

Noonday Sun. Canon 28mm f/1.8, f/22 at 1/50 (manual), Canon 5D at ISO 50.

You'll see the same thing at night and at wider apertures. Here's a full image at f/4:

Full-frame image, Canon 28mm f/1.8 at f/4 for 32 seconds, Canon 5D at ISO 200.

And here's the lower left corner cropped from the above image at 100%:

Crop from above at 100% (would be 44" (110cm) wide if entire image printed this big).

Sunstars become more prominent as you stop down and as the light sources become more intense. If I wanted to wait for 15 minutes at f/22, the star effects would be much more pronounced.

In daytime on digital, it helps to underexpose; otherwise sunstars are lost in the white bloom that surrounds the sun. Film's highlight shoulder helps retain sunstars that often get washed-out with digital capture.

If you have a strong, bright point of light, you might not see it in the full image:

The Street, 2:49 PM.

but look closely at the reflection off a windshield, and you'll see it quite obviously in this crop from a small section of the 5D Mark II image at 100%, shot at f/13:

14-pointed sunstar.

Image Stabilization       

The Canon 28mm f/1.8 has no IS, but just for fun, let's see for how long a shutter speed I can hold it.

This lists the percentage of perfectly sharp shots I can get at each speed, hand-held. Perfect means perfect at 100% magnification (44" or 1.1m wide print). At normal sizes I can shoot at much slower speeds.

50% of my shots at 1/8 are perfectly sharp, which means a marketer might claim that I'm getting a 2-stop improvement over the old-wives-tale of 1/30 second. That's what I call "Marketing Stops Improvement," or Lying with Statistics.

TIP: In dim light, fire several shots in the continuous shutter mode and pick the sharpest later. Blur is a random event, so if you fire enough shots, you'll eventually get a sharp one even at slow speeds!