Lens: Canon EF 28mm f2.8 – you never forget your first.

This is part of the EF 28mm Three Lens Comparison, check out how it compares.

This little Canon 28mm f2.8 lens is hiding an aspherical element in its modest 5 element 5 group design! Introduced in 1987, the EF 28mm f2.8 was the widest rectilinear prime lens in the launch catalogue (the EF 15mm f2.8 is wider but it’s a full-frame fisheye).

It was the ONLY wide angle prime at launch: the EF 24mm f2.8 was released in 1988 and the EF 35mm f2 was released in 1990. The EF 28mm f2.8 remained in production for 25 years until 2012 so there are a lot available on the used market. They are easy to find and reasonably priced.

Wide angle primes have been unpopular for quite a while because their focal length is pretty much covered by zoom lenses. However there are advantages to prime lenses: compact size, light weight, image quality, and that thing about using a fixed focal length lens and being forced to move around to make good compositions.

Handling

The EF 28mm f2.8 uses an arc-form drive (AFD) autofocus motor which is audible in use but focusses quickly and accurately. A switch controls manual focus, and like all AFD lenses the focus action has a mechanical gritty feel. The lens has a distance window with depth of field markings and IR correction. It is constructed from plastic with a metal mount, the filter ring extends on focus but does not rotate.

Though designed for EOS film analog SLR cameras the lens works equally well on digital DSLR cameras. On APS-C cameras the 1.6x crop factor makes the focal length about 45mm. When shooting on digital cameras, Canon’s Digital Photo Professional raw editing software can correct for chromatic aberration, distortion and peripheral illumination which makes the lens perform better than ever before.

Sharpness

This lens is part of the EF 28mm prime lens comparison, where all three Canon EF 28mm prime lenses are tested together. The sharpness images were made with a Canon EOS 5D on 100 ISO, processed in Canon Digital Photo Professional with lens corrections for chromatic aberration ,peripheral illumination and distortion. Sharpness was set to level 3 (standard) and no adjustments were made to colour or exposure. The full frame images have been reduced from 4368 x 2912 pixels (12.8MB) to 1080×1920 pixels (2MB); centre and corner images are at full resolution but cropped to 1080×1920.

Comparison images for all apertures are shown below for completeness, but save yourself some time, you only need to see how the lens performs wide open f2.8 and at the optimum aperture.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

The summary of the sharpness test is that only the extreme corners of the image wide open suffer from significant unsharpness wide open f2.8, which is minimal by f5.6 and gone by f8. Contrast across the image improves with stopping down but is excellent from wide open f2.8. Image quality peaks around f11 and drops a bit at f22 from diffraction, which is why we never use lenses completely stopped down.

Results

The EF 28mm f2.8 is very easy to use. It is compact and light and focusses well with both analog film and digital cameras. Optically the lens is excellent. Wide open it is sharp in the centre with some softness in the corners and some light falloff, but neither the softness not the falloff are obnoxious and both work well for street photography. Stopped down the lens sharpens well over the whole frame.

Difficult backlighting is handled well, the lens holds contrast and detail with little fare. Some of the images in the gallery have very strong backlight and the results are excellent.

The gallery images are all made on analog film. Most are shot on shot on Ilford HP5 Plus 400 with one image made with Rollei RPX 100 (the photo of the person outside the Lowes store: the grain is so fine I thought it was done on digital). All were camera-scanned with an EOS M6 and EF-S 60mm macro which is why those details appear in the gallery.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•