If you’re walking the city for street snaps, trekking into challenging terrain for landscape opportunities, or jetting off on your travels, a small lightweight camera is the order of the day. Disabling correction at the RAW image processing stage reveals very extreme barrel distortion in the 24-35mm sector of the zoom range, and it’s still very pronounced at 35mm, and easily noticeable at 50mm. Like many compact lenses designed for mirrorless cameras, including several from Canon, this one relies entirely on in-camera correction for distortion, which can’t be switched off in menu settings. However, the modest aperture rating is a minus point for gaining a tight depth of field and for maintaining quick shutter speeds under low lighting levels for freezing motion. Overall, performance is impressive, considering the compact and ultra-lightweight design of the lens. The speed and accuracy of the linear stepping motor autofocus system is impressive for stills and lives up to its billing of delivering smooth autofocus transitions when shooting video. That’s by no means uncommon in recent lenses designed for mirrorless cameras. This can’t be switched off in-camera and without auto correction for distortion, the lens is basically unusable. The lens relies entirely on auto correction for distortions, especially in the 24-35mm sector of the zoom range. Lateral chromatic aberration towards the edges and corners of the frame is minimal at all zoom settings, and automatic in-camera correction is available anyway. After all, there’s little point in having a really compact, featherweight lens if you need to lug a tripod around. In practical terms, the highly effective optical image stabilizer helps to maintain consistent sharpness in handheld shooting, even at slow shutter speeds. They’re also very consistent throughout the whole zoom range. Center-sharpness isn’t as impressive as with other Canon RF standard zooms that we’ve tested but levels of sharpness are remarkably uniform across the whole image frame, right out to the edges and corners. In our real-world testing, sharpness proved very good (rather than entirely great) throughout the zoom range. It’s the same hood as used for the EF-S 18-55mmf/3.5-5.6 IS STM lens, the genuine Canon article costing around £17/$25. The EW-63C lens hood is sold separately as an optional extra. Maximum magnification ratio: 0.11x (W) 0.19x (T) Minimum focusing distance: 0.3m (W) 0.35m (T) Lens construction: 8 elements in 8 groups Canon RF 24-50mm f/4.5-6.3 IS STM (Black) at Amazon for $299.99 (opens in new tab).If you don’t mind a drop in megapixel count, you can also switch to APS-C crop mode in full-frame cameras and get the same extended zoom range.

There’s also something to be said for using it on Canon’s APS-C format R-system bodies, where it gives an ‘effective’ zoom range of about 38-80mm. And just as that lens became a kit option for the Nikon Z 5 camera, the RF 24-50mm has become a kit lens for the EOS R8. The FR 24-50mm is super-small for a full-frame compatible standard zoom when retracted (Image credit: Future)Īlthough new to the Canon line-up, it’s not unique as Nikon launched its NIKKOR Z 24-50mm f/4-6.3 back in 2020, which is physically even shorter and lighter.

Canon rf 35mm