Canon 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM Review

I’ve been shooting with the 
Canon 17-40mm f/4L as my main landscape lens more or less since acquiring my Canon EOS 5D about 18 months ago.

This lens has an excellent reputation for sharpness and my own experience backs that up. With a street price of around £550, it also represents excellent value for money.

With the 16-35mm f/2.8 costing over twice as much, it seemed the ideal choice for those who didn’t need the extra speed. With DSLRs boasting increasingly higher resolutions and pushing the limits of its wide-angle lenses, Canon has updated its 16-35mm 
with the Mark II version, claiming improved sharpness and improved corner performance. I was keen to test these claims and compare it to my 17-40mm.

This lens is slightly bigger and heavier than the 17-40mm and has a larger front element than both the 17-40mm and its predecessor, with a filter thread of 82mm. Build quality is excellent and the zoom and manual focus ring are well-sized and turn smoothly.

As expected of a lens of this price, it has an internal focusing mechanism, which means that the front element doesn’t rotate when focusing, making it easier to use slot-in system filters. It also allows you to manual focus with the lens set to AF, which is handy for fine-tuning the focus. With the lens on the camera, the first thing I noticed compared to the 17-40mm was the brighter viewfinder image, which makes composing shots in low light a much easier task.

Autofocus is not something I use often when shooting landscapes, but it was fast, smooth and quiet.
Compared to the 17-40mm, the 16-35mm MkII gives slightly different metering results – about a third of a stop more exposure. This isn’t a problem, as it seems to be consistent, but simply something to be aware of. Colours are slightly warmer and it also has a touch more contrast. In terms of vignetting, the 16-35mm MkII suffers less than the 17-40mm, though this is so easily corrected in software as to be a non-issue in my opinion.
In terms of corner sharpness at wider focal lengths, there’s not much in it.

Both lenses, although not perfect, give very good results for ultra-wide zooms. At longer focal lengths, the 16-35mm MkII really shines in terms of corner performance.
The big surprise for me was how good its centre performance was. Looking at high magnification crops from the centre of shots from both lenses, the 16-35mm MkII image is clearly sharper and resolves detail that is not visible on the 17-40mm image.

Verdict
The 16-35 f/2.8L II is an excellent lens, no doubt about that. The big question is whether it’s worth the extra £600 or so more than the 17-40mm. That’s a tough one to answer, but if I was in the market for a wide-angle zoom, I’d try and stretch my finances to buy one.

Specifications
Construction: 16 elements in 12 groups;
Minimum focus: 28cm; Filter thread: 82mm; 
Image Stabilisation: No; Super Spectra coatings to suppress flare and ghosting; Three aspherical elements for improved corner-to-corner sharpness and two UD (ultra Low Dispersion) elements to minimise chromatic aberrations;
Circular barrel aperture creates attractive background bokeh at wide apertures;
Supplied with lens hood (EW-88) and soft case;
Diameter x Length: 88.5 x 111.6mm;
Weight: 635g;