Widescreen Photography

Lens comparison made at 21mm / f11. Exposure 4 seconds on a Canon 1Ds Mark I mounted on a view camera head on Manfrotto 155 legs, locked and braced, on a concrete floor. Multiple frames were shot, with fractionally different focusing - all exhibited very similar characteristics. RAW images were processed via Capture One on default settings, plus 50 sharpening and converted for web with Pro JPEG.

Samples shown are 1:1 pixel samples shown on an absolutely like-for-like basis (same resampling, conversion and sharpening). The only difference is the lens.

FULL FRAME at f11

Zeiss 21mm Distagon f2.8 (frame edge)
Canon 17-40mm f4 L (frame edge)

Contax Zeiss 21mm (foreground, frame edge)
Canon 17-40mm f4 L at 21mm (foreground, frame edge)

Zeiss Contax 21mm (mid-ground)
Canon 17-40mm f4 L at 21mm (mid-ground)

Zeiss Contax 21mm (background)
Canon 17-40mm f4 L at 21mm (background)

NB: This is not camera shake - there is no tell-tale 'doubling', and the effect was reproducible across several exposures.

I know what you're thinking - "no fair to compare a wide zoom with a wide prime" - but here's the kicker: in a similar test, my Canon 17-40mm f4 L convincingly and consistently outperformed Canon's own 20mm, 24mm and 28mm f2.8 primes at f8 and f11 - which in turn perform at least as well as their L-series equivalents at these apertures.

Curiously, at 28mm, this 17-40mm is better than the 28mm, and not a million miles away from the Zeiss 28mm Distagon, but it's rapidly downhill below 24mm.

SO - the crucial question: with Canon's best wide glass, IS THIS AS GOOD AS THE 1DS GETS?

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