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Customer SLR Camera Lens Reviews
Wonderful general purpose lens, with the expected limitations,
The EF EOS 24-105mm f/4L IS USM offers a lightweight alternative to the renowned EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM. The canon 24 105 is often tagged a “walkabout” lens, and that’s a good description. There’s nothing better if you want to carry camera and lens about and get a variety of shots in the range from wide angle to short telephoto. It’s difficult for lens designers to make all the compromises necessary to have a lens go from wide angle to telephoto, and have a max focal length over four times the widest focal length, but Canon has done a good job here. The image stabilization works excellently when hand held (it cuts image quality if you use the stabilization from a tripod, though). The f/4 maximum aperture cuts the size and weight down quite a bit. Image quality is excellent for a zoom from about 30mm up to 90mm, good from 90mm to 105mm, and tolerable from 24 to 30mm (getting better in the 28 to 30mm range). As expected, image quality is best stopped down to about f/8, but is still good wide open at f/4.
I can’t say the lens has major flaws, but relative weaknesses are the wide angle performance, and the f/4 maximum aperture. The lens is not fast enough for shots of moving subject indoors. For stationary subjects, the image stabilization lets you take shots with slower exposure times than you’d expect, but stabilization won’t do anything to improve a moving subject.
Build quality is excellent as expected, but the lens is quite compact and light, much better than the 24-70/2.8 zoom that is its obvious rival.
Also, if you are after the absolute maximum image quality, prime lenses will do better than this ef 24 105mm in the normal and telephoto range (35 to 105). My $75 50/1.8 lens far outshines this one in sharp, crisp imaging. Zooms that don’t have to accomodate both wide and telephoto focal lengths will also outperform this one–My 70-200/4 lens is much sharper and more contrasty, and even my 16-35 lens outperforms this one in the 24-28mm range (the 24-105 does do better from about 30-35mm, though). All these things aren’t surprising, and they are no reason to condemn or even criticize the 24-105.
If money isn’t a major concern for you, and you want a superb compromise lens, this is the one to pick. The only canon ef 24 105mm that can hold a candle to it is the old 28-135 IS zoom. If you get that one, you’ll get inferior image quality and much less effective stabilization. But you’ll also save quite a bit of money!
