Canon EF Lenses

15 May 2009

Posted by Jaco under: General; Lenses .

It’s no secret in the Photography industry that Canon is one of the leading manufacturers of camera lenses. Canon offers more than 60 EF lenses for its range of SLR and Digital SLR cameras. This range of lenses covers the whole spectrum from very wide at 10mm to very long at 1200mm. When I first became involved in photography, I was completely overwhelmed by the volume of information available on the Canon EF lenses and found it difficult to distinguish between good lenses and great lenses. So, before we look at how Canon classifies its EF lenses, let’s look at the different types of EF lenses.

Canon EF Lenses

Canon manufactures lenses with different types of mounts such as the FD mount, R mount and the most popular EF mount. The EF mount lenses are used with Canon’s SLR and Digital SLR cameras and is compatible with both the full frame cameras as well as the Digital SLRs with the APS-C sensor. When used on an APS-C camera, the focal length of an EF lens is multiplied by 1.6 (because the APS-C sensor is smaller than the full frame sensor). For this reason, 24-70mm lens is effectively a 38.4-112mm lens on and APS-C sensor camera like the Canon Digital Rebel T1i. Because of the multiplication factor an APS-C Sensor camera with an EF lens doesn’t cover a very wide angle and for this reasons Canon designed the EF-S series of lenses. The EF-S series of lenses fit only on APS-C cameras and all of them start at a relatively wide focal length such as 10mm, 17mm and 18mm. These lenses cannot be used on a full frame camera like the Canon EOS 5D Mk II.

Some of Canon lenses are marked with a red L. According to various sources, the “L” is for “Luxury”. Many of the L Series lenses have a distinct white coating and all of them have a red ring on the front end. These lenses can be easily identified at any sports event or any major event as they are used by many professional photographers. Canon takes special care when manufacturing the L series lenses and special materials are used for the components of these lenses. The result is that images made with these lenses are stunningly sharp and it is also guaranteed that a photographer will never go back to a standard lens once he has used an L lens. The L lenses also usually have a relatively large aperture which means that they have more glass and weighs more than other lenses in the same category. L lenses are also always more expensive than standard lenses.

Some of Canon’s lenses have an adjustable focal length, i.e. 24-70mm and are called Zoom lenses. Other lenses, like the EF300mm f/4L IS USM have a fixed focal length which cannot be adjusted. These lenses are called Prime lenses and although they are less versatile, the quality of images produced by them is usually better than images produced with their Zoom counterparts. Of course they are also more expensive. Below is a list of Canon’s lenses currently available in the market under their respective categories. Hopefully this helps to clarify the Canon lens lineup.