Lens Test: Canon EF 85mm

Fast and stabilized, Canon’s new 85mm L-series prime lens aims to give you the best of both worlds

Fast and stabilized: Canon’s new 85mm prime aims to give you the best of both worlds

buying a fast 85mm lens that’s ideal for portraiture has presented Canon photographers with a bit of a dilemma. Should you go all out for speed with a ‘fast’ aperture rating, and invest in a lens like the Sigma 85mm f/1.4 Art, or the even faster

Canon 85mm f/1.2l? Or should you sacrifice two-thirds of an f/stop and add stabilization into the mix, with a lens like the Tamron 85mm f/1.8 VC USD? It’s no longer an ‘either or’ situation, thanks to the launch of this new 85mm lens, which combines an f/1.4 aperture rating and 4-stop stabilization. This enables the convenience of handheld portraiture indoors or at twilight, without the need to bump up your camera’s ISO setting and degrade image quality. Indeed, you should be able to get super-smooth bokeh in defocused areas, without image noise spoiling the effect.

Typical of upmarket L-series lenses, this one’s solidly built and weather-sealed. Like most modern prime designs, it has a complex optical path, based on 14 elements in 10 groups. Canon’s specialist ASC (Air Sphere Coating) is applied to combat ghosting and flare.

It’s not a lightweight lens, at just under a kilogram with chunky 89x105mm dimensions and a 77mm filter attachment thread. It comes complete with a circular bayonet-fit hood and carrying pouch. Build quality feels excellent, and a smooth-action manual focus ring enables precise adjustments. The ring-type autofocus system and image stabilizer are whisper-quiet in operation, although the stabilizer is quite noisy when it starts up and shuts down.

Sharpness is superb even when shooting wide-open at f/1.4, and contrast is fabulous as well

Performance

In all but the extreme edges and corners of the frame, sharpness is superb even when shooting wide-open at f/1.4, and contrast is fabulous as well. Even the corners become very sharp at f/2.8, and remain so through to f/11, dropping off a bit at f/16.

Given the lens’s suitability to portraiture and still life photography, the bokeh is as important as the sharpness. This facet of performance is sublime, with a wonderfully creamy smoothness in blurred regions, and excellent quality in the transitional region between sharply focused and defocused areas.

Autofocus proved unerringly accurate in our tests, and very fast. This capability makes the Canon 85mm f/1.4l lens equally viable as a short telephoto perfect for action photography, rather than just being simply a ’portrait lens’. Ghosting and flare are very well controlled, living up to Canon’s claims.

The same isn’t quite true of the image stabilizer, however, the 4-stop rating suggesting that you should be able to shoot at just 1/5 second and still get consistently sharp handheld results. In practice, we struggled to get sharp shots at shutter speeds below 1/20 second, but that’s no mean feat with an 85mm focal length lens.

Excellent build quality and advanced features, including L-glass optics and coatings and a 4-stop image stabilizer 07 01 03 04 06 05 02

f/1.4At the widest aperture on the lens of f/1.4, the depth of field is so tight that only one of the birds remains sharp, and the background is thrown way out of focus

f/5.6At the widest aperture available on many standard zooms (eg the Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lenses) all the birds in the row are sharp but the backdrop lacks smoothness