CANON EF-S 60mm f/2.8 MACRO USM

For APS-C format SLRS, this lens is a smart macro and portraiture combo

£399/$350

Taking the 1.6x crop factor of APS-C format SLRS into account, the EF-S 60mm has an effective focal length of 96mm. It, therefore, feels like shooting with a 100mm macro on a full-frame, with the same advantage that it’s well suited to portraiture. It enables a natural shooting distance for head-and-shoulders and half-length portraits, so you’re not crowding your subject.

The minimum focus distance of 0.2m for full macro shooting is shorter than the usual 0.3m of a 100mm lens, but still gives plenty of space. There’s therefore no need for a built-in LED Macro Lite, as featured in the EF-M 28mm and EF-S 35mm lenses. A more disappointing omission is there’s no image stabilizer. There’s also no STM AF system. Instead, this lens features a more traditional ring-type ultrasonic AF system, which comes with the usual full-time mechanical override and a focus distance scale beneath a viewing panel.

Performance

Comparing Canon’s two EF-S macros, this one is a bit sharper towards the edges and corners of the frame at apertures between f/2.8 and f/5.6. That’s not much of a bonus for macro shooting, where you’re likely to use apertures of f/8 or narrower for the sake of depth of field. Even so, this lens produces less colour fringing and negligible distortion, so it beats the EF-S 35mm on those counts. However, the mechanically coupled focus ring doesn’t operate with such smooth precision as the electronically linked ring of the smaller lens.