CANON EF 85mm f/1.2l USM II £1849/$1999

Fast lenses don’t come much faster than this with a suped-up f/1.2 maximum aperture

Matching Canon’s new RF 85mm lens for mirrorless full-frames, this EF model for DSLRS has a super-fast f/1.2 aperture rating, making it a third of an f-stop faster than more mainstream f/1.4 primes. By necessity, the construction has quite a wide diameter, because the front elements need to be oversized to pull in more light. On the other hand, this lens is noticeably shorter than Canon’s EF 85mm f/1.4 and the net result is that it’s only a bit heavier, at 1025g.

The Mark II edition features a large-diameter aspherical element, aiming to reduce spherical aberration and increase sharpness towards the edges of the frame. It also has an unconventional ring-type ultrasonic AF system, in which the manual focus ring is electronically coupled, enabling fine adjustments. AF is faster than in the original edition, but still pedestrian, as the large and heavy elements towards the front are moved during focusing.

Performance

The availability of such a tight depth of field enables very defocused and blurry backgrounds, which helps with the quality of bokeh. However, axial chromatic aberration is quite pronounced when shooting wide-open, giving noticeable fringing around the edges of objects in front of and behind the point of focus. Stopping down a little helps, but then you miss out on the f/1.2 aperture, which is the main selling point here. The eight-blade diaphragm isn’t that well rounded either, and gives a noticeable octagonal shape to defocused lights and bright spots when stopping down a bit.