Canon 35mm lens

Meet a ‘reassuringly expensive’ new wide prime

This stunning new wide prime delivers great images – at a price. Discover the new tech inside this updated Canon 35mm lens

Canon has thrown its full technological might into the Mk II edition of its 35mm f/1.4

L-series lens. It’s bigger and heavier than the 17-year-old edition it replaces, has a new optical design and adds weatherseals. The big news, though, is that it’s Canon’s first lens to boast its newly developed BR (Bluespectrum Refractive) optics.

The new lens comes at a hefty price – especially in the UK, where it costs about the same as all three of Sigma’s excellent 24mm, 35mm and 50mm f/1.4 Art lenses. The Canon also costs about twice as much as the original 35mm f/1.4L USM, although pricing is more reasonable in the US. So, what do you get for your money?

Build & handling

The lens is built to withstand the rigours of professional reportage photography, for which a moderately wide-angle and fast 35mm f/1.4 lens is ideal. Fluorine coatings are applied to repel dirt and moisture, making the front element easier to clean.

The optical design is based on 14 elements in 11 groups, with a nine-blade diaphragm enabling a well-rounded aperture, at least at the wider end of its f/1.4 to f/22 range. Ring-type ultrasonic autofocus is both fast and quiet.

Let’s take a closer look at those BR optics. Canon bills the technology as “a new pioneering development”, in which organic optical material is engineered at molecular level. This is integrated into a compound element within the lens – the aims being to refract blue light, to significantly reduce chromatic aberrations, and to produce greater sharpness and contrast in images.

Performance

The lens lives up to these aims. Sharpness in particular is impressive across the whole frame, even at the widest f/1.4 aperture. Colour fringing is superbly well controlled, both in terms of lateral and longitudinal chromatic aberrations.