Lens review

Canon EF 55-200 mm f/4.5-5.6 II USM

4. Image resolution

As far as picture resolution is concerned, the best performance for the Canon 55-200 mm is observed at 55 mm. The situation is just a bit weaker at 200 mm and the weakest performance is at 100 mm, where the MTF50 doesn’t go higher than 30lpmm.

At the edges of the frame the differences between the focal lengths are very small. At open aperture the resolution reaches 26lpmm and a maximum value of 28-30 mm is reached at f/8.

An interesting fact is that the resolution results at the edge of the frame at 100 mm are almost the same as in the center of the frame. As we are going to find out soon, this is thanks to low chromatic aberration.

If we work with a little bit sharpened and the highest quality JPEG files, the lens reaches 1600 LW/PH in the f/5.6-f/11 stops range. This is visible in the pictures below.