Lens review

Tokina AT-X 165 PRO DX AF 16-50 mm f/2.8

5. Chromatic aberration

The crops below show what the situation looked like in our test charts. In the case of the most difficult combination of the wide open aperture and 16 mm focal length there is hardly any need to comment. The huge level of this aberration and weak image quality at the edge of the frame are obvious. Fortunately, when we stop down and use longer focal lengths we can reduce the chromatic aberration to the medium level.

To prove this problem doesn’t exist only in our charts but it can be also seen in real life photos we present a small example below.

Additionally I recommend looking at the sample shot no 2. The full extend of chromatic aberration is shown as the photo was taken in the most difficult conditions –dark objects against a light background.

Canon 20D

When you change from Nikon to Canon, you can expect some improvement of the chromatic aberration results, for instance because we deal with a smaller sensor. Our graph shows that such an improvement takes place but it is very slight. Our conclusions don’t change here a bit– the aberration is simply monstrous in this lens.