Lens review

Canon EF 50 mm f/1.2L USM

8. Vignetting

Looking at the photos below we can assess how the tested lens fares when it comes to the brightness loss in the frame corners of the APS-C sensor, depending on the aperture used.

The vignetting will be noticeable, but not very bothersome, only near the maximum relative aperture. By f/1.2 it amounts to 29% (-0.97 EV) and by f/1.4 it decreases to 24%. Implementing the f/2.0 aperture will make the problem disappear completely because the light fall-off in the frame corners is just 9% there. The full frame performance is much worse though. The miniatures, shown below, will help us assess it better.

At the maximum relative aperture we lose as much as 67% of light (-3.24 EV) in the full frame corners. By f/1.4 the situation doesn’t improve a lot because the vignetting still amounts to 61% there. A significant improvement can be noticed after stopping down the lens to f/2.0 because the brightness loss reaches 39%. By f/2.8 the vignetting decreases to 20% and by f/4.0 – to an imperceptible level of 10%.

On the one hand the 50L should be praised because the cheaper EF 50mm f/1.4 has higher vignetting when wide open than the faster L device, tested here. On the other hand, though, the new Nikkor AF-S 1.4/50 fares better in this category than the tested lens…