Canon EF 400 mm f/4 DO IS II USM review - Chromatic and spherical aberration

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Canon EF 400 mm f/4 DO IS II USM

26 August 2017

Arkadiusz Olech

5. Chromatic and spherical aberration

Chromatic aberration

Photos below prove that the tested lens doesn’t have almost any problems with the longitudinal chromatic aberration. At the maximum relative aperture and in blurry areas positioned further on you can find some slight colouring but on stopping down the lens to f/5.6 that slight effect disappears completely.

Canon EF 400 mm f/4 DO IS II USM - Chromatic and spherical aberration

A very similar situation can be observed after attaching the Canon TC 1.4x III teleconverter – you don’t have to fear that type of optical aberration either.

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Now let’s check the performance concerning the lateral chromatic aberration – an appropriate graph is shown below.

Values below 0.04% we consider to be negligible so the correction of that aberration performed by the Canon EF 400 mm DO II can be only praised.

A very similar performance is observed after attaching the 1.4x teleconverter.

The results increased but only slightly and still are close to 0.04%. It seems no matter whether you work with the bare lens or you add the teleconverter to it, the lateral chromatic aberration won’t bother you in the slightest.

Canon 5D III, RAW, 400 mm, f/4.0	Canon 5D III, RAW, 400 mm, f/8.0

Spherical aberration

First photos of this chapter don’t show any ‘focus shift’ effect. Light circles in crops presented below, which we got in front of and behind the focus, seem to be identical. The differences between them stem mainly from the fact of using DO technology, not because of spherical aberration. It seems the tested lens doesn’t experience any serious problems related to spherical aberration, especially that the image you get at the maximum relative aperture is of very good quality, properly contrasted and without ‘foggy’ areas which are typical for instruments with badly corrected aberration of that type.