Canon RF 24mm f/1.8 Review
Over the past few years Canon has really been building out their lineup of small and affordable prime lenses, the most recent of which being the Canon RF 24mm f/1.8. Now this lens sparked my interests for a couple of reasons, 24mm is one of my favorite focal ranges to shoot with, the lens is small and light, image stabilized and is quite affordable often found online for under $500.
Starting off with image quality. This lens is surprisingly good. Now I have shot with many 24mm primes some costing north of $4,000 and to get both photos and video as clean and sharp as you get from this lens and in such a small package is really impressive. Shooting at f/1.8 you get great separation. The way the focus gently falls off from the focal plane is very pleasing. The bokeh is well defined without being overly distracting and the overall sharpness of this lens from the center to the corners is very good, some of the best I have seen in a sub $500 lens.
Flairs and ghosting are fairly well controlled. I had no problem shooting photos or video with the sun backlighting the subject. I still wouldn’t say it is on par with Canon L Series glass, but a big improvement over some of their cheaper lenses like the RF 16mm.
An aspect of this lens that I didn’t really give much thought to, but I found myself using and enjoying quite a lot was the close focusing distance. Canon does classify this lens as a Macro lens and while it is not a 1:1 true macro lens, its 1:2 reproduction ratio was more than enough to get some unique shots. I found myself looking for more creative and unique angles because the combination of 24mm at f1.8 and being only a few inches from the subject can give you a really cool perspective.
Chromatic Aberrations and distortion is pretty well controlled. If you do turn off lens corrections, you can see that there is more correction being done than I would have liked to see, especially vignette, but there are far worse examples out there so I can’t be too hard on Canon for this. When shooting compositions that have a lot of lines or repetitive detail, I felt as though the lens did a great job at keeping the lines straight and the CA to a minimum.
Another big selling point of this lens is the image stabilization. Being a wide lens at 24mm on top of being image stabilized, you can get some pretty stable shots as long as you are intentional with your movements. Paired with something like the Canon R6, I was able to hand hold long exposure photos down to 1/10th of a second without any trouble. For video, I didn’t notice any corner wobble or anything out of the ordinary, the whole system felt great to use and allowed me to get some shots that I probably wouldn’t have been able to get without a gimbal.
Talking about video, all of these great qualities that made this a good photo lens, also makes this a good video lens. The focus motor is silent and smooth, the focal length is great for capturing every day scenes and the sharpness and overall image quality is perfect for a light run around lens. If you need just one lens to carry around with you can capture life as it happens, I could see this being a great choice.
At the end of the day we have a lens that is fairly affordable, has great image quality, is stabilized, has a macro function and is light, portable and easy to live with. I think Canon struck a good balance with this RF 24mm, it isn’t the f/1.4 that most people, myself included would have loved to see, but given all of the strengths that this lens has, if you have been waiting to get a 24mm prime, this one will not disappoint.
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