The 50mm scores especially highly, but the 35mm, 20mm and 24mm also perform very well.Ĭanon’s relatively inexpensive 35mm f/2 IS USM and 24mm f/2.8 IS USM make an appearance. However, enthusiast photographers will perhaps be more interested by the presence of Sigma’s f/1.4 Art-series primes, which currently sell around the £600 mark. Our list of the sharpest lenses under £2,000 is headed by the manual-focus Zeiss 135mm f/2, while Canon’s own top-ranking optic is the stellar, but pricey, EF 35mm f/1.4L II USM. Also on the rarefied list of premium ultra-sharp optics are Canon’s 600mm f/4 and 400mm f/2.8 telephotos, and Zeiss’s ultra-premium Otus 55mm f/1.4 and 85mm f/1.4 – none of which counts as affordable.
#THE SYSTEM LENS PROFESSIONAL#
The catch is its £4,799 price tag, meaning that it’s mostly limited to use by professional photojournalists. It should come as no great surprise to learn that the sharpest lens DxOMark has tested on the EOS 5DS R is a premium telephoto prime, the Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS II USM. When comparing across systems, only use tests conducted with similar resolution cameras. Higher resolution sensors tend to give higher sharpness measurements, while sensors with no OLPF give higher readings than those without.īecause of this, when looking to compare lenses for sharpness, they really need to have been tested on the same camera body. In particular, the measurements are influenced by the camera’s sensor, in particular its resolution and optical low-pass filter (OLPF). This can still give extremely useful results, but it does have its caveats. However, one complication of this approach is that it tests the system as a whole – in other words, the lens and the camera combined. Thousands of test exposures can be made at essentially no cost, and the raw files analysed to measure sharpness However, it’s now much more practical to use a suitable camera body for testing. All the data used for this article can be analysed in more detail on the DxOMark website at A note on modern lens testingĪt one time, lens testing used to be carried out using specialist (and expensive) optical benches. However, it follows that if any given lens produces good results on, for example, Canon full-frame models, it should give equally good results on Nikon, Pentax or Sony full-frame cameras. It’s worth bearing in mind that even DxOMark’s database isn’t 100% comprehensive, and not all lenses have been tested on all cameras, including several recent third-party optics. In addition, we’ve only included lenses that are available for sale as new. The lists of the sharpest lenses for each camera system in this article have also been filtered for some degree of affordability, leaving out any lens priced above £2,000. We’ve analysed DxOMark’s sharpness scores for each major camera system to see which lenses come out on top.
#THE SYSTEM LENS SOFTWARE#
Its lens and camera tests employ the same home-grown DxO Analyser software that is used to determine the aberration corrections that are an integral part of the firm’s award-winning OpticsPro raw-conversion software. About DxOMarkĭxOMark is part of the Paris-based company DxO Labs. For this reason, we’ve teamed up with DxOMark, one of the most respected names in the photographic industry, to sift through its extensive database of lens-test data in order to pick out the sharpest optics for each major camera system. Do you want a wideangle or a telephoto, a zoom or a prime? What’s your budget? With all this in mind, we decided to provide some kind of sensible answer anyway.Īlthough we’ve tested more lenses than ever over the past couple of years, we’ve had to accept that even that’s not enough to provide a useful answer. It’s also a question that needs to be qualified. Sigma’s 50mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art and the Zeiss Otus 55mm f/1.4: two of the sharpest lenses currently availableĪ question often posed by photographers is: ‘What’s the sharpest lens I can buy for my camera?’ In reality this can only properly be answered by examining lens tests that have been carried out in a reliable and repeatable way.
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