I had a little bit of time last night to capture a few test shots with the Canon 40mm f2.8 lens. Corner and center sharpness look very good for a lens in this price range, however the Vignetting is very strong wide open and doesn’t completely clear up until about f5.6. The focusing speed of the lens isn’t dramatically slower then USM lenses, but it isn’t as quiet as I was expecting. A 0.98 foot focusing distance did make it very easy to capture that flower on the street corner, which is a handy feature.  However the front element of the lens extends about a half an inch when focusing, making the lens slightly less compact.

I have some more film work coming up this weekend, so hopefully I’ll have a chance to shoot some video on this lens and see how it works out. In the photography department, if you like the look of vignetting, the Canon 40mm f2.8 lens could still be useful wide open, but I prefer to add a vignette effect in post. I’ll have to test it out on a crop sensor camera to see how well that fixes the vignetting issue.

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