Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM Review
Making myself available as a photographer has meant investing in new gear. Some things I need to fill in certain gaps, like focal lengths that my 50mm and 100mm macro don’t cover, and others to provide durability (or at least redundancy) that I don’t currently have. It’s expensive, but necessary, and as far as business start-up costs go, I think I have it pretty easy, since I don’t need to worry about real estate or vehicles or anything scary-expensive like that.
The first big upgrade is the Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM, a wide-angle zoom. I decided to get this lens first for a couple of reasons: I don’t have anything in that focal range, it’s the cheapest of the lens/camera upgrades I want to make, and I can use it as a wide-standard zoom on my 40D (I think I have to put off an upgrade to the 5D II until last).
This is my first L lens, and it’s pretty clearly in a different class than the other lenses I have. Rather than give the same review focusing on technical details that you can find everywhere else on the internet, I’d like to pass over the image quality and instead talk about my first experience using it on a crop body.
It feels solid in the hand, though it’s not a massive lens. It balances very well with the 40D, and I imagine it would with the heavier bodies, too. The front element is huge — it has a 77mm filter diameter while being only 97mm long — and dark. You can see down into the body of my other lenses, this one has more of a “black box” appearance to it. I was surprised at the slight resistance and muffled click when I mounted it for the first time, until I realized that it was due to the rubber o-ring that seals the mount against water and dust.
The USM autofocus is very snappy, nearly silent, and from what I’ve seen so far, pretty accurate. The zoom ring and focus ring are both smooth and quiet, without the dry scratchy sound of inexpensive lenses. I will say that I’ve never had a zoom lens that doesn’t change length while zooming, and that was a bit of a surprise, being one of the little details that had slipped my mind. It also keeps an f/4 aperture through the zoom range, as opposed to others that drop a full stop after zooming in by 1mm from wide open.
I was aware of something with this lens that I’ve never consciously felt before: that this is a piece of equipment that my imagery deserves, and on the flip side, it is not one that I can hide behind when a shot doesn’t come out how I’d wanted. Don’t get me wrong, I am NOT one to mistake quality gear for quality photography. But holding it in my hand for the first time, that was my gut response. It’s definitely true, of course, but it’s also true of my 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro, and probably even the 50mm f/1.8 II — the difference is in the build quality and cosmetic design, and I have no doubt that this is exactly the impression Canon wants to give.
We had some reasonable weather the day after I got the lens, so I went out for a photowalk — no flash, no bag, just the 17-40mm on the 40D. With the crop factor, it’s acting as a 28-64mm zoom, which for me is a great focal length. It’s funny that 95% of the time I’ve been shooting with a prime between 50mm and 100mm (both telephoto on the 40D), but I really connect with the wide/standard perspective. I like having that depth without necessarily going ultrawide.
As I said, I don’t want to get too deep into the image quality side of it (this lens has been around for years and I doubt I could say anything original there) but I do think it’s important to say that my initial impression, that this is a lens my images deserve, stands up once I was actually looking at the results. I would comfortable printing a 100% crop from this lens. Color is great, detail is great, contrast is great. This is a lens whose quality you can see by looking through the camera’s viewfinder.
I think what I was really feeling when I pulled the lens out of its box was a sense of confidence: I can rely on this lens. It’s a sense that I don’t have to baby it. It’s not fragile, it’s not plastic, and I’m not worried that some delicate mechanism inside is about to snap if I swing it around too quickly. Obviously I’m going to be careful with it, but I don’t have the nagging voice in the back of my mind that’s monitoring how I’m handling it while I’m shooting. Having actually shot a bit with it, I still feel the same, and the images I’m getting from it back that up.
That’s one less distraction, and to me it’s the most important reason for getting pro-grade gear: if I’m going to book half my day (and possibly half of someone else’s day too) to a shoot out on location, I need to have confidence that my gear won’t let me down in any way. I also need to know that it’s not going to spontaneously die the day after the warranty expires. That peace of mind is what you’re really paying for with L glass.