Review of the Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM

Offering the 35mm equivalent of 16-35mm this Canon lens covers pretty much every useful and popular wideangle focal length, in a reasonably lightweight, yet sturdy package. The lens weighs just 385g, and has Canon’s Ultra Sonic Motor for fast, whisper-quiet auto focusing. The optical construction consists of thirteen elements in ten groups and includes three aspherical elements and a Super-UD element. Super-UD is Canon’s ultra low dispersion glass to aid in the correction of chromatic aberration. Canon also allows the lens to focus down to 24cm, which is great for including foreground interest, especially when combined with deep depth of field focusing. Unfortunately Canon loses some brownie points by not including a lens hood, so factor another £25 into your budget. Build and handling While this isn’t one of Canon’s professional L-series lenses, the construction is impressive, with a solid feel, metal lens mount and robust materials. The zoom ring is loose without being slack, and rotates smoothly. Similarly the manual focus ring is solid and smooth. Incidentally the focus offers manual focus in AF mode, which is ideal for fine-tuning focusing if the camera AF misses the spot. The AF speed is impressive and the operation certainly very quiet. Image Quality In field trials the Canon 10-22mm is a very capable performer, and displayed good contrast and sharpness overall using a 400D. All’s not perfect though: there’s signs of fringing, especially towards the image corners, though also in some high-contrast areas in the centre of the frame. At wider apertures, sharpness can fall off fairly quickly, again with the corners of the frame suffering the most, and some detail goes positively mushy. On the bench, the Canon produces good results, with best performance at f/8. Sadly it suffers from high chromatic aberration (CA), especially at 10mm and at the edges. Distortion at 10mm is also quite pronounced.