Any lens that carries a near £2,000 price tag has to be pretty special, and Canon’s 14mm ultra-wide ticks the boxes in both respects. With its one-piece lens cap in place the 14mm lens looks rather ordinary but as soon as the cap is removed a bulbous front element comes into view, surrounded by a low-profile, petal-type lens hood that is an intrinsic part of the lens barrel. A broad deeply-ridged focusing ring sits just behind the lens hood: perfect for ergonomic use.

The rearmost part of the barrel contains a focused-distance window, to the left of which sits the slider switch to change between manual focusing and combined AF/MF. Focusing is carried out internally, without disturbing the focus ring in AF mode yet always allowing manual intervention. The distance window includes depth-of-field markings and an infrared focusing index.

One problem ultra-wide lenses have is an inability to attach filters at the front owing to the fact that this would cause vignetting: This lens overcomes this by providing a large gelatine-filter holder behind the rear element. This facility would previously have been useful for contrast control in mono film photography (as would the IR focusing index) and digital users are unlikely to value these features as highly but will appreciate the rubber flange that provides a dust- and water-resistant seal between the lens and host camera body.

Other features include aspherical profiles and ultra-low dispersion elements (which both should enable top-notch images); plus ultrasonic-motor focusing for quick, quiet, and accurate focusing.
Technical testing reveals a very impressive peak resolution just short of 0.3 cycles-per-pixel at f/8 but a slightly weak performance wide-open and, even more so, with the aperture fully closed down. Distortion is very well controlled: straight lines remain straight even close to the frame edge.