Canon's EF 35mm f/2 adheres to a traditional film-camera focal length while at the same time attempting to meet the demands of digital photography.....
Canon EF 35mm f/2 Review
Given that the lens tested here is capable of covering both formats it is likely to appeal to a large number of potential buyers, which must make good commercial sense for Canon. The lens looks good, with a semi-matt eggshell finish, and feels like a traditional film-camera standard lens, making it just the right size to offer good handling both when changing lenses and during shooting. As well as a depth-of-field window the lens also has an AF/MF switch and a narrow manual focusing ring that is located about half-way along the barrel.
In terms of performance, the EF 35mm produces very acceptable visual results but numerically it is rather lacklustre, returning close to 0.2 cycles/pixel across much of its aperture range. That doesn’t mean it’s a poor lens so much as that it simply doesn’t sparkle. Using the f/2 maximum aperture means accepting some loss of performance but stopping down only produces a very slight improvement through the crucial mid-range apertures. This sounds unimpressive but it does have the advantage of producing fairly consistent results over a wide range of aperture settings.