Canon RF 16mm F2.8 STM Review 

This lens along with the 35mm have become my gimbal duo for real estate walkthrough videos. The digital corrections are immense on this lens, so I’m surprised it wasn’t mentioned here (maybe I missed it?). So for photography, it can be somewhat underwhelming to bring a RAW file into Lightroom and see a dark, distorted abyss in the corners before it corrections. At the end of the day, I have all my bases covered with L-series RF glass, but this little guy never leaves the bag as a “just in case” backup for real estate and is always my first choice for gimbal shots - it’s an unreal lens to balance so easily!

I have this lens and really like it. It gives me a usable ultrawide option in my camera backpack for almost no space or weight. The image quality might not be L level but I've made some beautiful and exciting pictures with it. Having the option always beats not having it.

Bought this lens on day of release and have never regretted my choice. I use it on a RP and it has worked fantastically everytime I have used it as Chris says a no brainer if you want a cheap ultra wide.

It is actually a good lens paired it with a 50 1.8 and you can almost do everything

I own this lens, I bought it almost a year ago, on a sale, for €220, minus a €30 cashback, so €190. Lovely deal. Since I rarely use a ultra wide, this pairs magnificently with my 24-70 2.8 and 70-200 2.8, on my R6. Of course it doesn't have the same performance as say a RF 15-35 2.8, but neither it has the same price tag. I got it the JJC lens hood, for half the price of the Canon version, and...done! Very nice little lens!

I always admired the specs and price of this lens, glad to see the image quality isn't cheap-looking!

Wow, is this the best value Canon lens ever made? Easily best value RF lens. Other than focus breathing, this lens seems to be punching waaay ahead of it's weight class. Not going to lie, I'm really impressed. Great work Canon.

I love how you guys have kept the Noct as a unit!

Hi guys, thanks for another great review! There is one thing I want to add: If you use the camera in video mode for vlogging, you don`t hear the autofocus motor anymore. The motor then works absolute silently. I use the lens for photo and video on my R10 and I´m very happy with it.

I recently went to the Auto show in Toronto. My daughter came along so last minute I handed her the R5 with this 16mm lens and put it on full auto. Myself I took the R6mk2 with the RF 24mm F1.8 IS with Circ Pol and a bloom filter for some creative look. Had the RF 24-105 in the bag but never took it out. After reviewing the photos the RF 16mm took some great photos. With 45 Mpix lots of room to crop in a little so its nice to have that option with the 16mm focal distance. For tight spaces like an Auto and with F 2.8 this lens delivered and my daughter loved using it.

This lens with a Canon r8 what a great combo if you want a ”cheap” and light fullframe combo för landscape, architecture etc

Great, fun review as always.

Just grabbed this one on sale from The Camera Store here in Calgary, looking forward to testing it out this weekend. Can't beat the price!

Downloaded the raw files and used DPP, the results are amazing!

Good timing! Just picked this lens up on Monday. Gonna take it out right now and try some snowy/frosty Calgary landscapes with it.

I use this little guy for real estate stills and video, especially when I am getting so much unwanted lens flare with the Sigma 12-24 ART when shooting images of the front of a house. Excellent for landscapes!

My next ultra wide

I love the noct is still used as a measure unit, even for very light lenses

Have it. Love it.

Thankyou again for the comprehensive and entertaining review. I really like what you are doing and how! I own this little thing and overall I am quite impressed, too. Sharpness not a problem for me on an R5. I have some complaints though. It vignettes quite drastically at f/2.8 (stopping down improves it) and it is absolutely relying on digital distortion correction. The latter being a problem for the optical purists only and I think it's absolutely forgivable at this price. Other than that: Great value.

Impressive! Great Review!

that lens is a nice little banger. real nice for the price point and one of those lenses you have on you not taking up space but knowing you can handle a wide angle situation. Aside from the focus breathing itd be a nice little gimbal ready lens and id say any kid lookin to shoot BMX or skate its a great lens to pick up for a low cost kit

Great review and love Calgary for sure! 🤠👍

I have had one for a month now, and I really do like it. To get ultra-wide at f/2.8 at this price is amazing! Yes, the STM motor is annoying, and the tiny body doesn’t inspire confidence, but the results are what matter in the end, and this does deliver good results without breaking the bank. PS. You can get the lens hood for the RF 50mm f/1.8 STM and put it on this lens, and it won’t vignette. The JJC one doesn’t vignette either.

Thanks for sharing another wonderful video like always, hope to see more funny videos with Gordon, take care 👌👍🤗

Great wide angle possibilities advantage of small flange distance is a good start

Thx for the review. Just ordered mine. Will see. I am about to use it with R6

I LOL'd at the "A Calagary Icon Returns - Pfft, I never left!" 😆😅👌

effetely a nice pairing with a 24-70mm f2.8 if you wanted that wider field of view as you travel with the 24-70mm f2.8.

I love this lens! I don't know about the 35mm, but the 16mm and 50mm are the same filter size and share the same lens hood.

I used this lens on my R5 this past winter shooting Northern Lights and got excellent results.

I've found this 16mm lens better for photo than video. The focus breathing makes even talking head pieces difficult with eye AF, as even slight movement drastically changes DOF. As the lens isn't stabilized, you rely on IBIS or electronic stabilization and there will be peripheral warping when you walk and talk. But for photography, it's a great architectural and street shooter lens.

Got this lens, im in love with it

That’s a little gem of lens

I bought this lens as a cheap, lightweight, travel lens for a trip to Iceland and was very surprised by the quality of it for the price! Gonna keep it around for a while.

i love mine. my only complaint is the focusing noise. but covering it with music or jump cuts pretty much cancels it out. it's awesome for small room talking head vids

43mm filter thread is a bit inconvenient. My solution for this and the rf 50 is to mount a step ring to 58mm with cap to match. This has remained on the lenses since new, doesn’t interfere with mounting the hood and allows use of the more common filter size.

great video!

I have this lens, it’s been great for real estate video and photo type work. I do get INSANE jiggle in video with the R6 though so it’s actually better to turn off the IBIS, use a steady hand and stabilise in post if needed.

More of this please Canon! The 3000$ lenses are important but you don't want to buy them for something cheaper than the R6

My Canon has the option to shoot video in Super 35 crop or from full frame. So when I want to travel light I bring the 16mm and the 50mm f/1.8. Both weigh the same and are the same length so ideal on a gimbal. Because of the cropped option I can shoot 16, 25, 50, 80mm footage with only two ultra small lenses. Well, small for RF that is :-)

The budget real estate photo/video company I worked for eventually got R6s with these. Really impressive setup. Just because they didn't mention it here: in video when using this the classic Canon IBIS wobble is very present, and yes the motors are loud, but I personally think it makes an excellent vlog lens overall.

I am surprised you're talking about this lens. I have been using for a few weeks now with my R5, and really like it. I have a mixed bag, so to speak, with my 100-400mm, 600mm F11, and now the 16mm F2.8. I have been using it with waterfalls, creeks, and lake shots.

I like using it

Great lens for the EOS R 4K video.... for my EOS R5C i use the budget 24mm & 35mm for video.

I like my 16mm on my R6m2 don’t need a macro and great for rooms indoors amongst others

It's an excellent entry level lens for astro.

I would be interested on your review with a APS-C camera, such as R50.

Despite the terrible distortion, easily correctible in post, it is an incredibly sharp lens. I am using it at f.9 for my real estate photography and, combined with my Eos R, on Manfrotto tripod, it gives me unexpected results.

Could you review their other lightweight offerings? I'm thinking of the 24-105mm (f4-7.1) and the 24-240mm.

Close focusing distance and same filter thread with 50mm. Lens that’s always on mah bag

Really cool! Seems like there's lot to love in this one.

Nice & Thanks :)

As someone who owns the 15-35 this lens isn’t for me, but I am looking forward to some mid-tier primes from canon. High-end but not necessarily f/1.2… I have the 35 prime but it’s rendering is pretty meh so it doesn’t come out of the bag unless I’m really needing the extra stop of light or really wanting to keep it light.

I literally just bought this last night! Awesome lens!

It is worth noting that this lens does not reveal the potential of the camera, in truth, it exploits it and spends like a teenager who received an inheritance. With barrel distortion about 10%, correction profile uses just somewhere around 85-87% of the sensor area. So with this lens you don’t really have a FF camera, rather you have a pillow-shaped crop sensor there, that narrows to the edges somewhere up to 33 and 22 mm. At the same time, even after distortion correction cuts edges and stretches pixels on the remaining edges by 1.5 times, there is a still a pretty strong vignetting correction needed. And it's one of those lenses where about 2 stops of vignetting correction at the edges remains at any aperture. It's really hard for me to recommend such a tool for those who want to squeeze more juice out of their full frame camera. As a stock photographer, I'd rather buy some old lens that has a reputation for being "soft", like a 16-35 II or even a 17-40. Stopping down to f/8-f/11, these "non-sharp" lenses begin sharper than this wunderkind, and with no more than 3.5% distortion - your pixels are still your pixels for the most part. You can still work with this data quite hard before it starts fall apart. This lens makes "nice pictures", but in some smartphone sense. And that's fine as full frame cameras have become very affordable and convenient, but I still believe in the need to provide useful information for demanding users.

do you think this would be a upgrade from a ef 16-25 2.8 Ver1?

It would be important to see how does this perform on Canon APS-C bodies, as this would be a 24/27mm (depending on the crop on R10 body) cheap prime equivalent. That said, 300$ is not that cheap compared to what you used to pay for the 35mm and 50mm F1.8 APS-C prime lenses 5/6 years ago

I own this lens, before any correction it actually is like a flawed 14mm if you look at the raw files albeit with serious vignette and distortion. Don't really like it but for a lens that I barely use it is great for its value in my bag.

Good review, however, this lens seems like it might be a good choice for Astro Photography. It is UWA and reasonably fast. It would have been nice to see a few seconds with you pointing it at the night sky.

The focus and control button is not to switch from autofocus to manual focus… that’s done in the camera settings.

The distortion is nuts!

Hi there. Which is the best possible way: Canon ef 10-18 + adapter or this 16 for a newbie Canon r10 user btw I enjoy with 50 mm f/1.8 rf lens so much.

Jordan, How's S5 II in terms of AF?

0:42 right side: How did Chris and Jordan get themselves on a mural? Some kind of Calgary's-favorite-sons thing?

I'll upgrade my kit next year, I'm thinking about this lens for Wide Angle, 35 Macro for General POV and then a 85mm for potrait.

Got it one day. Shot with it. Sold it the next day. You get what you pay for.

i like DP

Would like to have heard about video capability....

Just got it an realised that I won't be able to use whit my formatt hitech filter set, because it has to be mounted on the lens threads an that part of the rf 16mm is moving when focusing 😢😢

the thing that sucks about this is no weather sealing. sometimes the best landscapes happen in or very near rain.

Normally I’m more of a Nikon fan, but damn am I jealous of this lens.

This lens is the cheapest way to get into super ultra wide Real estate. This is way better than iPhone 14. I use this for Real Estate video @F4 on a gimbal and Real Estate photo @F8. The distortion correction in Camera is great as long as you have the latest firmware. Lastly when you run it on APSC or Movie Mode it becomes a Near 26MM which is amazingly small Run and gun SCI-FI Short film look

No Chris you're certainly an angel ;)

This is just a fun little lens. Good quality, not great. Buy it if you want one, pay a lot more for better if you must have the best. Or if you need weather sealing. I love mine and yes the corners are horrible if you turn off lens corrections. But don't do that and it will be ok! And don't Pixel peep outside of the middle. Never. That's the secret to happiness with this one. It's fine in the corners if the middle of the image is sharp. Just never super sharp in the corners. But the corners never look bad either, and it's $299. Not $2499. Don't overthink this one. It's tiny, weighs next to nothing, it's ultra wide and the price is right. Optically it's not perfect. But it's good enough for a lot of us. You know who you are!🤣

Hi everyone. Which lens is a must in my bag ? Should I go with the RF16 mm F/2.8 or the RF50 mm F/1.8

I have zero investment in Canon, but when they drop that R60 I'll get one the, R8, this lens, the rehoused 22f2, and the 35f1.8 and be done. Hopefully they make no weird changes to the M6II when they change the mount. I am waiting on the no EVF, flip UP (not out) screen. If it doesn't do these things then my plans are fucked, and I'll probably just get a Ricoh GRIII and wait for somebody else to make it. C'mon Canon don't bungle it at the finish line. 🤞😅

i have a r7 and was gonna use it for night cityscapes videography. the 16 would be a 24mm on a apsc?

Has anyone tried this lens for landscape? Can you put square filters on it?

I just wonder if I got a really bad sample for review. The bokeh was horrible, CAs were crazy and sharpness was not there at all. Looks very different with yours.

Guys, everyone who has an RF mount camera already has this lens. But thanks for the review! ;) P.S. Was it me or was the audio quality a lot worse in this episode of DPReview TV??

I’ve had this lens for almost a year and unfortunately think I have to conclude it’s just not for me. Yes, its incredibly wide focal length gives an interesting perspective, it’s got great color and sharpness, but I really can’t shoot people I love and care about because there is so much distortion it makes their body parts look enormous, especially when placed anywhere outside dead center. The lens also requires an aggressive correction profile to flatten out the fisheye effect but makes the “body part distortion” even worse. I can’t hold it against Canon-it’s the nature of an ultra wide focal length and difficult obstacle to overcome. The fact that they put out a tiny, light, 16mm f2.8 that produces the photos it does and kept it under $300 is impressive. But for my shooting style, I haven’t been able to make it work. On a different note, I was surprised by how challenging it is to compose well at this focal length. So much of photography is knowing what -not-to include in the frame, and this lens sees everything. A lot of my photos (of landscapes, for example) came out looking like uninteresting cell phone pictures at first but with some practice and attention to composition they’ve become nicer. This lens definitely made me a better photographer.

How is the distortion? I'm thinking for real estate

Thanks for the review; I bought the lens for my Canon R6 II and its been a good purchase. Decent. I also compared with wide angle pictures taken on iPhone 13 ProMax using app which allows using iPhone lenses individually and feel iPhone does a better job.

Not for me. One of the few EF lenses I still have is the 16-35 L F4 L IS USM. While not the best image quality, likely similar to this and focuses faster than an STM lens (and weather sealed with IS) I feel if i walked around all day with a 16mm lens, I'd miss a ton of shots where I'd want to zoom in. Trust me, back in the day I was a PRIME guy, I only liked using primes. But it's just not that practical to switch lenses a ton. I see this more useful on the RF50 cropped sensor, as mentioned in the video, it would act as a 25.6 F2.8 and I think that would be far more useful. The closer you are with the this 16mm lens the more it will distort your subject, so eventho it's F2.8, forget using it indoor for most applications, (people). This limits the usage even more. I know my comments have nothing to do with quality, only application.

It is too bad it can only 25% life size. I really like the 50% of the Tamron 20mm OSD.

how about for video use? @Jordan ? lol

I wish Nikon had the same lens

Why publish so late this review ? The lens was issue last year, or is this another model ?

Well… Sony did make that 16mm f2.8 APSC pancake back in the day…

2nd

1🎉

I'll have you know yours is the only version of eternal sunshine I have ever seen. I remember being intrigued by the premise back in the day but that movie had a cast that I just couldn't get down with_ Frodo, Rose, and dumb the dumber.

Chris, they look more like fairy wings 😉

The DPR staff needs a better understanding of how focus breathing affects video. Their tests always consists of focusing from the closest point to infinity regardless of whether the lens is a macro (or half macro) lens or not. Lenses with close focusing capabilities are always going to look terrible in such a test. Totally unfair.

I wonder what he shot this video with

Pentax!

Are we weighing lenses based on Nikons 0.95 Noct lens? Hahaha

I just bought it for $250.00 for a Canon R.

Not horrible… that’s the most Canon gets from me.