Sharp lens ??

I find the 15 to 45 to be remarkably sharp in the centre and the 50 f1 8 to be as sharp or sharper than it was on my 60d. This may be due to how a mirrorless doesnt have front or back focus issues.

Have you stopped down the 50mm. Mine works best stopped to f2.2 and beyond.

The 50 STM, or the older one? The 85 F1.8 is also very sharp, especially when stopped down to about F2.2.

Chaihg said:

What is the sharpest lens available for shooting people?.

Thanks

Click to expand...

Basically, the 22mm F2 is the sharpest EF-M lens, but 11-22mm could be sharper in some situations at around 16-17mm.

Otherwise Sigma 18-35 F1.8 is very sharp, but its big, heavy and expensive.

Thanks to everyone who replied. I think I will go with 28mm EF-M and see how it performs.
I have the 50mm STM lens and find it soft or blurry even with plenty of light. Will have to explore more stops and see if there is a lens specific setting I should stick to.
I do not know much about other Canon and Sigma lenses mentioned here, will search for them now.

Cheers

Chaihg said:

Hey all, I had the Samsung NX camera for years and loved the 60mm Macro lens for portraits and macro stuff.

Now I moved to EOS M6 and have used the 15-45 and 50mm F1.8 with an adapter. However, I find both of these lack the sharp focus my 7 year old samsung camera provided. What is the sharpest lens available for shooting people?. Since I have the adapter I wouldn't mind getting any EF lens too.

Thanks

Click to expand...

I think I know what you're talking about here because I can remember downloading my first pictures from the EOS M6 and was wondering if there was a problem with my camera because the images seemed quite "unsharpened" and perhaps even slightly soft.
.
The EOSM cameras (including the M6) usually tend to ship with sharpness minimized. It's not turned down all the way but it's reduced to a level closer to RAW. The original M wasn't so bad. But the M6 definitely required a tiny bit of tinkering before I was happy. Sharpness wasn't bad but color was slightly cyan (blue) biased. If you have the M6 you'll possibly need to make a couple of alterations with your custom settings for color and sharpness. I have opted to only make subtle changes with mine but some of the presets such as Fine Detail (I think that's what it's called) are designed for photographing in museums ... so I used that as my template when adjusting color saturation and other parameters. The camera then uses this as a preset and (if you press the right buttons) you can save it as your custom setting. If you're not sure, just try the Fine Detail setting and see if that makes a difference. I also feel that the out-of-the-box M6 is slightly cooler in color cast than Canon normally produces with other cameras. I know that Samsung artificially sharpen their images using in-camera software and they tend to ship their cameras with this preset on. Hence their pictures will seem much sharper than those from an M6 straight out of the box.
.
The M6 has DPAF so the focus should be pretty accurate each time. I rarely shoot in M or Av so I'm not usually altering the aperture to "force" a lens to take sharp shots. I have only purchased my EOSM cameras as a body-only and later bought three three lenses mentioned below. As such I have not used the 15-45mm lens but I have hear some members here state that as a kit lens it was adequate but that it was not typically sharp enough for their expectation. I can't comment on that because I have not use this lens other than to test it on a display camera at a dealer's display... and I have not downloaded samples to view.
.


EOSM + EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM lens. Taken wide open at f/4 - my first shot with this lens.

.
The sharpest lenses for the EOSM are going to include the EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM lens... which is sharp wide open at f/4.... and certainly the EF-M 28mm f/3.5 IS Macro STM lens. I had not heard that the EF-M 22mm f/2 STM lens was reputed to be incredibly sharp before seeing a mention of this in this thread, but it is certainly one of my favorite lenses on the EOSM camera because it functions well in low light and produces pleasing bokeh. But looking back over some of my pictures, I can see that it has produces exceptional detail in many shots, even with shallow DOF. I've added two below that were taken in P-Mode so you can see how much unforced detail showed up in the resulting images.
.


EOSM6 + EF-M 28mm f/3.5 IS Macro STM (+ CPL filter)


EOSM + EF-M 28mm f/3.5 IS Macro STM lens (+ CPL Filter) 2x image vertical panorama.


EOSM + EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM lens (no filters used)


EOSM + EF 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM lens (CPL filter used)


EOSM6 + EF-M 22mm f/2 STM lens (no filters, taken while leaning over a balcony)

I had 2 copyes of 11-22 and they was equally sharp. At close distance the 22 F2 is sharper at any aperture till F8. For long distance the 11-22 at 17mm was sharper with better contrast in the middle, but overall both are pretty close. My copy of 28mm Macro was little bit softer with less contrast at any distances than the both - 22mm F2 and the 11-22mm. 15-45mm is very sharp, but only in the very middle and only at 15mm.

Chaihg said:

Hey all, I had the Samsung NX camera for years and loved the 60mm Macro lens for portraits and macro stuff.

Now I moved to EOS M6 and have used the 15-45 and 50mm F1.8 with an adapter. However, I find both of these lack the sharp focus my 7 year old samsung camera provided. What is the sharpest lens available for shooting people?. Since I have the adapter I wouldn't mind getting any EF lens too.

Thanks

Click to expand...

I'm using a 22mm f/2 and does a good enough job in the sharpness department, bad vignette though, but manageable. Another useful lens is the 18-35mm 1.8 from Sigma, provided you can find a copy without any focusing issues with DPAF.

Chaihg said:

Thanks to everyone who replied. I think I will go with 28mm EF-M and see how it performs.
I have the 50mm STM lens and find it soft or blurry even with plenty of light.

Click to expand...

This sounds strange. Perhaps there is something wrong with your copy. Could you post examples? I have never seen that lens described as soft or blurry, and certainly haven't found it to be so myself. I'm usually shooting mine at F2 or F2.2, and get excellent sharpness.

Chaihg said:

Will have to explore more stops and see if there is a lens specific setting I should stick to.
I do not know much about other Canon and Sigma lenses mentioned here, will search for them now.

Cheers

Click to expand...

OMG I can't believe there was a setting for this. As Macro Nero said, this was hidden in the menu and I had to select portrait mode and set the sharpness to 0 instead of 7.
Pictures are now turning out to be awesome. Thanks Macro and others who helped me. This is a pro tip every user must know.

Chaihg said:

OMG I can't believe there was a setting for this. As Macro Nero said, this was hidden in the menu and I had to select portrait mode and set the sharpness to 0 instead of 7.
Pictures are now turning out to be awesome. Thanks Macro and others who helped me. This is a pro tip every user must know.

Click to expand...

You're welcome. I think a few of us were worried at first that your camera had some sort of defect although this is also the same issue I remember dealing with when I downloaded my first M6 pictures. I think that the factory-default settings produce a JPEG that looks quite unsharpened... much like the RAW file that created it did. Presumably it is set to either Neutral or Faithful when unboxed. If ever you are unsure of which setting to use, just turn to the "Fine Detail" setting and use that as your template for 'Customizing Picture Styles' (see pages 73 and 74 of your manual). I think we found that the Fine Detail setting produced a sharp picture that did not appear to be overly processed and had enhanced some colors slighting.
.
Both the "Neutral" and Faithful settings are described by Canon as being "For retouching later on a computer. Faithfully reproduces the actual colors of subjects as measured under ambient light. Vivid colors are suppressed for a subdued look." These two settings would probably be the softest.
.
Personally, I feel Canon should not have toyed with the previous color system and since each picture style has adjustable settings for sharpness (which in turn has three different sharpness parameters which each have their own settings) as well as contrast, saturation and color tone alterations, this gets very confusing. I do not find this new method particularly easy to master. There's also "Filter Effect" and even "Toning Effect" in the options for Picture Style Customization.
.
I think most of us choose a "Picture Style" like Fine Detail and then tweak it to what appeals to our shooting style and subject matter... then save it to "User Def." so we can recall it later. Using the default setting, as you noticed, produces a softer image that is disappointing. I can only imagine how many people buy this camera and assume that it takes "soft pictures". All the previous models were nicely set with a decent and practical image quality setting.

This is the default styles in EOS M10. The maximum value for the sharpness is 7.

When I'm testing the lenses I'm using sharpness on 1. Sometimes when I shooting landscapes with tiny branches in far distances sharpness on 3 is little too much, especially with EF-M 15-45 on 15mm.

lumenite said:

Chaihg said:

Hey all, I had the Samsung NX camera for years and loved the 60mm Macro lens for portraits and macro stuff.

Now I moved to EOS M6 and have used the 15-45 and 50mm F1.8 with an adapter. However, I find both of these lack the sharp focus my 7 year old samsung camera provided. What is the sharpest lens available for shooting people?. Since I have the adapter I wouldn't mind getting any EF lens too.

Thanks

Click to expand...

I do think that the comparison between macro lens and other cheap lenses is fair.

Either EF-M 28mm/3.5 macro IS or EF-S 60mm/2.8 macro would be a good choice for you. EF-S 35mm/2.8 macro IS is another choice. Along side macro lenses, maybe EF 35mm/2.0 IS would be the best in this range.

Click to expand...

I tried the Ef-m 28 macro against the ef-s 35 macro on M5 and I found the 35 macro is to be much sharper. I don’t know if this was because of the individual copies I have or if the 35 is better than the 28 in general. Bab