24-240 / 24-105 7.1 / 24mm IS comparison

highdesertmesa wrote:

tkbslc wrote:

Quick comparison of the 24-105 4-7.1, 24-240 and an EF 24mm f2.8 IS prime all at 24mm. Wanted to see if the 24-105 is as bad at 24mm as they say.

The centers are all pretty close. Close enough I didn't bother showing the crops. Nothing really to see. All are great in the center.

The edges, there was quite a difference. 24-105 is pretty bad, even at f8. The 24-240 gets quite good at f8. Prime still wins, as it should. I didn't show it, but the 24mm prime is better at f2.8 edges than 24-105 is at f8. (Easiest to see the differences in the fire hydrant)

Surprised the 24-240 is so much better given it need much more distortion/vignetting correction than the 24-105 and it has more than double the range.

I've not noticed such a large disparity between 24-105 and 24-240 except at the wide and. 24-105 is very good from 35-105. But certainly can't recommend it for WA landscapes.

100% crops at f4 and f8 of just the top right edge/corner (view full screen). Shot JPEG with in camera corrections.

FWIW, the 24-105 STM is much better corrected using RAW and doing so manually in Capture One — it corrects to where it looks better than the 24-240 in the corners at 24mm. Canon didn’t do enough peripheral sharpening correction in their processing, and Lightroom/Adobe simply mimics what Canon does in-camera. On the 24-240, the distortion correction is too extreme for extra sharpening in the corners to make any difference. My guess is that given the resources available during the pandemic, Canon engineers didn’t pursue peripheral sharpening on the 24-105 STM because it hadn't helped the the 24-240.

Jpeg with in-camera corrections should give just about best case for this kind of test. I don't know if DLO was enabled which might make a difference.

I think the 24-105 / 7.1 can and should be better.