The 'All Canon EF-M lenses' club

Larry Rexley wrote:

In the past several weeks I picked up a Canon EF-M 18-55mm and a 28mm f3.5 macro from eBay - and realized I have all 8 Canon native EF-M lenses.

I'm curious how many readers have most or all Canon EF-M lenses, and what their experiences are.

I have some 3rd party native EF-M lenses: 2 Rokinons (8mm f2.8 fisheye & 12mm f2) and two Sigmas (16mm and 56mm f1.4) in native Canon EF-M mount, giving me 12 native lenses total.

Here's my EF-M collection, along with a set of EF-M extension tubes:

All of them have their unique uses, and I enjoy them all.

When seen together, it's striking how small these lenses really are. The largest and heaviest is the Sigma 16mm - because of this I only take it when I'm sure I'll need it.

Not shown are my Canon EF-S 55-250 IS STM, Rokinon 135mm f2.0 in Canon EF mount, Viltrox 0.71x EF-EOS M2 speed booster, Kenko 1.5x SHQ teleconverter and Kiron 2x MC7 teleconverters in Canon EF mount.

I shot the above image with a vintage 3rd-party 1970's Star-D 28mm f2.8 lens in Minolta MD mount... I have half a dozen vintage adapted lenses.

I've shot comparison shots with all Canon EF-M lenses the past week, to compare them. I'm not going to show results here: there are too many images and they're not taken under strict, 'ideal' testing conditions.

My impressions of the image quality of the Canon branded EF-M lenses (only) is as follows. They seem to fall into roughly four 'tiers' of IQ:

Tier 1: Astonishing. The Canon EF-M 32mm f1.4 lens. This lens gets its own tier. No other lens I've had matches its IQ. And it's almost as sharp wide open as stopped down.

Tier 2: Excellent: Canon 11-22. Very sharp at all focal lengths and apertures, just not quite as sharp as the 32

Tier 3: Very Good: Canon 55-200, 22mm f2, 28mm f3.5 macro. The 22mm gets sharpest at 2.8 or lower, but all lenses in this tier are slightly softer than my Canon 11-22

Tier 4: Good: Canon 18-55, 15-45, 18-150. The 15-45 is the sharpest in the center of the frame, but is softer at the corners, while the 18-55 is uniformly sharp across the frame and ends up being sharper in the corners than the 15-45. My 18-150 copy is slightly decentered and shows one or two soft corners wide open at the wide apertures, and overall is slightly less sharp than the 18-55 and 15-45 zooms. All 3 zooms in this tier are perfectly capable of making sharp, vibrant images at 4k monitor resolution with a little cropping, and work well for 4k video. Notably of the 3 zooms in this tier the 18-55 has the best build quality --- it's a well-built, solid lens.

As for the Rokinons and Sigmas, I believe they would mostly fall into Tier 2, definitely stopped down to f4 they're as sharp as the Canon 11-22. Wide open, the Sigma 16 and Rokinon 8mm might be more in the Tier 3 category.

Thanks for your assessment.

Generally, my conclusions without complete ownership.

Through observation and technical optic sites, I went through the same assessment before buying M system and ended up only buying tier 1 and tier 2, the two lenses you list.

I didn't want tier 3, tier 4, etc. because my FF glass makes it to tier 1 and tier 2 on my RP.

My RF 24-105 F4L on my RP gets so much usage because it is so versatile both indoors and outdoors.   M has nothing like it.  This lack of a bright versatile zoom is the biggest shortcoming of M.