The 'All Canon EF-M lenses' club

Larry Rexley wrote:

J Peters wrote:

I have two M5 bodies, and have owned every lens apart from 15-45mm.

I sold on my 22mm as I always found it a bit short. I like shooting portraits, animals and flowers.

The one I'm least happy with is the 18-150mm. Focussing issues and poor contrast. I'm on my second copy as the original was even worse. I've just returned from a weekend trip where I only took that one lens, and it cemented my negative options of it. Might ditch it.

Sorry to hear about your poor experiences with the 18-150. How did you obtain the copies, new, used or refurb?

My one copy was off eBay used. It's not perfect, it has some slight decentering so that wide open at 18mm the upper left and lower right corners are a little soft. Optically it is better than the EF-S 18-135 and kit EF-S 18-55 lenses -- a little more sharpness and better microcontrast, on the M6ii's 32 MP sensor.

That being said, it is the weakest performer of all my native EF-M lenses optically. I still find it good enough so that it's one of my most-used lenses as it can do so much --- great range and definitely good enough for 4k video work, and as long as I use it at f5 or dimmer I can almost always get good results out of it.

I had an experience similar to yours with the 15-45 lens. I had given up on it after 3 really mediocre copies, but seeing RLight's amazing copy gave me hope, and after 2 more tries I got a copy that outperforms my 18-150. Very sharp in the center and sharp 'enough' on the edges to work with.

However, I do shoot always shoot RAW and post-process. I find DxO PL5's default optical corrections not strong enough for my imperfect 18-150 copy --- but DxO has very good sharpness and CA options and I can dial in custom settings and get results much more in line with other EF-M lenses with more aggressive optical correction. Here is an example.

First image is with 'default' DxO optical corrections, and no de-noise. Second image has Deep prime de-noise set to 30, global sharpness at +50, CA settings to Intensity 179, size 7, and unsharp mask set to Intensity 0, radius 0.91, Threshold 0, and Edge Offset 225 (!) to sharpen up those soft corners. 'Intensity' setting sharpens the whole image --- setting it to 0 and using only the 'Edge Offset' sharpens the edges and corners progressively and leaves the center alone.

M6ii, 18-150, 18mm, f3.5, DxO default settings

M6ii, 18-150, 18mm, f3.5 (same image) with more aggressive DxO global sharpen, CA, and unsharp mask sharpening for edges/corners

With DxO these kinds of results are good enough for quite sharp 4k video, or 4k images to post in camera club competitions or for most web and PC applications, as long as there is not too much cropping needed.

Many thanks for the in depth reply and the examples. The 18-150 I bought new, and agreed a replacement with the supplier after a few days as it was awful. I am not that experienced in testing lenses. All my previous ones I didn't "test" as such, by which I mean I didn't take test shots of brick walls and so forth. They just gave good results and I used them without any further thought. So the fact that even I noticed 18-150 was wrong just in casual use is saying something!

It sits on my second camera body as a general purpose lens when cycling or walking. But I'm considering using my 18-55 instead.