Bad bokeh limits it's usefulness.

Been using one of these now for about 8 months,  purchased new,

build quality is ok,  not up to l series odviously,  but fine if you actually take care of your lenses...

all the functionality is  good,  and the  IS has proven to be surprisingly usefull both for stills and for video work,..

first complaint is the price of the lens hood  (  And because of the unusual filter size knocks offs are rare.)  Which is frankly ludicrously expensive...

Sadly the lens has one major flaw....  The awful bokeh wide open...  wide open the lens produces a nice useable narrow DOF for portrait or PJ work in available light.. but the bokeh is really ugly.... So much so that my office manager even commented on some of the work produced with it.

the 35 f2 should IMHO be the standard go to lens...   But this one is let down by the terrible wide open bokeh.

The problem is that the bokeh looks just weird IMHO.... This isn't the worst example... just what I have to hand on my iPad,  it renders alright in the centre,  then gets worse as we move off...  I don't know if this pic is wide open mind... It was on this shoot with some other subjects that we really were a bit displeased...   I now avoid wide open.

Colour is excellent mind,   And it gives a very nice feel...  But the 35 1.4 which a colleague of mine has has noticeably better bokeh...

Great Bustard wrote:

NottsPhoto wrote:

Colour is excellent mind, And it gives a very nice feel... But the 35 1.4 which a colleague of mine has has noticeably better bokeh...

Thanks for the example! To me, the most obvious standout is that it appears a bit soft -- I didn't see anything off-putting in the bokeh. That said, next time you have an opportunity to use the 35 / 1.4L, shoot a scene, or couple of scenes, with both lenses and compare. That is, whatever you found objectionable about the bokeh in the photo above may have been scene dependent, and you'd have also found it objectionable with the 35 / 1.4L.

For example, PZ says this about the bokeh of the lens:

The out-of-focus highlight rendition is pretty clean with a slight outlining effect.

The situation changes a bit when moving towards the corners. The highlight discs deteriorate and the outlining effect gets emphasized.

The quality of the general blur in the focus transition zone is pretty good. The foreground blur is a bit busy whereas the more critical background blur is quite smooth and better than most zoom lenses for instance and also significantly improved over its predecessor. Such a good bokeh is quite unusual for a wide-angle lens featuring an aspherical element.

As opposed to what they say about the 35 / 1.4L:

The bokeh (the quality of the out-of-focus blur) is a primary aspect for an ultra large aperture lens. However, the Canon does not totally convince here. It is, of course, capable of producing a very shallow depth-of-field but especially the foreground blur is a bit nervous at f/1.4 whereas the background blur is generally smoother. Out-of-focus highlights can also be a bit nervous at max. aperture if they reside close to the image borders. The technical quality of the bokeh improves at f/2 and f/2.8 although the blur effect diminishes of course. To be fair - this characteristic is all not overly surprising because wide-angle lenses with aspherical elements are rarely good renowned for the quality of the bokeh. The lens performs better on APS-C DSLRs where the critical border portion is masked out.

Naturally, I'm not saying these comments are definitive by any means. Just saying that PZ's analysis is more in line with other reviews I've heard.

That is straight from the camera... So I would expect it to be a bit soft...     I wouldn't disagree with the review you cite...  but at f2 the 1.4 is better... And as they point out...  The bokeh gets worse as we move away from the centre of frame..  And that gives a effect that has not been welcome to my eye..

I would note,  that in every other respect... Except the expensive lens hood of course... The lens very good... And stopped down its excellent... But for me the purchase has been a big dissapointment due to the bokeh... So Its on the list to be replaced...

but of course... What with??

Great Bustard wrote:

All other reports I've heard have praised the bokeh from this lens. Any examples you can share?

qianp2k posted a few examples a few months ago with really busy bokeh. They were taken at f/2 with focus quite far. I could not find them. All I remember that I made a remark that it was a very useful lens but the bokeh was bad. That was the last post.

Well thats one approach...  I think that a aesthetic approach is more valid...  All lenses are compromised to a extent....   and it's up to the snapper to decide which of these compromises is more crucial to them...

mind,  I am a hypocrite in this regards as I wouldn't put anything by sigma on a camera unless I was going to be making a insurance claim....

Great Bustard wrote:

Just another Canon shooter wrote:

Great Bustard wrote:

All other reports I've heard have praised the bokeh from this lens. Any examples you can share?

qianp2k posted a few examples a few months ago with really busy bokeh. They were taken at f/2 with focus quite far. I could not find them. All I remember that I made a remark that it was a very useful lens but the bokeh was bad. That was the last post.

Ah. What I'm saying, however, is that to make a determination that Lens A is "worse than" Lens B, we need pics of the same scene from the same position with the same settings on the same camera with the same processing.

There is a big problem with that, as I explained earlier. You do your test, and then you realize that in your real life shooting you shoot at a different distance, with different background, etc.

One of the common mistakes made on these boards is to attribute a characteristic general to a set of lenses or focal lengths to one lens. 35mm lenses as a whole do not produce fully convincing bokeh. The 35IS is no better or worse than other 35mm lenses at f2.

Is this more a characteristic of retrofocus wide angle? (A question not a statement). The little 22mm on the EOS-M (with a 35mm equiv FOV) seems OK.

It probably good without saying that the 1.4 is better in every way, bokeh included.

Abu Mahendra wrote:

One of the common mistakes made on these boards is to attribute a characteristic general to a set of lenses or focal lengths to one lens. 35mm lenses as a whole do not produce fully convincing bokeh. The 35IS is no better or worse than other 35mm lenses at f2.

Source?

Great Bustard wrote:

Not a problem, actually. You shoot a bunch of different representative scenes with the same camera, lens, and settings, and compare. What are the odds, then, that the real life scenes you shoot are not only way different, but systematically favor one lens over the other?

Huge. When I got my 35L I did just that. Everything was perfect. Then I started using it and realized that I did I had a very poor idea of what a representative set of scenes meant.

There is no substitute for real life experience.

Abu Mahendra wrote:

One of the common mistakes made on these boards is to attribute a characteristic general to a set of lenses or focal lengths to one lens. 35mm lenses as a whole do not produce fully convincing bokeh. The 35IS is no better or worse than other 35mm lenses at f2.

Well,  see I would say that one of the common mistakes on these boards is to believe that you can attribute common characteristics to lenses,  and that these attributions are valid In photography..

you cannot apply a deterministic model to judge a lens in a stochastic process such as photography,  so there is no worse or better,  there is only individual preference.. so saying that one lens is no better or worse than another because they have common characteristics is simply invalid in this medium.

so,  my review of this lens is not deterministic,  it's a reflection of the medium...  Which is entirely aesthetic in nature and stochastic in process.... Any attempt to apply a deterministic approach to the process of determining the preference of one lens over another will not only be invalid,  but paradoxically from the end users perspective,  be counter productive.

so,  I guess in one respect your assertion that one lens is no better or worse than another is correct,   But only so far as there is no better or worse,  only more or less prefered...  But your assertion that the reason for this is that all 35mm lenses are essentially is the same is incorrect.. (Both from the validity of the paradigm,  and the simple fact that this assertion is incorrect...    )

anyways....  Of all the 35mm lenses I have owned in the past,  or do own now...  This particular one produces bokeh which I find distinctly unattractive...

www.pageonephotography.co.uk
Striving hard to be the man that my dog thinks I am.

PalmettoFellow wrote:

It probably good without saying that the 1.4 is better in every way, bokeh included.

I think the colour rendition in the IS is better than on the 1.4.   But thats a preference thing... I would be keen to see canon update the 1.4....

Abu Mahendra wrote:

One of the common mistakes made on these boards is to attribute a characteristic general to a set of lenses or focal lengths to one lens. 35mm lenses as a whole do not produce fully convincing bokeh. The 35IS is no better or worse than other 35mm lenses at f2.

Source?

Since we are talking about bokeh quality, it is purely subjective discussion. The source is me. Got that?