EF-M 11-22mm Zoom Compared to RF 16mm Prime.

The EF-M 11-22mm zoom is a favourite, and my most-used lens. The RF 16mm is widely derided, but it's small and the second cheapest Canon RF lens in the range, so I bought it as a Christmas present to myself. I've compared it to my EF 16-35mm f /4 zoom here; https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/66332857, but I also brought along my 11-22mm and my M100 out of curiosity. I chose the Civic Centre as a target because the pebble-dash panels give some fractal detail and the tiled columns show up any distortion better than a brick wall. I lined the tripod up and took a series of pictures with each lens at each aperture, then processed the RAW images with DPP4 and with DxO PhotoLab 5 so that I could produce jpegs without applying distortion corrections. DPP4 sensibly won't let you do that with this lens. I only bought DxO when I bought a Sigma lens, and that was specifically to correct the lens distortions. I took the various jpegs into AutoCAD so that I could plot and trace the borders of the corrected images onto the uncorrected ones.

This is the uncorrected 16mm with DPP4's and DxO's 3:2 maximum crops and DxO's uncropped image

This is the uncorrected 11mm view with DPP4's 3:2 maximum crop - DxO's is almost imperceptibly wider.

RF 16mm at f/4

EF-M 11-22mm at 11mm and f/4

These are 1:1 crops following -they're all 1080x720, taken at f/4.

By co-incidence the focal lengths and the pixel pitches cancel out almost completely, giving very similar sized areas.

Central crop, 16mm, DPP4, all corrections + DLO, default image processing

Central crop, 11mm, DPP4, all corrections + DLO, default image processing

Extreme corner crop, 16mm , DPP4, all corrections + DLO, default image processing

Extreme corner crop, 11mm , DPP4, all corrections + DLO, default image processing

Despite all the stretching, the extreme corner of the 16mm lens is sharper than the extreme corner of the 11-22mm lens. I did not expect that.  OK, it's stopped down one stop from wide open and the zoom is wide open, but the zoom is still at a full-frame equivalent aperture of f/6.4.

Extreme end crop, 16mm , DPP4, all corrections + DLO, default image processing

Extreme end crop, 16mm , DPP4, all corrections + DLO, default image processing

Timely and helpful.  Perfect test for my needs.  I just picked up the RF 16mm f/2.8 for my RP and my wife just got the EF-M 11-22 for her M6II.

Would be interesting to see how the results might change with the lowly RP sensor vs the majestic M6II sensor.  Lens alone, looks like well both be happy.

Thanks!