We compared sunstars from eight ultra-wide full frame zoom lenses, including both DSLR and mirrorless lenses, from Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Sigma, Sony and Tamron, including:
Canon EF 16-35mm F2.8 III
Canon RF 15-35mm F2.8 IS
Nikon F 14-24mm F2.8
Nikon Z 14-30mm F4
Panasonic 16-35mm F4
Sigma 14-24mm F2.8
Sony 16-35mm F2.8 GM
Tamron 17-28mm F2.8
Who's the winner? Watch the video and look at the samples below, then tell us which one you think is best in our poll (below).
I would have loved to see the same but with an actual sun. The star shapes usually are quite similar when it comes to small sources of light and differ more and more the larger the source gets. The Christmas lights look almost identical, in a classic landscape scenario shooting into the sun they would look very distinguishable though.
nice to see the 14-30 has the best white balance. of course thats the camera, but im just saying. also another interesting thing, the 14-24 nikon blows everyone out of water in terms of ownership, and yet nikon comes in at about 2rd in terms of sales after sony and canon.
Not that anyone in their right mind would actually WANT lens artifacts to dominate their image, but if you really want "sunstars", turn out the lights, use the lowest ISO rating and expose for a looooong time.
Nikon AF-S 20mm F1.8g: nice bokeh at large apertures and great sunstars at small apertures, thanks to the unique shape of the aperture blades ... Fast lens in low light, renders colors beautifully, keeps flare under control very well, compact & low weight FF lens, allows filters ... all for acceptable price, thank you Nikon.
For the top four chosen by Chris, patterns look great close up but objectively when you have a lot of them in frame it becomes very busy and an eye irritant. Especially the Sony. Maybe great for a single sun but not for Xmas lights.
FWIW I chose the cleanest looking one the Z 14-30 f4 as an overall picture. In a different shot like the sun through a forest canopy the Sony and Canons would probably edge it out.
I love the 14-30, I shoot real estate and 12-24 f4 art by sigma was my go to, before that 14-24 2.8 nikon. i love the weight, sharpness, extra reach 30mm from the 14-30. seriously loving the z6, its not perfect but almost perfect for me.
A gimmick? Not sure I understand. Do you shoot landscapes wider open, so that you don’t get sun stars, or do you always avoid having the sun in your pictures?
If neither of the above, surely it’s a valid question to understand which lens best achieves the look you might like?
Testing sunstars without a sun seems a bit off. The test was for relatively close subject, not infinity focus or at least further off as in landscapes. Second, and more important is selecting a lens to shoot sunstars also involves testing to see how flare resistant the lens is. This test did not include the flare test - which also measures the quality of the lens coatings.
I don't think anybody cares about measuring sunstars with a ruler, they all look fine. But Nikon 14-30 looks so much better overall, nothing comes close.
Yeah the Canon 16-35 has been one of the reasons why there are still landscape photographers among my peers who shoot Canon. Still I was surprised that the Nikon 14-30 looks okay - Nikon has a terrible track record when it comes to sun stars. I own the 20mm 1.8 just for getting decent sunstars with a Nikon camera. Looking good for the Z future if I am delving into the system some time in the future.
All of these lenses seem to have numoerus aperture blades. This is very nice for general use. But if it comes to sunstars a lower number of not rounded apterure blades would give a more intensive and more clear sunstar - and for this purpose an old lens from the 80ties may be capable to be first choice for this particular use.
But in general these modern lenses all perform very well - and it is matter of taste which one is preferred. It would not be a reason to decide for a particular system.
After all those years of bokeh mania, we now have sunstar mania? next year, a best retro-flare test and poll? and in 2023, will we go for the best moustache distorsion? And lament the corrections that destroy all those oh-so-quaint "character" features? :)
Sunstars can be over bearing, I've seen many "sun in landscape" photos ruined by over the top sunstars.
With my favourite Pentax HD lenses (rounded blades) DA15 and DA 20-40 I can dial sunstars in or out without using an unwanted fully open aperture.
Some Pentaxians like the older straight bladed DA15 but it is too much all the time and you can't dial them out without using open wide at f4 which the lens is not great at.
Sometimes I want the sun to be a disc and other times I want the rays, although never the overbearing "look at my sunstar" type.
What, no Voigtländers? Any of the M4/3 Noktons will produce nicer starbursts that the ones shown.
All my Voigtländers have 10 aperture blades. Or 12 with the new 75mm f1.5. Even numbered aperture blades make much nicer, sharper and better defined starbursts than odd numbered blades.
What? None of these is really ultrawide by modern standards; these are mostly wide-to-moderate-ultrawide zooms. There are lots of FF zoom lenses that go to 12mm and some (e.g., the Laowa 10-18mm) that go to 10mm. Also a bit odd to be testing only fast lenses given that sunstars are a stopped-down phenomenon.
Personally, I tend to view sunstars as a flare defect, which they technically are. However, I will admit that they can add interest to an image when used sparingly... which is hard to do if you have a lens that loves to produce sunstars and the lens isn't wide open. For example, I'd say the Laowa 10-18mm produces reasonable sunstars, although they aren't as long nor sharp as some shown here... and I actually prefer the smaller stars because they're less obtrusive.
When 17mm was as wide as rectilinear went (thru the 1980s), 24mm was the start of ultrawide. All but one of these lenses goes longer than 24mm and as wide as they get is 14mm, which hasn't been very extreme for about two decades. I would argue these are all fast wide zooms, not really ultrawides by modern standards. None are fixed-focal length ultrawides, and notice the article title doesn't say zooms.
You can get stars on a very wide range of lenses -- it's just a matter of shaping flare.
MightyMike: They are indeed flare: scattered light. You're right that ideally no reflections need to be involved, although reflections can be used to enhance the effect. Sunstars are caused by diffraction occurring as aperture blades meet at sharp angles. The reason it happens stopped down is because the scale and angle of blades meeting is typically a function of how far down you stop the lens. The Laowa 10-18mm claims to have been designed to optimize sunstars, and actually has a non-circular (pentagonal) aperture at 10mm even wide open.
Although on ocassion they can add interest to an image, I consider substars to generally be an annoying defect rooted in the difficulty of making really small aperture irises have a smoothly round opening. Avoiding this defect is why quite a few ultrawide/fisheye lenses have used perfectly round Waterhouse stops on a rotating wheel.
Diffraction that spreads light out as it passes through an aperture is not the same as flare by any stretch of the imagination, nor is the light scattered. I've encountered one fish-eye that had a waterhouse stop on a rotating wheel, as far as I was concerned it was done to make the lens cheap and not to avoid a diffraction star. In the photos I took playing with that lens I can't really agree that a round blob/glow around the sun was better than a diffraction star. We'll chalk that star vs. glow up to a personal taste thing though.
I was right! Nikon Z 14-30mm F4 shot at F22 wins! Canon RF 15-35mm F2.8 IS shot at F22 close second with and without my prescription glasses. All mirrorless ! Sigma and Tamron are the bottom pile. Were it not for Sigma and Tamron Sony would have won the voyage to the bottom of the pile.
Can't wait 'till next Christmas to shoot sunstars again.
Be very extra careful in shooting Canon EF 16-35mm F2.8 III @ F16 it zaps one red ball (on the lower left side of the Christmas tree).
Nikon Z 14-30mm F4 @ F16 & F22 has no warmth. White balance is over-corrected. Seems like not Christmas at all.
You where right? Nikon did not win and they where not all mirrorless because a dslr lens wom. Or did go by the pill or your own subjective (just as they did) toughts when you declares yourself as the one who is right?
My equal subjektive toughts are that the Winner is the best of the ones that you can mount on your camera. Otherwise i have to agree with the chris not that its important
I love you guys but I'll be damned if I care about sunstars. To me this always looks like something you could just add in a photoshop filter and I never want to shoot so far into diffraction even at f16.
I'll try to get into the spirit. I dunno, I guess the Sony lens at least looks messy and less tacked on so maybe that one? Sorry, that's as much as I can put into this.
Well done video but... yeah.
Complete lack of sunstar knowledge but why not a 20mm prime stopped down?
Sunstar is personal subjective. I agree in this review Canon EF zoom has the best sunstar that is similar to my EF 24-70L/2.8 II. However these days all these zoom don't generate best sunstar in my taste. Zeiss Loxia and Voigtlander (CV) lenses have the best 10 or 12-point sunstars already at F4.0, you don't need to stop down to crazy F16 or F22. I don't like those overwhelming excessive numbers of rays such as from Sony with 22-point rays, too many.
Sunstars are a product of diffraction from the aperture blades; while flare generally refers to reflections on the surface of the glass elements. Completely different things.
One could have a lens with brilliant sunstars and very little flare, and some of the lenses in this video actually do.
As I mentioned below, at some point we need to limit the number of products in any comparison or it would get out of control and the articles or videos would never get finished.
Even when limited to full frame lenses we still ended up with eight models in the comparison, which is quite a few. I'm not sure how you interpret that as meaning we don't think users of other sensor sizes aren't interested in sunstars.
No one gave the rules for the number of Rays... * With an even number of aperture blades you get one ray per blade. * With an odd number of aperture blades you get two rays per blade. * Straight aperture blades are said to give better rays than curved ones, but the rest of the bokeh won't be as nice.
It's not so much the shape of the entire aperture blade, but the angle at which the blades meet. When blades are overall very rounded, they tend not to meet at an angle; while blades that are straight tend to meet at an angle.
The reason this distinction is important is because lens makers could do apertures with blades that curve variably (like a logarithmic curve) so that wide open the bokeh is very round (round enough not to look like a polygon), but stopping down causes sunstars. I wish more did this.
I wonder how the Canon 16-35 f/4 would do... the IS would be handy with the longer exposures f/16 can need... plus it's not like maximum aperture is an issue here... :-)
P.S. I'd have thought f/11 would probably have been okay, plus less diffraction softening on higher res bodies...
Before anyone goes out and buys one of these very expensive lenses, if your goal is mostly using the wide-field end, there are primes from a few companies that are good performers, as fast or faster than these zooms and a fraction of the price.
We can certainly look at making another video. It would be fun to test primes next. Maybe do lenses around 20mm from all the manufactures including third party. At the same time this video is not a total fail. The zooms we tested are ubiquitous in the pro and enthusiast fields and we were able to get them all on the same sensor size and at the same aperture and field of view. It makes sense to have very controlled experiments. So perhaps next time we will do a video on all lenses in the universe, which one gives the best sunstars but I still think this video is very useful to many people.
Well said, Chris. Thanks for the video. I really appreciate all the work you put into your videos, even when you just know you are going to get comments like these!
@Chris I would prefer a matchup of lenses renown for their sunstars regardless of which camera system they are for or who made them. Make it a blind test and let the users decide in a poll and reveal the results afterward – might cut down on brand-bias and post-test whining.
Could you add some comparisons at f5.6 or f8 or something? Given how early difraction sets in on today's high density sensors, and some newer lenses being able to sunstar early on?
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