I’ll cut straight to the chase with this post, but I’ve gone and bought it – the Canon 17-40mm f4 L lens! And wow, it is just awesome.
The build quality on this lens is great, and I honestly don’t think I will be buying any consumer-grade lenses anymore (apart from the nifty-fifty f1.8 or f1.4). L-lens build quality is great, it just feels so nice and operates so smoothly and perfectly. Not only that, but the image quality and definition is pin-sharp.
I sold my Canon 28-105mm lens back to Jessops (it was only 2 weeks old) since I barely used it at all. The 28-105mm was a great lens, although wasn’t wide-enough for what I want on my 1.6x crop body (Canon 350d).
I’ve yet to take any really good photo’s yet, but I was just messing about last night and wanted some decent photo’s of my guitar. This was the perfect opportunity too, with my new lens and with new strings on the Gibson!
The Bokeh the lens generates is lovely, much better than compared to other lenses I’ve owned. Bokeh, just encase you don’t know what it means, describes the aesthetic quality of the out-of-focus areas in a photo. Shallow depth of field creates a lot of Bokeh since not much will be in focus when the depth of field is not that much.
Nice Bokeh is generally only created by using high-quality lenses, such as Canon L-lenses, and high-quality 3rd party lenses (such as Sigma’s EX range). Bokeh quality is generally controlled by the shapes of the aperture blades inside the lens, as well as the number of aperture blades. The Canon 17-40mm f4 L lens has 7 aperture blades which are purposely circular in shape to produce good quality Bokeh.
PS: Almost forgot to add. Before I left to go to Jessops, I printed out the page from their website (jessops.co.uk) since the online price is cheaper than their in-store price. I also printed off a few more from various other online stores, the cheapest being £529. When I produced these print-outs to the (very nice) young woman, she wasn’t sure about the prices and looked on her computer.
After a few moments she said "actually, we can do that lens for £500". £500? That’s £89 less than the in-store price, £59 less than Jessops.co.uk and £29 less than the cheapest price I could find online (non eBay!) Well pleased!
And finally, here’s my beast… (taken with my Mum’s not-so-great Nikon point-and-shoot!)
bastard.
[...] The deal was, she was to get my Canon 350d (minus battery grip) and my 18-55mm USM kit lens, then she buys a new Canon 75-300mm USM (the same lens which I own). After all of that, I buy myself a Canon 400d body only with the money that I sold my camera to her for, plus a bit more from myself to make up the price. Of course, it would make sense for her just to buy herself a new camera out-right, but she couldn’t afford that, so hence me getting my new lens the other day. [...]