This lens is amazingly sharp, amazingly wide, has absolutely no chromatic aberration, and is exceedingly well built. The new Canon TS-Es are as good as anything available in the genre. You can tilt, shift, and change the planes of each relative to each other. If you have tilt-shift experience, this lets you do remarkable things. If you’re tilt-shift challanged (this would be me) you can still do remarkable things- once. Then you can spend the next two hours figuring out how you did that.

To be honest, both the Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5 and Canon TS-E 17mm f/4 are so sharp, I sometimes take them in place of another prime to shoot as regular lenses- they’re just that good. Then you can do the tilt-shifty thingamabob and get some really amazing depth of field, slam home a quick panorama, straighten up tall buildings, or just get a very cool effect.

March, 2012