We’ve updated our Canon RF Lens Guide recently to include more of the company’s profile of lenses, and we encourage you to go take a look. If you’ve bought into the Canon RF mount and are looking to possibly get a new lens, the answer for most of us would be only L glass. But there are lots of us that don’t necessarily need the top of the line or want to spend that kind of money. And so our updated Canon RF Lens Guide includes 27 lenses as of March 2023. That’s the most of any accredited outlet when it comes to independent real-world reviews. Below, we talk about the guide a bit more.
Our Canon RF Lens Guide has a table of contents and is mostly designed to give photographers a brief look at the lenses before diving into our fuller reviews. It includes original product images shot by our staff, e-commerce links, and quotes from our reviews. You can then click further in to the review to read more about the lens. It’s designed mostly because folks will know pretty much what lenses they want to look at; and we believe they should have all the info they possibly can.
This guide also only includes Canon RF lenses. We’ve reviewed third-party options before, but chose to keep them out of here purposely. The first reason why has to do with the way that Canon works with third parties. They don’t allow autofocus, and as it is, they tell the press that they don’t work with third-party companies. There are some manual focus options available, but the only autofocus lens ever made by a 3rd party was done by Samyang. And that’s tough to get your hands on these days.
There are companies that are saying that they’re going to work with Canon and give focus and exposure confirmation. But as of early March 2023, we haven’t tested any of those yet.
Further, the list is separated with prime lenses first and zoom lenses after that. This is because it can otherwise get very complicated when mixing everything together. However, the products in the Canon RF Lens Guide are also ordered by widest to longest.
We’ve tested these lenses with an assortment of cameras by Canon. But the guide is also primarily just focusing on the RF lenses, not the RF-S lenses. We’re doing this because Canon has always treated APS-C lenses kind of like second-rate products compared to their full-frame lineup. The exception was the EF 17-55mm f2.8. But we haven’t seen anything like that come out yet for RF-S. And if something like that were to be released, we’d hope that it would be a lot more innovative.
Some brands do f1.8 zoom lenses at this point for smaller formats. Canon should do the same.
As you look through the guide, we encourage you to open up the reviews you’re interested in in new tabs so that you can read a few of them. Each of our reviews is easy to navigate with their own table of contents. And as always, our reviews have no sponsorship or input from the manufacturers. We’ve never done sponsored reviews. And unless they’ve been directly quoted, we try not to involve manufacturers in our reviews because customers don’t have the same level of access that we do. Otherwise, we’ve always found it a bit unfair.