Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L Review: The Sweet Look of Nostalgia

I vividly remember reviewing the old Canon 8-15mm f4 Fisheye lens. The exciting feels I got from that lens are almost wrapped up into the Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L lens. In several ways, this lens is a wonder. You get a super-wide angle field of view that’s excellent for story-telling, journalism, cityscapes, landscapes, travel, food, etc. And when you use Canon to its fullest potential and load film-styles onto the camera system while using lens filters, you’ll get images that you’d find hard not to fall in love with. In fact, I’d probably rate this as one of my favorite wide-angle zoom lenses in the mirrorless camera world.

The Big Picture: Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L Review Conclusions

There’s a lot of love about the Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L. It embraces distortion, but in a way that helps to tell stories. It also gives us lens character, color, and depth that is hard to get from many other lenses. It’s a lens for people that don’t want to pixel peep just to compare lenses. Instead, they’ll pixel peep to get closer to a story. Plus, it’s weather resistant and has good image stabilization. There isn’t a lot not to like about this lens to be honest.

We’re giving the Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L five out of five stars. It’s incredible in so many different ways. Want one? Check them out on Amazon.

Pros

• Weather resistance
• Fast autofocus
• Canon isn’t trying to be super clinical here, and I embrace that. It’s almost like there’s a constant but muted Pro Mist filter on here.
• You want to carry this lens everywhere

Cons

• Kind of pricey at nearly $2,300
• Overlap with the 14-35mm f4 and 15-35mm f2.8.

Who Should Buy the Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L?

Who should get the Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L?

• Landscape photographers
• Cityscape photographers
• Travel photographers
• Documentary photographers
• Fine-art photographers

Gear Used

Lensrentals loaned us the Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L. We tested it with the Canon EOS R5, a long-term loaner from Canon. We also used the Canon EOS R, a camera we purchased several years ago.

Innovations: What Makes the Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L Unique?

Canon, like Tamron, can sometimes make odd focal lengths. But of all the weird ones Canon makes, this is the most useful. Not many brands have anything like this. However, I can see how photographers can be very confused about what lenses to get.

Hardware

When we hear about wide-angle lenses, we know that they’re going to be fun, but we also know that they’re going to be heavy. At least, that’s the case with Sigma and Sony. That doesn’t happen with Tamron—and it didn’t happen with the Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L.

Everything about the lens, from its slightly pebbled and matte texture, feels like it was made by Canon. It has a clicky ring for controls, a zoom ring, a focus ring, and several control switches for image stabilization and focusing type. The lens is also weather-resistant, as it’s from the company’s L-series.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, it’s well-balanced with a variety of Canon cameras. We even mounted it on the Canon EOS R3 and were shocked at how well the combo felt.

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Focusing

Autofocus with the Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L is, well, exactly what you’d expect it to be. It’s a wide-angle lens — and that means that it’s pretty impossible to not be able to focus easily. In fact, because it’s such a wide-angle, it’s also tough to not get your subjects in focus. Instead, you need to give it some difficulty. That means shooting in low-light with a subject very close to the lens. However, it does a good job there too as long as you’re selecting the correct focusing modes.

Canon’s reps have told us before that it’s sometimes not even useful to shoot in anything outside of Servo AF. But for product imagery, I couldn’t disagree more. Sometimes, the lens might try to refocus. This means that as long as you’re an experienced photographer who is practicing good autofocus techniques, then you’ll be fine.

Truly, I feel like in the past few years, so many photographers have just used continuous autofocus and have not even chosen an autofocus point. But the reason why you’re buying good cameras and lenses like the Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L are so that you can pick all that stuff.

With that said, tracking in low-light worked pretty reliably too.

Ease of Use

Using the Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L is a point and shoot affair for the most part. Mount it to the camera, point, focus, and shoot. The only thing that I’ll state is that it was harder to autofocus with this lens while shooting handheld beyond two seconds. We know that that’s an extreme for many photographers — but if you’re trying to make images that an AI can’t possibly come up with, you have to try new things.

Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L Image Quality

If you’re looking for a zero-distortion style of lens, then you shouldn’t consider this one. It’s surely going to have it and you can work with it accordingly. When shooting with the Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L, I used the in-camera corrections. Even then, I still saw distortions. But for the record, I like distortions. I think that often manufacturers try to create lenses that are too clinically perfect, but we don’t need those. We need spice.

Speaking of which, at times I felt like the images looked like a Pro Mist filter was attached. So naturally, I love what this lens can do.

Is it sharp? Yes. Can you get bokeh from it? Yes, but it’s nothing like what other lenses can do. How’s the color? Delicious. That’s all.

Let’s Talk Art

Photography isn’t just about tech — it’s about art. So in this section, the Phoblographer’s reviews team talk about something artistic that we did with the products we’re testing. And in this case, I visited a relic of New York’s past: John’s Pizzeria in Elmhurst, NY. Stepping inside, you’ll feel like you’ve been transported immediately into a time capsule. The way that the sun’s lighting blesses everything inside gives it a sense of cinematic nostalgia. Things like the wallpaper, the bar stools, the real bricks, the chandeliers, and the fact that a mom and daughter are working in this place alone are all things that will bring you joy and awe. Finding relics like this in NYC brings me lots of joy. So when photographing them, I used very warm and romantic colors. Plus, I invited along a good friend.

The Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L was great for this because of the documentary aspect to this lens. Using it, I could tell a story of the interior and get lots of details in the shots. I could also get close to things and be specific with my story-telling thanks to the close focus. This lens made telling the story so much easier than something like the 24-105mm f4 because of how small the place is. It also meant that I needed to interact with people — which added a layer of the story beyond just being a voyeur and observer. And I think that’s important when telling stories about NYC’s past. So much of the city’s history is told from an outsider and gentrifier perspective. Why can’t natives who didn’t have Brooklyn accents have their say, too?

Extra Image Samples

The Phoblographer has been huge on transparency with our audience since day one. Nothing from this review is sponsored. Further, many folks will post reviews and show lots of editing in the photos. The problem then becomes that anyone and everyone can do the same thing. They’re not showing what the lens can do. So, we have a section in our Extra Image Samples area to show edited and unedited photos. From this, you can decide for yourself.

Unedited

Edited

Canon RF 10-20mm f4 L Tech Specs

Specs taken from the Lensrentals listing