If you’re like me and you’re in love with the APS-C or Super 35mm sensors, then the chances are that you have a real appreciation for wide angle images.
Let me clarify that. You have a real appreciation for wide angle shots. Period.
Recently I was contracted to shoot some property videos and I knew that my Tamron 24-70 just wasn’t going to be wide enough on either my C100 or 7D Mark II.
Enter the Canon 10-18mm.
Now is this the most well built or stylish lens? No, of course, it isn’t but I love this lens and here’s why.
Autofocus
This is my first STM lens from Canon and while it doesn’t have the build quality that my 70-200 has, the autofocus is damn right amazing.
Not only is it very fast, it is completely silent and accurate 10/10 times. I’m being very serious, its never missed focus once. It was a complete surprise to me as my go-to lens is my Tamron 24-70 and that at best is 7-10 (I’m excluding the 70-200 from this as it’s not a wide angle lens at all).
I was so worried that the lens was silent I thought at first it wasn’t working. I had to do a test with my C100 with its Dual Pixel Autofocus to make sure it was.
Build Quality
This is not a big bulky lens, nor is it built like a tank. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t badly made, it’s just an all plastic body and lens mount so it isn’t going to take any kind of abuse.
The lens as full-time manual focus, a very solid image stabilisation which is up to 4 stops and it’s so light it doesn’t feel like its taking up any room in my kit bag.
Image Quality
I am used to shooting on pretty expensive glass now and feel quite spoiled. My two main lenses as mentioned before are my Tamron 24-70 f2.8 and my Canon 70-200 f2.8 IS II.
Imagine my surprise when taking my first shots with the 10-18mm that it holds up pretty well in comparison to my 24-70. Pretty damn well!
It is sharp all the way through the zoom range. A little soft in the corners but not enough to cause concern. It has a nice colour rendition. All the images in this review were shot with my 7D Mark II (unless stated otherwise) and in a standard profile.
Cost
This is one of the cheapest wide angle lenses on the market at the moment and while it did play a factor into why I bought this lens, I actually weighed it up against more expensive wide angles lenses from Canon but for a crop sensor camera, the larger bulkier lenses aren’t actually a good choice. The 17-40 L lens from Canon would behave more like a 30 – 70mm on a crop sensor due to the 1.6x crop.
Low Light Performance
Now here is probably where the lens falls down. Its maximum f-stop is 4.5 so not exactly a low light demon and on a crop sensor body, it can put you off when you start getting up to those higher ISO’s.
The majority of the time, by which I mean 95% of the time, I light all of my shoots with either my LED panels or speedlights so I’m not worried about that.
In the event that I do have to crank up my ISO, in video, I use the Red Giant Denoiser 3 to get rid of noise patterns in Premiere Pro or I should Define 2 which is part of the Google package which you can use inside of Photoshop. The 7D Mark II and C100 both perform well up to ISO 6400 and can be cleaned relatively well using these plugins.
Conclusion
This lens has fast become one of my more savvy purchases that I have added to my kit and I’m really happy with it. If you are worried about low light performance, then look at the Tokina 11-16 f2.8 but if you’re using a wide-angle lens – then in all likelihood I don’t use it below f 5.6 because I want that deeper depth of field. Landscapes at f 2.8 look horrendously soft.
The Canon 10-18mm is a great little lens and well worth its cost, and then some, for both photography and video production.