Canon 45mm TS-E

Messages
74
Edit My Images
No
I think its pretty much decided that the rumours earlier this year of a replacement for the elderly 45mm TS-E lens is now not going to happen at Photokina so I was wondering if anyone has any experience of this lens. I already own the 90mm TS-E of the same generation and find it an excellent lens but I've seen reports that the 45mm is not that great and gets even worse when shifted but wanted some first had experience. I want to use it for table top product shots and some architecture so will live at f11 ish for most of its shots.
 
I've got one but it doesn't get too much use although I don't consider it to be noticeably inferior to the 90mm, just not as useful for me. It generally makes an appearance when I'm taking shots of lenses to sell....ideal for subjects that'll fit into a mythical 50cm cube. Mine doesn't get shifted, just tilted a little so I can't comment on the shift side of things. I can take some test shots at various shift settings if you want.

Bob
 
That would be excellent. I hear comments if it not being very sharp away from the centre, made even worse when shifted?
 
Give me a day or two and I'll attempt to do some meaningful test shots with various amounts of shift.

Bob
 
Here you go......be aware that all the shots are at maximum aperture.
1....simply the test setup to give you an idea of what's what.......too much bright sunlight so the unimportant bit looks a little gloomy.
2....focused on the '0' of the target
3....5mm shift and refocused on the '32'
4....11mm shift and refocused again on the 32
Focused using Liveview at 10x and shots are 100% corner crops from a 1Dx

The complaints about soft corners on shift lenses are invariably down to people not appreciating that the plane of focus is not flat on these lenses. It's curved out of necessity and this means that the edges of any perpendicular flat target are going to be out of focus (soft) if the focus was in the centre of the image. This isn't so obvious on the wider TS lenses as there's a deeper DoF in a typical shot due to the FL and larger maximum aperture of the lenses.

Bob


Test setup.....target set in top right hand corner.
p1034861831.jpg


Unshifted and focussed at O on the target
p898546027.jpg


Shifted 5mm and focused at 32
p670966422.jpg


Shifted 11mm and focused at 32
p923137168.jpg
 
Last edited:
Back
Top