The Slower 24: The EF 24/2.8

This article is part of a series I'm (slowly) writing about Canon's original EF prime line-up, that I've dubbed "Ugly Ducklings."

One of the less popular lenses in the Canon "Ugly Duckling" line-up is the EF 24/2.8. This is not due to any fault of the lens as much as to the competition. Back in 1988, when the lens was introduced, 24 mm was bordering on ultra-wide, with standard zooms usually starting at 35 mm and sometimes at 28 mm. Today, most standard zooms start at 24 mm, and many of them have the same maximum aperture as the EF 24/2.8. On the other hand, Canon has introduced the very impressive 24/1.4L, which is a whopping two stops brighter. This has left the 24/2.8 stranded: it's little or no brighter than the zooms, it's not much cheaper than them, and many of the zooms aren't half bad optically, even the midrange ones like the EF 24-85/3.5-4.5 USM. Apart from a slight edge in optical quality, pretty much the only thing it obviously has going for it is size: like all the Ugly Ducklings, it packs an impressive picture-taking wallop into a very small canister. And like the other Ugly Ducklings, it's a lens whose charm takes a while to learn to appreciate -- yet if you're the right type of shooter for it, it has the potential to become one of your "indispensables" -- the lenses you'd never leave home without.

The EF lens system always had a reputation for being a bit thin in the wide-angle. Indeed, there were only two wides in the 1987 line-up: the medium-wide 28/2.8 and the 15 mm diagonal fisheye. Early adopters had to wait until the next year for the 24/2.8, and until 1991 and 1992 to get anything rectilinear and wider than that. However, if there's something actually wrong with Canon's wides, the 24/2.8 isn't it. The 24/2.8 was an improved version of the FD 24/2.8, which was already in its second generation. It uses a pretty typical 10-element reverse-telephoto design, and incorporates a floating group to keep aberrations under control at different focusing distances. Like the 135/2.8 SF, the 24/2.8 is internally focusing (that is, it doesn't change size when focused).

The 24/2.8. I bought mine used. It has seen better days, and a sleepy camera repair guy put on the front bezel top to bottom, but it works as well as the day it came off the assembly line. I had to have it cleaned, though, since apparently a long stint at the back of a drawer had caused lubricants to pool up and get sprayed onto an element inside; this caused all kinds of funky flare effects in extreme conditions. It hasn't happened since, and I don't think this has anything to do with the lens.