Stephen Mick
Totally Usable
Thanks to my friends at Texas Media Systems, I was able to get hands-on with the brand new Canon 18-80mm Cine Zoom lens. I don't normally do lens tests, but this is such an interesting beast, I figured I'd give it a look-see. My overall thoughts…
It's a killer lens. I didn't want to like it, but I really, really did. It's small, about the same weight as the 24-70 f2.8L II Canon. You can't really "get" just how small this lens is until you've got it in your hands.
From what I can tell, it's parfocal. I zoomed into 80mm, focused, and zoomed back out. Not only did it hold focus wide open, but I didn't see any other strange behavior.
I couldn't see any obvious distortion at 18mm, though I wasn't working with a focus chart.
I also didn't see any fringing/CA issues in out of focus areas. I actually thought the OOF areas looked very, very nice on this lens.
On my FS5, I wasn't able to do much with the focus/iris control features. (I think Metabones needs to update the firwmare for their adapters for that to happen.) But the image stabilization works beautifully.
Overall, I think this lens is going to make a lot of people very, very happy. I only wish it was a hair faster (f2.8 or 3.3 even), or full frame (so we could use it with the Speedbooster). But as sensitive as modern cameras are, I don't see T4.4 as as big a limiation as it would have been two or three years ago.
Again, this isn't meant to be a test, so please don't take it as such.
