Canon EF-S 55-250 mm f/4-5.6 IS review - Vignetting

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Canon EF-S 55-250 mm f/4-5.6 IS

20 July 2009

Arkadiusz Olech

8. Vignetting

The Canon 55-250 IS has a particularly narrow body and therefore we were curious to see how this characteristic is going to influence its behavior in the category of fall-off. Unfortunately, it seems that we were right worrying about the lens’s results in this category. At 55mm focal length and the maximum aperture the light fall off in the corners of the frame was as much as 32% (-1.1 EV), which seems to be a quite large value. Fortunately, after stopping down the lens to f/5.6 the defect goes down to 13% and at f/8.0 it almost completely disappears (3%).

Canon EF-S 55-250 mm f/4-5.6 IS - Vignetting

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The situation in the middle of the focal length range is a little bit better. Here, for f/5.0 the vignetting reaches 27% (-0.91 EV). Stopping the lens down to f/5.6 makes this value drop down to 21% and at f/8.0 it disappears (3%).

The vignetting starts increasing again at 250mm focal length. At this point, for the maximum aperture, the light fall off in the corners of the frame reaches 31% (-1.09 EV). Fortunately, at f/8.0 it comes down to an acceptable value of 10%.

The results may not be that great, but again we have to add that both 55-200 Nikkors perform much worse in this category, scoring over 30% for all the focal lengths and maximum aperture. On one hand it is harder for Nikkor since it projects its image on a larger detector with crop factor 1.5x, on the other hand its focal length range is smaller, which means we can expect a little bit more than in case of Canon.