Canon 17-40mm f4 L Sharpness: Two Examples

Posted on 28 January 2006

Someone in an online forum I read asked for example images from sharp Canon 17-40mm f4 L lenses. I posted the following images from mine. Both are 100% crops from 8MP originals shot on a 1.6x crop sensor body and, as such, they comprise a very tiny excerpt from the full original image.

(For those who are unfamiliar with the “100% crop” terminology… you are looking at a display in which each pixel of the original image occupies one pixel on your computer monitor. Another way to think of this is that if the 100% crop came from a 12MP original, the crop is roughly equivalent to looking at a tiny section of a print that is about 5 feet wide.)

1740CropDemo: 17-40 lens. 100% crop.

The upper half is an unprocessed image. I converted it in Adobe Camera raw, then took it into Photoshop to crop and save as a .jpg. The second one was slightly sharpened in Photoshop using the Smart Sharpen tool. Pretty sharp, I’d say!

UPDATE: Here is another example of the potential for image sharpness with the Canon EF 17-40mm f/4 L lens. This is a 100% crop of a photo of some old mining equipment at Bodie, California.

BoltSharp17-40: Sharp image of bolts shot with 17-40 lens

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