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| Canon EOS R5 II | Canon RF 85mm F1.4 L VCM | F5 | 1/640 sec | ISO 3200 Photo: Richard Butler |
Last week, Canon announced the RF 85mm F1.4 L VCM, a new telephoto lenses made for portraits and video work. The company also invited our editor Richard Butler to Japan, to take a tour of their factory (so keep an eye out for some exciting stuff coming down the line), and on the trip he got the opportunity to take several portraits with it, along with other images that fit the focal length.
We processed the samples using our standard Capture One workflow, which includes digital geometric distortion corrections. However, unlike with some of the wider lenses in Canon’s current F1.4 lineup, the company says those aren’t required for this lens, and indeed we’ve found them to be relatively subtle.
Same file, exported from Adobe Camera Raw with and without distortion correction.
As with other lenses in this line, we found the declicked aperture ring to be somewhat unsatisfying for photography; the lack of discrete stops meaning it doesn’t give any sense of feedback when you change your aperture setting, so we tended to leave it in its locked position and control the lens from the camera’s command dials.
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Our DPREVIEW Tribute:
After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview closed on 10 April 2023. This difficult decision was part of the annual operating plan review that parent company, Amazon, shared earlier this year.
Over the course of 25 years, DP Review built up a reputation as being one of the most informative places to go for information about that new camera or lens you’re after. DP Review began as an independent reviews site based in the UK in 1998, the brainchild of Philip and Joanna Askey, but it was eventually purchased by Amazon in 2007 and relocated over to Seattle in the USA in 2010.
Cheers DPReview – thanks for the great work and content that guided photographers, videographers and techno junkies the world over!