a small fisheyed lens

Author's Rating:

Pros: good optical quality, delivers what it promises, great fisheye

Cons: fisheye distortion makes this a one-trick lens, no USM motor

The Bottom Line: 
Get this lens after all of your essential lenses and if you're looking for a specialty lens with some neat fisheye perspective.

Author's Review
Be warned right off the bat that this lens is not a walk-around lens. You do not want to be using this lens everyday as your primary lens. This is primarily due to the heavy barrel distortion intrinsic to this lens.

That being said, the Canon 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye lens is one of Canon's widest lenses, but is also the lens that has the most barrel distortion...intentionally. That's where the Fisheye part of the description of the lens comes into play. A fisheye effect is one where there is heavy barrel distortion and everything towards the edges seems to have a big curve in them...as if someone took a normal image and printed it on a rubber material and then pushed out the center of the image toward you.

This lens is called a rectilinear fisheye lens which means that it still produces images that fill out the entire frame of an image, as opposed to the circular fisheye lenses which only render an image in a circle.

Optically, the images that come out from this lens are very nice. Clear, sharp, and what one expects from a fisheye lens. I have to be very clear that you should not expect to use this as a wide-angle prime lens. Contrast was good, and the lens is reasonably fast.

Some people would like to use this lens and then through the power of the digital darkroom convert images from this lens from fisheye-to-rectilinear. There are many software packages that do this, but generally speaking, the corners of the images become quite soft after this kind of conversion, so if that is your intention, keep that in mind.

This lens does not sport a USM motor, so focusing is noisy compared to other USM-fitted lenses. The autofocus on this lens is still relatively speedy and decent. Not quite as fast as an L-type lens, obviously, but still on the good side of the consumer lenses.

The front lens element protrudes out of the lens quite a bit and because of the curvature of the lens, a traditional screw in filter cannot be placed in front of the lens element. A built in lens hood also sticks out from the body of the lens to help minimize flare. A special friction-hold lens cap protects the lens when not in use. You can use gelatin filters on the rear of the lens, if absolutely necessary.

If you want to minimize the effects of the fisheye lens, avoid vertical or horizontal lines in your composition.

I really do like this lens, and it is my current favorite of all of my lenses, but it still finds a relatively small amount of time on my camera body. The reason for this is that it is just not a very practical lens to use everyday because of the fisheye effect. I don't want to overdo the effect.

I really enjoy that this lens is small, fast, and WIDE. With my film body, I have to make a conscious effort to make sure my feet do not get into the picture.

What I don't like about this lens is the lack of a USM motor and the little bit of difficulty it has with focusing on very close subjects.

If I were to recommend different types of lenses to a new camera owner, I would recommend that they first buy a good walk-around lens. Then they should get a good telephoto lens. If their walk-around lens is not a wide-angle zoom, I would urge them to get the wide angle zoom. Once a photographer has all of those lenses in their bag, I would then have them look into this lens. It's a specialty lens and you should get all of the essentials out of the way before you consider purchasing it.