How wide is wide?

I've owned the 17-40L lens for over 3 years and used it as my main UWA lens for many of my landscape nature shooting adventures. It's been a pretty good performer for me!

All the while, I always longed for something even wider but on my full frame 1DsMkII, that meant about the only choice was the 14L if I wanted to maintain or better the over all picture quality. Anyway, I had been saving up for a while and finally got the 14L a couple of weeks ago. I had taken a ton of new shots with the 14L and really loved the quality it gave me and I'm very glad that I got it!

What I hadn't done yet was to actually compare exactly how much wider the 14L truly was compared to the 17-40 so this morning I decided to set up the camera on my tripod and position the shot for minimum keystone effect, though there was still some that I corrected for in post though the correction was very slight just to keep the outer edge vertical lines straight. I maintained the identical camera position on both shots and will post 3 shots bellow;

The first shot is from the 17-40L

And if you want to see dizzyingly wide, get a 15mm fisheye.

Damn, now you made me want the 14L.

"mathematical" it's 21.4 percent. The 30 percent you claim would be, well, almost a third of the frame (which it is not.)

Jman13 wrote in post #8149027
And if you want to see dizzyingly wide, get a 15mm fisheye.

I've thought about a fish-eye but not sure how much use I could really give it?

Trainboy wrote in post #8149067
Damn, now you made me want the 14L.

Sorry about that. Many of the threads here have a similar effect on people!

BigAlz1 wrote in post #8149201
"mathematical" it's 21.4 percent. The 30 percent you claim would be, well, almost a third of the frame (which it is not.)

Thank you for both the math and spelling corrections! I did run my post through my spell checker prior to posting but it didn't catch the error on "mathematical"?

I am curious though, how did you arrive at the figure of 21.4%?

Cheers!

17/14= 1.214
17mm is 21.4 percent larger then 14mm! Simple arithmetic.

BigAlz1 wrote in post #8149201
"mathematical" it's 21.4 percent. The 30 percent you claim would be, well, almost a third of the frame (which it is not.)

That's 21.4 percent linear. And that again is 47 % more area .

Kind regards, Wim

14mm isn't wide 12mm is wide

Very nice comparison, I wonder how wide the 16-35 is compared to the 17-40. I wonder if the 1mm make as big of a difference as the 3mm difference here.

-tyler

Jman13 wrote in post #8149027
And if you want to see dizzyingly wide, get a 15mm fisheye.

Or the Sigma 12-24

The Ghost of FM wrote in post #8149244
I've thought about a fish-eye but not sure how much use I could really give it?

If you use it well, you can get a lot of use out of it. Obviously, for architecture, it's got somewhat limited application, but it can be wonderful for landscape, and in certain circumstances for architecture and travel as well.

a few shots from mine (3&4 are the Tokina 10-17 at 10mm on my 30D, first two are the Sigma 15 on the 1Ds II):

OK, I just did this the old fashioned way!

I measured the overlay picture that I posted. The image representing the 17-40L lens measured 9.5 x 6.75 inches equaling 64.13 square inches of area.

The 14L image measured 11.33 x 8.25 inches equaling 93.47 square inches of area.

93.47 divided by 64.13 equals 1.46 or 46% more real estate coverage on the 14L!

Cheers!

TeeBoi wrote in post #8149464
Very nice comparison, I wonder how wide the 16-35 is compared to the 17-40. I wonder if the 1mm make as big of a difference as the 3mm difference here.

-tyler

Probably a third of the difference you see here I would guess.

TeeBoi wrote in post #8149464
Very nice comparison, I wonder how wide the 16-35 is compared to the 17-40. I wonder if the 1mm make as big of a difference as the 3mm difference here.

-tyler

Not the same, but similar .

It is 1/16 bigger, linear, and (17/16 squared - 1) area or FoV wise. IOW, 6.25 % linear, and 12.9 % area.

However the 16-35L II and 17-40 are closer together on the short end than the old 16-35 and 17-40, so it is slightly less with the 16-35 II.

Kind regards, Wim