Canon EF-S 24mm f/2.8 STM Lens

Out of all the lenses I’ve used with my Canon T6i, the EF-S 24mm f/2.8 STM is easily my favorite. It’s incredibly compact—basically a pancake lens—but it delivers sharp, vibrant images that punch way above its size and price.The autofocus is smooth and quiet, which is perfect for video work, and the f/2.8 aperture gives great subject separation and solid low-light performance. I’ve used it for everything from casual street photography to product shots and it consistently delivers.It’s also super lightweight, which makes the whole setup feel much more portable. Honestly, it rarely leaves my camera. If you shoot with a T6i or any crop-sensor Canon body, this little lens is a no-brainer.

First of all, I was amazed at how fast this lens arrived. I'm not a prime member, but I ordered this lens yesterday morning at around 6:00 AM and it was on my doorstep before 6:00 PM! I never had anything arrive so quickly before!Okay, now for the good stuff. The lens was nicely boxed, in bubble wrap, and an additional plastic wrap, so very well protected.Don't be fooled by the low price. This little lens is pretty solid. It appears well built so I'm very pleased with its construction. It's a little tighter to mount than my other Canon lenses, but it is very secure.It does not have image stabilization, but that's not an issue for me (the only lens I own that has it is the 18-55mm kit lens). It does have auto and manual focus. Plus, you can get very close to your subject, almost like a macro lens.This lens may be small, but the focus ring is easy to access. I heard reviews that the STM with auto focus is a bit noisier than the Nifty Fifty, but I did not find that to be the case. The motor is fairly quiet and smooth. I also heard that the auto focus takes longer than normal. When I tried the auto focus through the view finder, it found the subject and focused in less than 2 seconds. In live view, about 4 seconds, which is pretty much what I experience with my other lenses.The photos have been pretty sharp. So far, the "sweet spot" has been at f4.5, but I haven't put the lens through a full test on this. I've only taken indoor photos so far so the real test comes later when I can take it outside and really put it through its paces.For those interested in this particular lens, please remember that it is an EFS lens so it is specifically for a crop sensor camera (I have the Canon EOS Rebel T7). It cannot be used on full frame cameras. Also keep in mind that with an APS-C (crop sensor) camera, you will want to consider the crop factor, which for Canon is 1.6 This means that although the lens is a 24mm, with the crop factor, the photo will look as if it was taken with a 38.4mm. But an advantage is that you will not need to step further back to take a group photo. I had to step quite a bit back in order to take a photo of 5 people with my 50mm, because with the crop factor, the lens acted like an 80mm.Also remember that this is a prime lens, so there is no zoom. But the advantage is that the aperture can open to f2.8. I would have preferred f1.8, but it's still fairly fast so no real complaint.I am extremely happy so far with this lens and look forward to testing it further, but considering that you can pay a lot of hard earned money for lenses, this is a great bargain and certainly a lens that you will want to add to your equipment list.

The media could not be loaded. I mainly bought this lens to record videos indoors for my university courses but I knew it would be very useful for indoor photography to get in tight spaces where my EF 50mm ƒ/1.8 STM would just be too much range. I already heard it was close to the human eye in viewing so I was quite excited to take this out onto the street with my Rebel SL1 to double the tiny DSLR with this tiny lens. Overall in every situation, the lens has met my expectations. It's not as good as the 50mm but it's still very good considering the size and price. The EF-S 24mm ƒ/2.8 STM actually works surprisingly well for portraits and self-portraits in dim light or with the flash, similar to the EF 50mm ƒ/1.8 STM. You can get very crisp detail, hair pores, skin shine, and iris color. I think this lens is supposed to be like an EF-S version of the EF 40mm ƒ/2.8 STM, so buy this lens over the 40mm first, especially if you already own the 50mm. It's a little redundant to get all three so I suggest skipping the 40mm to save up for other lenses and then return for the 40mm.The wide aperture is great to have, even if it is slow compared to some other prime lenses, but I think this lens performs better in the middle to narrower range instead of shooting wide. Auto-focus works very well, at least better than the rest of my cheap lens collection. This is my fifth lens, my other four being the kit, a prime, a zoom, and a wide, making this more of my practical lens. The EF-S 24mm ƒ/2.8 STM will move in and out during focusing without twisting and this is one of my favorite features of this lens because it makes circular polarizer so much more convenient. It has no image stabilizer but I don't think it needs one because it seems fine without one given the small size, and to include one would push up the price and increase the size. The small lightweight lens is really cool to have, especially as my DSLR is one of the smallest ever made, so it can be a bit fun to go compact. I would've bought this lens long ago had I known how useful it is for tight spaces. There tends to be some slight chromatic aberration on average, so take a deep look at your images. The colors seem to be generally true but I often have to increase the saturation like normal. I never actually take off my circular polarizer, so I have no day time images on hand without it. The filter I use is made by Ultimaxx.My post-process suggestion, in Canon's software that is, is that you do not use Digital Lens Optimizer, Color Blur, or Peripheral Illumination, and start the Unsharp Mask with a Strength of 8, Fineness of 5, and Threshold of 2. Keep Chromatic Aberration on as I usually have to slide the red slider to the left while the blue slider is generally left alone or pushed to the right, while 100 is mostly all you need. This of course varies overall depending on situation variables but this is what I found works best for me with this lens.This lens generally goes for $120, but I paid $134 because the $120 lenses were sold out and I needed this for a project. The full price is $150. If you're tight on money, I think this is a good buy, depending on what you want to shoot. If you have no specific subjects to shoot, this is a great choice for hobbyists because of the versatility. You can probably make it work if you're a professional but I wouldn't know because I actually need to use this lens some more. I uploaded some of my pictures, half were images I had on hand while the other half I went out to shoot just for Amazon. My videos always look grainy so I need to learn how to take better videos, but it's a nice lens for videos. One suggestion I found online after making my video was to use Auto-Intelligent Scene and auto-focus for videos on high resolution. I was using 60fps but I will now change to 30fps. Auto-focus from what I found is not silent, so I rate the lens 4.5 for that, in addition to auto-focus not being totally good but the touchscreen makes it good.