Amazing Canon Lens Test Site

Have visited The Digital Picture before for the text reviews and comments on resolution, but check out the ansi test chart image comparisions, you get to pick two lenses, set the focal length (if a zoom) and the fstop and by running your mouse over the image it changes from the test image from the left selection to that of the right - incredible.

As a landscape photographer I have almost no use for wide apertures - all my shots are done at f11 if I can get away with it and more often f16 as the greatest depth of field without running into ruinous diffractio problems. Finally I can test this - guess what I found.

Even at f16, almost all the L primes are better than the L zooms - enough so in many cases to make me rethink my lens purchases. I was almost ready to get one of the 70-200 L zooms to replace my dropped one - but maybe I'd be better off with a 135 and 200 mm. lens, a 1.4 extender to replace my 300 that doesn't get used often. If I'm shooting from a balloon though, IS and zoom sure are handy - and I hope to do some flying while in Tofino - zoom would be useful there too - sigh - no perfect answer - but at least the website above answers my questions better than any site I have visited so far. Highly recommended.