Canon EOS 1D X Digital Camera Review

Sharpness

The one area where the Canon 1D X didn't excel relative to the field in our image tests was in resolution. While the 24-70mm f/2.8L lens does quite well in terms of distortion and chromatic aberration, it struggles in edge-to-edge sharpness. Part of this is due to the lack of enhancement being done to the images—the images are practically untouched out of the camera, and benefit greatly from some post sharpening—but the lens itself also has some issues.

For our testing we shot our images at the highest possible quality setting JPEG (with RAW backups to check for processing issues) in the faithful picture setting. This produced images that had a sharpness of roughly 1500 lw/ph in the center of the image, but fell off quite sharply when the lens was wide open at f/2.8 or closed down to f/22. Edge sharpness improved dramatically when the lens was stopped down to f/8, however.

Either way, these results are quite soft, though it's a known issue with this particular lens. Luckily, Canon has, ahem, resolved this issue by releasing the new version of the 24-70mm f/2.8L lens. The new lens is a slightly different barrel design, with a supposedly improved AF system and better resolving power. As this lens wasn't quite available as of press time, we had to stick with the original version. It's worth noting that the new version is more expensive, but it would improve on these results quite a bit. More on how we test sharpness.