Canon EOS 60D Digital Camera Review

Chromatic Aberration

Chromatic aberration is caused by the elements of the lens diffracting colors of light differently, causing a colored fringe at the edge of objects. We found that there was some aberration going on with the 18-135mm lens, especially at the wide and telephoto ends of the zoom range.

Shooting at the wide end of the zoom range, we found that the images were sharp in the center of the frame across the aperture range, but the edges of the frame were a different story: they were rather soft at both the widest and smallest aperture. There was also a noticeable amount of chromatic aberration in all of our test images at the edge of the frame.

Things were a little sharper in the middle of the zoom range, but there were still issues, with the images taken at the smallest aperture being rather soft.

At the long end of the zoom range, we found the same issues as above with slightly soft edges leading to a loss of detail, especially at the smallest aperture.

Distortion

The 18-135mm zoom lens that is sold with the 60D introduces some distortion into images: we found that there was only a very small amount of distortion at the wide and telephoto ends of the range, but there was some significant distortion in the middle and at the long end of the zoom range.