I have recently purchased a Canon EOS 80D with EF-S 10-22mm USM Lens; you can read my initial thoughts here. I replaced my EF-S 10-18mm STM lens with the 10-22 because of the issues I was having with ghosting and flaring of light sources and windows in my real estate work, see my thoughts here.
If you’re looking for an in-depth analysis of these two lenses, you’ll need to look elsewhere, I am looking at specific elements and this write-up is aimed at real estate photographers and real estate agents.
I took two identical shots with the same settings and my thoughts are based upon these two photos. The settings I used were 1/4 second shutter, F/8, ISO 400 and I switched lens without changing tripod positions or turning the camera off, both lenses had their respective Canon branded lens hoods
The first thing I noticed was that the 10-22mm was approximately half a stop darker; the 10-18mm produced brighter images despite the same 1/2, F/8, ISO 400 settings. Image sharpness seems to be the same; neither lens was sharp when zoomed in 100% without any post processing. The 10-18mm did look wider at 10mm, but that is because the 10-18mm is a shorter lens; giving the impression of being wider.
The reason I did this experimentation was because I have heard so many people praise the EF-S 10-18mm lens and reported no such issues with ghosting and flaring. Yes, I could have just gotten a bad lens; but if that is the case, many others have also gotten a bad EF-S 10-18mm STM lens as I have also seen plenty of reports on the ghosting/flaring issue written on the Internet during my research.
So the results are in and with the identical shots I took; my 10-18mm had ghosting of the ceiling mounted light and flaring from the window. It was not as bad as in some photos I had taken of other properties, but it’s definitely there while the 10-22mm showed none of the same ghosting and flaring.
I won’t tell anyone to buy one lens over the other; it comes down to personal choice and the 10-18mm is less than half the cost of the 10-22mm, which is why I initially chose the 10-18mm STM over the 10-22mm USM. However, I’ve had issues with the 10-18mm which has cost me precious time in post production and in some, albeit rare cases even ruined the shot completely as I could not fix it in Adobe Lightroom.
I didn’t include the photos as I did not want to post photos of the disaster that is my house right now. If you have questions or want me to elaborate on my quick write up, please comment below.
