Congrats to Canon on the TS-E 17!
Recently it has been a bit of a bummer being a Canon user. Granted, the 5D Mark II is a great camera and competes very well with the D700, but every other camera in their SLR line seems to take a back seat these days.
Therefore it was nice to see Canon still has a bit of ingenuity up their sleaves in the TS-E 17 F4 lens. One area where Canon still has an advantage over Nikon is in their lenses. Canon simply has far more lenses and far more good primes specifically. Nikon has a few lenses Canon doesn’t – such as the 14-24 and the 200-400, but the Canon lenses I use most often – the 70-200/4 IS and the MP-E 65 – have no equivalents in Nikon.
Still, Canon has the tendency lately to sit back on their laurels and let Nikon catch up. That is what happened with high ISO capabilities and I expected the same to occur for lenses – where Canon’s strategy lately has been to upgrade existing lenses.
This is not the case with the TS-E 17 – which is the ultimate interior photography lens. Already I am salivating at the thought of taking real estate pictures with this lens – though I’m having more than a little trouble convincing my wife that it is worth it!
I had planned to buy the TS-E 24 at some time, but I wasn’t crazy about it. I had heard that the lens was not great optically and 24mm is a great distance from my 16-35 that I normally use. I did use a friend’s TS-E 24 briefly in a house I photographed, but I put the lens away because I needed something much wider. The TS-E 17 fits the bill exactly.
I hope that this is a sign for the future – that Canon will keep innovating. They now have another lens with no equivalent in other systems and I suspect a good number of interior photographers will buy a Canon camera if they are not using one just to be able to use this lens.
Now if I can just figure out where to get $2500. 