Lens Review: Canon EF 135mm F/2L USM

The Canon EF 135mm f/2 L USM is one of the medium tele lenses in the Canon lineup and a member of Canon's prestigious "L" (Luxury) class. A few years ago we performed a test in the APS-C scope already and it turned out to be a superb performer here so it's naturally interesting to check its qualities on a high resolution full format body as well now.



The mechanical quality of the lens is truly excellent thanks to quality materials, tight build tolerances and a smooth and well damped rubberized focus ring. The lens has a "true" IF design so it does not change its physical length and the front element does not rotate during focus operations. The lens accepts all Canon EF tele-converters resulting either in a 189mm f/2.8 (135mm + 1.4x) or 270mm f/4 (135mm + EF 2x) combination. This resulting max. aperture is still fairly large so AF is retained on all EOS cameras.

The AF speed is very fast so the build-in focus limiter isn't really necessary. The AF of the tested sample was highly accurate during the field tests. Thanks to the ring-type USM drive the AF operation is near silent and full-time manual focusing (FT-M) remains possible in one-shot AF mode.