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 My cameras: | Canon or Nikkor: Wide zooms | Canon or Nikkor: standard zooms | Pictures from my trips
Canon or Nikkor: Wide zooms

If you visit the photography lists in the Web you'll find out that brand owners are very found of his gear. This seems quite normal but when you speak to a member of a brand list of the competitor material very often he exclaims : crap!!!.
 
I'm a multisystems user so this behaviour firstly astonished me but thereafter lead me to make some test about the truly differences in material. Of course the validity of these tests may be contested but this is right for me.
 
As always the lenses a wide zoom 17-35 mm f1:2.8 from every brand has been tested on sturdy Manfrotto tripod firstly at 2.8 and after at 8. The Canon on a Eos 1V camera and the Nikon on a F5 camera. Metering with a Minolta Autometer IV and reading incident light. Provia negatives have been scaned at 2.800 dpi in a Minolta Dimage scaner and the picture of a test chart that you can see correspond only to approximately 1/10 of the chart. So it's a private test but I think that rightly made.

1.jpg
Canon 17-35mm at 17mm f:2.8 at 2.8

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3b.jpg
Nikkor 17-35mm at 17 f1:2.8 at 2.8

As you can see these are differents pictures but it is not so easy say which is better. On the other hand this is not the last wide zoom from Canon as some months ago a new one has been launched with 16-35mm range and owner say it's sharper full open than the previous.
 
Anyway any of this lenses is usable even full open with very good results and excepting bigger distortion and a little more flare and vignetting it can be used instead of corresponding primes but this is another question who arises, again, some of the most famous flames in the Web.