A Complete List of Canon RF Lenses

This is a complete list of every Canon RF Lens, updated regularly.

I broke this list up into pages, so I could put a little more information on each section about each brand. Let me know it’s not working for you.

Canon Mirrorless Lenses

Canon has a new design philosophy with these RF lenses, which is to keep the lenses lighter and more customizable. A lot of people say they feel plasticky, but from my experience, they feel very good, very high quality. Canon is just using a thinner plastic outer shell than what they traditionally have used in the past. I think people are forgetting that Canon lenses have had a plastic outer shell for a very long time now.

Regarding the electronic manual focusing with the new RF lenses, it’s the best I’ve used so far. You can get very accurate with it and it feels very natural, better than any other brand in my opinion.

You have some MF focus ring sensitivity options so you can set the focus ring to change with rotation speed or you can link it to rotation degree. If you link it to a rotation degree it works almost exactly the same as a manual lens. You can also adjust the direction of the rotation of the manual focus ring.

Canon RF Prime Lens List

This list shows all of the available canon mirrorless lenses that are of a fixed focal length. L lenses are the highest quality lenses that have the best coatings, elements, and mechanics and they are also usually weather sealed. The Non-L lenses are often built with more casual photography in mind, they often have some limitations in performance, but some of them still have some unique character like the 50mm f1.8 which has nice micro-contrast.

Canon RF Zoom Lens List

Canon now has a full range of f2.8 zoom lenses that expand from 15mm all the way up to 200mm, as well as some variable aperture lenses and a great 28-70mm f2 lens. Unfortunately, there still aren’t a lot of lightweight f4 lenses other than the 24mm-105mm.

Canon EF to RF Lens Mounts Adapter

Canon RF Extenders

Third-Party RF Lenses

Many of the third-party lens manufacturers have worked out some designs for the RF mount, some are even offering autofocus.

Before buying a third-party RF lens thinking you’re saving money, there are a few things you should know.

Often third-party lens manufacturers do not use official autofocus protocols and sometimes the focus can suffer.

The cameras will not have firmware for third-party lenses and the camera bodies will not automatically adjust for color shifts, distortion, or vignetting like they do with official RF lenses.

You should also know that many third-party lenses optical designs are not tuned for any one particular camera brand’s sensor coverglass or micro-lenses, so the MTF charts you see these companies posting will actually show varying results with different camera brands.

The sensor cover glass or micro-lenses should actually be considered part of the optical formula as it can enhance or reduce performance if the lens is not properly configured for it.

Sometimes with third-party Canon RF lenses, we’ll see strange aberrations like the purple color shifts in outer areas of the sensor, so it’s important to look for any reviews on the lens you’re considering on the body that you have. Since some bodies have more problems with some lenses, like the Canon R had a much more aggressive purple shift in the corners than the Canon R5 and R6 – Likely Canon improved their sensor cover glass.

American Brand Lenses

There aren’t many American lens companies out there that make lenses for the Canon RF system. The only one that’s popular and still around today is Lensbaby which has shifted some of its attention over to the Canon RF mount.

Lensbaby Lenses

The history of Lensbaby is interesting. They started out as a small company back in 2004 making ball and socket lenses or shift lenses. While many of their lenses still are special effects art lenses, their designs continue to improve.

Lens Baby has some very nice lenses such as the Velvet lenses, that keep true to the classic mid-century rendering that is lost with today’s modern lenses. They do this by keeping the elements low while still allowing for some lens flare. 

List of Current Lensbaby Lenses For Canon RF

Japanese Lenses

Sigma Lenses for Canon RF

Sigma has yet to release any lenses for the Canon RF mirrorless system, however, we’re hoping they will soon.

It’s rumored that the new lenses for the Canon RF system will be tailor-made for the new RF mirrorless mount.

Each camera system has a unique approach to sensor design with different microlenses configurations and sensor cover glass. To maximize performance, each lens’s optics will need to be tuned to compensate for these differences. It’s even more important with mirrorless cameras since the rear element or exit pupil can sit much closer to the sensor creating very sharp angles of light for the edges and corners of the sensor.

Tamron RF Lenses

Tamron has let the world know they are now making mirrorless for systems other than Sony. Their lenses will come to Nikon and Canon full-frame bodies likely in the next few years.

Tokina

Hopefully, we get more Tokina lenses in the future.

Yasuhara Lenses for the RF Mount

The Yasuhara Anthy is a new mirrorless lens for the various full-frame mirrorless camera systems. They are the same company that made the 5:1 macro APS-C mirrorless lens that was well received. They also have a few EF and F lenses.

The new Anthy 35mm f1.8 Features 9 elements in 7 groups. So far I’m seeing nice contrast and sharpness with the weakness being the vignetting. This might be a great place to start if you’re looking to build out their prime manual lens collection.

The Anthy is a very fun street lens because of the great performance you get from such a small package. Unfortunately for the Canon RF mount, it does produce a little purple vignetting in some situations.

Korean Lenses

Samyang / Rokinon Lenses

Samyang is a company out of Korea that also sells its lenses under the brand Rokinon. They’ve really improved as lens designers over the last 10 years, and now have some incredible designs at really good prices. Often they won’t be as good as the big brands like Canon or Nikon but are still very good for the price.

Samyang has released a few nice options for the Canon RF system with and without autofocus. More autofocus lenses are expected to come soon.

Note that the 85mm autofocus version is a slightly more complicated design than the manual focus 85mm. The 14mm is still a fairly new design updated several years back.

List of Samyang RF Autofocus Lenses

Samyang / Rokinon has worked out some autofocus lenses for the Canon RF mount.

List of Samyang RF Manual Lenses

List of Samyang Cine Lenses

Samyang has released a series of Cine lenses for the RF mount. They are DSLR design lenses fused on RF adapters.

Swiss Brand Lenses

IRIX Cine Lenses

Irix a company out of Switzerland that uses Japanese optics has a series of Cine lenses for the Canon RF system.

List of Irix Cine lenses for the Canon RF system.

Chinese Brand Lenses

There has always been this stigma about Chinese quality control and production ability. While this is true for some lenses and products, there are some incredible things happening in China right now and we’re seeing some genuine expertise with some lenses coming out of China.

Kipon, for example, is a very high-quality brand and Laowa lenses have been very well received. Kalman continues to grow and even Mitakon continues to refine its lenses.

Of course, some of the Chinese lenses are cheap junk, but that doesn’t always mean they aren’t worth something.

Often you’ll find some of the cheap Chinese lenses are priced very fairly and will produce some really fun results in the right circumstances.

I’ve had a ton of fun with some of those cheap Chinese lenses over the years and I do recommend them for fun.

Brightin Star Lenses

7Artisans Lenses

7Artisans lenses are a lot of fun, especially for the price. They can be a little shaky when it comes to build quality, but they always produce a cool classic look that you just can’t find anymore with modern lenses.

Funleader RF CapLens

It’s one of those fixed aperture cap lenses.

Kipon “Elegant” Lenses

Kipon has a new lens line of Elegant lenses for the Canon RF and Nikon Z Mount. These are essentially updated Handevision lenses.

Handevision is actually owned by Kipon and they make lenses with a classic style in both physical design and rendering. Kipon has moved away from the Handevision brand name and is just using Kipon which already has a great reputation for its high-quality adapters.

These lenses are of very high quality. One could consider Kipon to be the Voigtlander of China.

LAOWA / Venus Optics Lenses

Venus Optics has made some interesting mirrorless lenses over the years and their quality continues to improve. People usually get excited by the zero distortion some of their lenses offer.

Meike Lenses

Meike has engineered its 50mm f1.7 lens for the new Canon RF mount. This was a fairly popular low-budget lens for the Sony FE mount and it’s nice it has moved over to Canon.

The Meike lenses are cheap Chinese lenses but their optical formulas are actually quite nice. Usually, the main flaw with their designs is poor coatings, so you get inner element light scattering in bright environments and well as ghosting and flaring. I’ve found the Meike lenses to hold up a little better than the 7Artisan lenses, but both brands are very similar. Usually Meike will share the same optical formulas as 7Artisans but they’ll switch out the aperture to use fewer blades.

Mitakon Lenses

Mitakon is slowly moving over some of their more interesting designs to the Canon R mount starting with the latest update to the Speedmaster.

Mitakon also shares their designs with SLR Magic, which are essentially Cine versions of the Mitakon lenses.

NiSi Lenses

NiSi, a popular company known for its ND and UV filters has started making lenses.

They also have a line of Cine lenses in the E, EF, and PL mount that can easily be adapted to the R system.

SIRUI Z Lenses

SIRUI is now making full-frame anamorphic lenses.

TTArtisan Lenses

Viltrox Lenses

Viltrox has been working hard at pumping out new lenses for these mirrorless camera systems. Their first lens for the Canon RF mount is the 20mm f1.8. A full manual lens with a few interesting features. Short-wavelength high transparency. Not sure what that means, Short-wavelength is UV light.

4 ED elements and a Nano-coating. Some of these third-party lens developers are getting very good with their lenses and some of these lenses should not be ignored. The Kipon lenses, for example, are fantastic.

Adapters

I’m already noticing that third-party 35mm lenses adapted to the Canon EOS R are performing a lot better than they do on the Sony cameras. Because Canon has a correctly sized lens mount, they don’t have to use a very aggressive lens micro design, so lenses designed for film or DSLRs tend to perform better.

Also, the Canon EOS R has a thin sensor stack which results in improved performance when adapting Leica lenses or 35mm film lenses. If it wasn’t for the pretty bad focus peaking, the EOS R is probably the best option for adapting old 35mm film lenses.

Kipon has 20 different adapters for the Canon EOS R system. Kipon is a very high-quality adapter and lens company out of China.

Novoflex has some adapters on the way as well.

Canon RF Lens List Conclusion

I’ll continue to update this list as more lenses hit the market. If I’ve missed anything or have made any mistakes, please feel free to let me know in the comments.