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 RF Lens List

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

Canon began the RF mount with a focus on very high-quality ultra-fast f1.2 lenses. These are without a doubt the best f1.2 lenses ever made.

Following the f1.2 lenses, Canon has shifted some of its focus to non-L f1.8 lenses and they’ve just released an 85mm f2 prime lens.

The non-L lenses are not weather sealed.

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

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 who has shifted some of their 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.

Today 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, they should soon.

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

When Sigma originally made lenses for the Sony full frame E-Mount, they only adapted their current line of DSLR lenses with built-in lens adapters. Now that Sigma is producing uniquely made lenses for the mirrorless L-Mount system, we should expect to see all those designs move over to the Canon RF system like they have been doing with Sony.

It’s a little more complicated than just switching up the lens mount. Each camera system has a unique approach to sensor design with different microlenses configurations and sensor stacks. Each lens will likely need to be tuned to compensate for any differences between the brands.

Tamron Lenses For Canon RF

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 this year.

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.

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.