Once you bought your first-ever DSLR camera, you have no choice but to learn everything about lenses. Why? It’s because lenses are the one that’s controlling the image that’s being projected onto the camera’s imaging sensor. Meaning, a good lens will guarantee you’ll get only the best image quality.

Lenses are commonly consisting of letters and numbers. If you’re new to photography, you’ll find those confusing and, honestly, a bit intimidating.

But don’t be! This article’s purpose is to avoid this kind of confusion and we’ll start that by discussing the lens’ aperture, focal length, format type and lens mount.

Best lenses for Canon 5D Mark IV

• Aperture

If you’re shopping for lenses for quite some time, you probably notice this: f/1.4 or F1.4-5.6. This is the lens aperture measurement. If you’ve seen one number (f/1.4), it means that’s the lens maximum aperture; while if there’s two (f/1.4-5.6), that’s the measurement range of the lens aperture.

Aperture has a measurement ranging from 1.4 up to 16. For some, they find this range confusing because they assume 16 has the largest aperture and 1.4 has the smallest. This is wrong! It’s actually the other way around, 1.4 has the largest while 16 has the smallest aperture.

So, if you’re planning to shoot in low-light condition without the need to use a flash, choose a lens with a larger aperture.

• Focal length

Focal length is the one that describes the lens’s angle of view and usually shown in a lens’ details in mm. If you’ve seen two numbers (20-300mm), it means that the lens can zoom to that range; while if there’s one number, it automatically means that it’s a prime lens.

This is an important detail to consider because a lens focal length can work differently depends on the camera’s sensor’s size (crop factor). The proper way to solve this is by following the 35-mm format wherein you’ll have to multiply the camera’s crop factor to the focal length of the lens.

For 5D Mark IV, it has a 1.74x crop. Multiply this by any lens’ focal length and the answer will be the equivalent field of view for that lens.

• Format type

Format type is the one that defines the sensor size that the lens is designed to work with. For 5D Mark IV, it has a CMOS sensor that’s also compatible with Dual Pixel CMOS AF.

• Lens mount

Determining the lens mount is the simplest way to determine the compatibility of the lens to your camera. For 5D Mark IV, it has a lens format of Canon EF mount only. If you’ve seen lenses with EF-S or EF-M on their name, it’s not compatible with 5D Mark IV.

The table below will show you the comparison of the 3 best lenses for Canon 5D Mark IV.

*Note: The format and lens mount of the 3 lenses are an exact match to 5D Mark IV.

Review of The Products

1. Canon EF 24mm f/1.4 L USM II Wide-Angle Lens

Every photographer needs a wide-angle lens to capture landscape, interior and architectural infrastructure. For 5D Mark IV, the best lens option is Canon EF 24mm f/1.4 L USM II Wide Angle Lens.

It weighs 1.43 lbs. with a dimension of 3.4×3.7×3.7 inches and designed with Canon’s newest fixed length L-series lens.

The key features of this lens are:

• Version “II”

This version “II” of Canon for this lens has an additional 2 high-precision aspheric lenses (corrects aberration) and 2 UD lenses (ensure optimum image quality) to its predecessor.

• Anti-reflective (SWC) Sub Wavelength Coating

This lens is built with Anti-Reflective SWC to minimize any form of flaring and ghosting throughout the lens surface.

• Ring-Type USM Motor

This lens has a ring-type USM motor, an autofocusing mechanism that allows full-time manual focusing override without the need to switch it from AF to MF mode.

2. Canon EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM Telephoto Fixed Lens

For photographers who love to shoot action-packed events or subjects, the lens they need is a telephoto lens. Not just any telephoto lens! A telephoto lens that has a fast shutter speed and long focal length.

For 5D Mark IV, Canon EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM Telephoto Fixed Lens is the best lens to choose. This lens weighs 1.69 lbs. with a dimension of 3.27×5.35×3.27 inches and designed with Canon’s newest fixed length L-series lens.

The key features of this lens are:

• Version “II”

This version of Canon for this lens has 2 Ultra-low Dispersion glass elements with Fluorite elements that ensure all images will have a maximum sharpness and accurate color fidelity.

• Micro Ultrasonic Motor (USM)

This lens is built with a micro ultrasonic motor (USM) alongside with rear focusing design. This two works together for this lens to have a silent, high-speed autofocus and full-time manual focus.

• Compatibility

This lens isn’t only compatible with 5D Mark IV camera but to all Canon’s EOS system cameras.

3. Canon EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM Lens

If you’re looking for a more versatile lens that doesn’t add so much weight to your bag, you may consider all-in-one zoom lenses. For Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, the best all-in-one zoom lenses are Canon EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM Lens.

This lens weighs 3.68 lbs. with a dimension of 3.62×7.24×3.62 inches and features a dust- and moisture-proof on its camera body. Also, it’s designed with Canon’s newest fixed length L-series lens.

The key features of this lens are:

• Precision Optics

One of the advantages of this lens is, it’s designed with 3 Ultra-low Dispersion (UD) glass elements and 2 aspherical elements.

• Fast Auto-Focus

This lens is built with an inner focusing powerful ring-type ultrasonic motor (USM) that delivers a high-speed, high-precision and virtually noiseless autofocusing. It has a minimum focusing distance of 0.7m all through the entire zoom range.

• Image Stabilization

This lens has been incorporated with Canon’s two-stage Image Stabilization technology. If you’re not a huge fan of carrying a tripod everywhere you go, you’ll enjoy this lens’ feature.

What’s Canon L-Series lens?

I’ve mentioned “L-Series lens” thrice and you may wonder what it’s all about. The L Lens Series is Canon’s professional line of EOS EF autofocus that guarantees impressive color reproduction, sharpness and overall performance at all settings; for all their DSLR cameras.

Canon’s lenses have been incorporated by one or more special optical technologies such as Ultra-Low Dispersion UD glass, Super Low Dispersion glass, Fluorite elements, and Aspherical elements.

Conclusion

Looking for the right information is always the key to buy the best lenses for your DSLR camera. And if we have to choose between the 3 lenses above, we’ll choose the all-in-one zoom lens Canon EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM Lens to be the best lenses for Canon 5D Mark IV.

We chose this because of three reasons: 1) It has high resistant to water droplets, moisture, and dust. 2) It has dual-mode image stabilization which is an advantage since 5D Mark IV doesn’t have this kind of feature. Lastly, 3) It has an impressive precision optics that give the lens unsurpassed clarity even during zooming.