Wide Angle Lens Need: Can I kill two birds with one stone?

[Benalpha30]

Thank you everyone for taking the time to offer your suggestions. As my #1 need will be shooting paintings, I am looking at the canon 35mm f2.8 IS macro, as I've heard good things about its performance in that role. While I have no plans to move on from my 7D mkII, I know everyone cautions against stockpiling lenses that will be obsolete if I go full frame. With that in mind, i'm at least considering the canon 35mm f2 IS USM as well. Does anyone have experience to compare these two? Do you think the f2 would do as good a job at copy work as the macro?

 

[TWX]

The only comment I could make, when I was digitizing film slides using a 18-135mm USM lens, I found that I had a mildly rough time autofocusing. That 18-135mm is an electronic-focus model, the ring basically just provides electronic input, which the camera has to interpret to trigger the focus motor. I found it laggy until I turned too quickly at which point it tended to jump too much, making fine focus control cumbersome to achieve.

I have no idea if the 35mm f/2 USM uses such a focus-by-wire system or not, but if it does then you may want to see about trying it out before you buy it, in case manually focusing on your artwork proves an exercise in frustration. In my own slide-digitization case admittedly I was using lots of extension tubes to give me macro capabilities so for all I know those were affecting the performance, but if I were in your shoes I'd want to experiment, even if only in the store, with the lens on my own camera.

 

[Derrel]

A macro lens is designed to give a flat field of focus and is typically quite sharp. However at f8, i would expect the 35/2 would be adequate....but i would expect the macro would be excellent. No personal experience with either lens however