The Bottom 10 Updated: The Ten Oldest Lenses in the Current Canon Lineup

I spent part of last week cleaning up the currently available vs. out of stock and discontinued status of the lenses on the site, saying farewell to an especially large number of Canon EF lenses. While some of those lenses should have been discontinued a long time ago, it was sad and nostalgic to let others go.

The bottom line is that, as I said recently, it is time to make the move to mirrorless.

With the EF lineup significantly impacted, I thought it would be interesting to again sort out Canon's 10 oldest lenses. What has changed since the over-4-year-old and over-6-year-old lists?

Here is the bottom 10 list in oldest to youngest sequence.

Model	Year Introduced
Canon TS-E 90mm f/2.8 Tilt-Shift Lens	1991	B&H | Adorama | Amazon
Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM Lens	1992	B&H | Adorama | Amazon
Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM Lens	1993	B&H | Adorama | Amazon
Canon EF 135mm f/2L USM Lens	1996	B&H | Adorama | Amazon
Canon MP-E 65mm Macro Lens	1999	B&H | Adorama | Amazon
Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III USM Lens	1999	B&H | Adorama | Amazon
Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM Lens	2003	B&H | Adorama | Amazon
Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens	2004	B&H | Adorama | Amazon
Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM Lens	2004	B&H | Adorama | Amazon
Canon EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM Lens	2004	B&H | Adorama | Amazon

Perhaps my biggest surprise in the above list is that the Canon TS-E 90mm f/2.8 Tilt-Shift Lens is still on the shelf. The Canon TS-E 90mm f/2.8L Tilt-Shift Macro Lens has a feature superset and optical performance far surpassing the old lens. While the L lens's price also far surpasses the old TS-E 90, the 30-year-old lens that won't go away is still rather expensive.

The Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM Lens has long been a great value portrait lens, offering good build and image quality and quick USM AF for a low price. 85mm image quality has come a long way since this lens's inception.

While the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM Lens produces soft image quality at wide apertures, it is a small and affordable lens. For years, this was the best Canon lens available in this favorite focal length.

The Canon EF 135mm f/2L USM Lens's ultra-wide aperture and fast AF made it a first choice for its low light and background blur performance. L-grade build quality combined with a relatively low price added to this lens's appeal. This lens's image quality was greatly loved but now surpassed.

The Canon MP-E 65mm Macro Lens is a unique, fun lens that has relatively low popularity.

The Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III USM Lens is a great (cheap) option for the manufacturer to add to a camera kit to make the buyer thinks they are getting a better deal.

We loved the Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM Lens when it arrived. Eventually, the Canon EF 16-35mm f/4L IS USM Lens arrived with dramatically better image quality. The 17-40 should have been retired many years ago from an image quality perspective. However, it offers an ultra-wide-angle L-zoom lens option to the budget-constrained photographer.

Since its inception, the Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens has been a good general-purpose lens option for the APS-C kit. This lens features good image quality, a great range of focal lengths, decent build quality, image stabilization, and USM AF.

The Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM Lens was Canon's first APS-C lens to offer ultra-wide angles of view to the APS-C cameras. It remains beside the EF-S 10-18mm IS STM Lens in the EF-S lineup.

There is no Canon equivalent to the EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM Lens. While this lens has L-series goodness, a size, weight, and image quality penalty is paid for the long focal length range.

That concludes the 2022 roundup of the oldest Canon lenses.

What was the newest Canon lens to be discontinued? That would be the Canon EF 24-105mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM Lens, formerly the optimal budget full-frame DSLR kit lens.