You're right, there does seem to be a lot of antagonism and beligerance in here of late.
I'm bowing out of this one anyway as it's such an utterly stupid argument and I really can't be bothered any more.
Your post is needlessly argumentive for absolutely no reason and nothing you has said has disproved what I said. I won't lower myself to childish rebuttals of your individual points (I can easily provide reviews show non-L lenses perform better than L but you will ignore these facts. I feel so I don't want to water my time) but will apologize for upsetting you so.
You seem to find great offense when someone makes a factual statement about a canon product that isn't bathing canon in glory and praise which I find quite a sad allegiance. Even with my fondness of Nikon products of late I can fault them until the cows come home (very slow to updated certain lenses, customer service going downhill, terrible marketing, not admitting design defects, terrible software, not sharing sensor details with Adobe and 3rd party raw converters, lack of DX primes, lack of D300 successor, price increases, overprice Nikon 1 system with terrible name.)
As to the topic at hand, I am glad you are bowing out because you simply don't have a tenable argument and my observation is based on factual data. The point is simple, Canon do not provide any official requirements for L designation (minimum resolution, maximum distortion or CA) and so judging a lens's optical quality by the L marketing is flawed. In black and white terms, a non-L lens can have fantastic image quality, and an L lens can be mediocre or poor. Each lens must be judged individually on it own merits. It seems you have been tricked by the marketing.
You seem to find this simple fact to be an attack on Canon. I feel sorry for you if this is how your mind works. If it makes you feel any better I firmly believe that canon make some of the best 35mm(SLR) format lenses known to man, some of these lenses can not be matched by Nikon, Sony, Pentax, Zeiss, Leica, and many of these have an L designatio and some of them dont. But the 17-40L is not one of them, it is distinctly mediocre (but sufficient when stopped down for most landscape users). Maybe 90% of canon L lenses are superb optically, maybe way more, it doesn't matter as the point still stands. Judge each lens on its own merits for your own individual use and ignore marketing.
