Canon EF 50mm lens
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| My first lens purchase 11/08/2010 I have recently started on the photography trail and after using the standard 18-55 lens, realised it was time to invest in something new. I was after something that gave great picture quality and created sharp images. After looking at the 1.8 and the 1.4, I decided it was worth the additional investment and I was not wrong. The images come out sharp and capture soem great momeents - recently taking pictures at weddings, you can really catch some great photos which really highlight the subject in the picture. This lense is worth the additional money over the 1.8, build quality is better and image quality is better By Andy Green | |||||
| Fantastic for low light situations 11/08/2010 Just to qualify this review... I'm a keen amateur photographer who has always used Canon gear and use a 5D (full-size sensor) as my main camera. I bought this as I was about to become a father for the first time and I wanted a way of capturing some of those special moments of our lovely daughter. I was conscious that for a newborn you don't want to use flash (ringflash is sometimes okay but best avoided) and thus I wanted a lens with "fast glass" which would make this easy. This lens has not disappointed at all. At 50mm it is perhaps a little wide for those portraits on a full-size sensor (I find I crop the images a bit in Photoshop) but the speed and sharpness of the lens make up for that. It's reasonably quiet focussing (certainly not loud enough to disturb baby) and the results have been really good. At f1.4 you obviously get some really lovely blurring away from the focal point and it makes the photos that much more magical. I actually find I tend to use f1.8 most the time. If I was looking to criticise the lens for this specific need, I would say an 80mm lens may have been better for a full-size sensor, since you do want to go quite close. The other thing I would highlight is that it's not a macro lens so you don't get that close (I think I was finding 50cm as being the minimum focus distance). A final piece of advice - if you are an amateur and thus have some sort of budget for your lens and are not sure whether to go for the f1.4 lens or the considerably more expensive f1.2, I would suggest the f1.4 is plenty lens for your money. I really found the sharpness and colours of the images from this lens excellent, and never found myself wanting a wider aperture than f1.4. It also means you may have some cash left to buy some other gadgets!! By Darren Simons Middlesex, United Kingdom | |||||
| Beware - flimsy, poor quality lens! 07/08/2010 I received this lens a couple of weeks ago and from the first photo I took with it - I wasn't happy: the autofocus was coming up short, so nearly every shot was slightly soft; unless I painstakingly flicked the camera to video mode, zoomed right in, set focus and then shot - who has the time to do that at a kids party whilst candles are being blown out and general mayhem is ensuing? I returned the lens and another one promptly arrived in the post, and exactly the same problem? Now, I know it's not my camera as I have tested other canon lenses on the camera which were all fine. So, very frustrated I did a fair amount of review hunting and basically what it boils down to is this lens is weak, the slightest bump and it loses it's auto focus sharpness. Another thing I really don't like about this lens is the green or purple fringing you get on bright white, which seems different with every 50mm 1.4 lens I've tested. If you really insist on buying this lens - then make sure you buy a lens hood at the same time, and as it comes out the box, fit the lens hood and never take it off. Also test it straight away because if the delivery guys have let it drop, chances are it will be off focus. Not happy! Very glad there's some old classic 1970s lenses out there, which do an amazing job - auto focus be damned! Although I'm going to get rid of this lens and get the canon 85mm 1.8, which is supposed to be very robust and an excellent lens. I hope this helps. By Mr. J. G. Baney Brighton, UK | |||||
| A mixed bag 05/08/2010 You get a bit of a mixed bag with this lens. There are definitely some positive sides to it, however there are also (for me) an unacceptable amount of negatives, and as such I don't quite think this lens is worth the ever climbing price. First off the image quality. It's good - as long as you're up above f/2. Below f/2 (lower f/ number), all of the lens' faults become visible. Spherical abberation (hazy effect), some chromatic abberation, horrendous vignetting (this can be used to creative effect, but it's beside the point) and loss of clarity in colours/detail. really, it's not much better than the f/1.8 version when you start to compare them both at around ~f/2.8. By f/4-f/5.6 both lenses are fantastic. The colour rendition of this lens is very good, near perfect I'd say when you've stopped down a bit. The f/1.8 version seems to add a magenta tinge to photos - the f/1.4 does not. The bokeh off the f/1.4 is more rounded and supposedly more smooth as it has 8 aperture blades, as opposed to the f/1.8's 5 aperture blades. In practise though this doesn't make *all* that much difference unless there are out of focus points of light in the image; which with the f/1.8 will appear as pentagons, with the f/1.4 they will appear nearly as circles. I have still had many occasions where bokeh off the f/1.4 was surprisingly harsh, though. The build quality *is* better than the f/1.8, but quite frankly, fisher price toys still beat the f/1.8 lens in build quality. There is a placebo effect that Canon have created, whereby people upgrade from the f/1.8 lens to the f/1.4 thinking how great the build and AF is when in reality, the lens isn't much better built than Canon's 18-55 IS kit lens. Clever marketing or coincidence? This brings me neatly onto my next point as well - AF speed and accuracy of the f/1.4 is sketchy at best - even on a 1 series camera. If the light is less than ideal, my 50 will hunt, hunt and hunt until the sun goes down. Take it outside in daylight however and it performs flawlessly. There is no point in having a fast lens if it struggles to focus in lower light. For this, I blame the pseudo ultrasonic motor that they use in the lens - not true ring USM, but a micro USM motor. Don't be mislead into thinking that this is one of Canon's near-silent and lightning fast focussing lenses - it isn't. The focussing is not as quiet as true ring USM and as I have just said there, certainly not as accurate. The manual focussing ring has far too much play and when turned feels like it is meshing with sand and pebbles. As an upgrade from a 50mm f/1.8, it initially feels great, but if like myself you expect a bit more for your money, the 50mm f/1.4 quickly becomes disliked. Poor build quality, shoddy AF and questionable quality at low apertures - not worth the premium price! I am now selling mine - with a hood - for quite a big loss, and will be getting the Canon 85mm f/1.8 as my 'arty lens' instead. Quiet, fast and accurate focussing with proper ring USM, better build quality and arguably better IQ wide open - and it costs around the same. It's a no brainer. By C. J. Fraser | |||||
| Brilliant but takes some getting used to! 14/06/2010 This is my first prime lens and it took some getting used to at first, coming from a zoom but after two weeks of constant use, I feel I'm beginning to really get the best out of it and I've had some very pleasant surprises at just how sharp it can be. I took a photo of my son from about 5ft away and when I zoomed in after on the computer, even every single eyelash was razor sharp. AMAZING! Also the bokeh effect was beautiful! But I have a Canon 550D, which also shoots high quality video and I have to admit, its not the easiest of lenses to manual focus with (and if you want any sort of professional look to your video, you'll need to shoot manual) The extreme shallow DOF means that a close subject only has to move very slightly and you're out of focus again but in saying that, when you get it right... WOW! By Lory London UK | |||||
