Canon EF 50 mm f/1.8 II Lens
Posted by Notcot on May 20, 2012 in Photography |
- Lens structure (elements/groups): 6/5
- Viewing angle: 46 °
- Aperture range (F-F): f/1.8
- Focal length: 50 mm
- Image stabilizer: N
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Beautiful, simple little lens that produces wonderful results,
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I bought this lens to go with my Canon EOS 400D kit, along with an expensive image stabilising lens. Although the image stabilising lens is fantastic, this little one is definitely my favourite. It has no zoom, but is a joy to use. The wide aperture available makes it unbelievably good for low light indoor photography (especially compared the compacts that I was used to) and the low depth of field makes great portraits. It really encourages you to be creative and imaginative with your photos. As other reviewers have said it doesn’t feel extremely solid, the autofocus is a bit noisy and the manual focus ring is too small, but all of these negatives are far outweighed by the brilliant results you get almost every time. You just have to be absolutely sure where you’re focussing!
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|Fantastic for the price!!,
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Most reviewers of this lens will talk about the lack of build quality and plasticky feel overall – and they are to be believed!!
However, don’t let this put you off.
Yes this lens has a plastic mount, yes the focus ring is narrow and fiddly and yes, the autofocus motor is an older, noisier, slower type but do I care one bit – NO!!!
This lens an absolute gem. I thoroughly recommend it as a replacement for the 18-55mm kit lens (I bought it for my Canon 400D) and recommend it simply because it’s a great lens in it’s own right no matter what you already have. It’s a nice focal length for portraits.
Where this lens scores highly is its 1.8 f-stop – very fast!!! Images are definitely soft at this setting but acceptable in a pinch. I reckon you’d need to go above A4 prints for it to be noticeable. You always have to remember that you may not have got the shot at all if you didn’t have the f1.8 setting so a bit of softness is the trade-off! Noticeable improvement in shrapness is seen at f2.2 and it just gets better from there on in. Stopped down to around f4 – f11 the lens displays stunning levels of clarity and sharpness for the price (by all accounts rivalling L series pro lenses costing much, much more from what others have said- I can’t personally verify this but the results I’ve had are truly excellent.) It also focuses down to 45 cm!
To sum up, this lens punches far above its weight. For £65 you will get a lens that gives you fantastic pictures typical of lenses costing many times the asking price. Go for it!
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|Made my new camera sparkle,
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I’ve got a Canon 400D with the standard kit lens. It’s OK but I was a little disappointed by the sharpness that it achieved. After quite a bit of reading up I’d heard so much good stuff about this relatively inexpensive lens that I decided to get one.
Most of my pictures are of my kids and many of them are indoors. This lens is great for portraits and because the aperture can be opened to 1.8 it gets enough light that flashless indoor pictures become feasible. The results are great. Nice, natural colours compared to the flash and as others have mentioned, the blurring of the distant background is very pleasing.
Having read that it had an old fashioned and noisy focus motor I was expecting something horrific which would cause people to look around if you were taking a picture in public. In reality it’s marginally louder than the USM lenses and a little slower. We’re talking 25% in my view. It’s perfectly useable. In low light, manual focussing is preferable and is very easy. People also say the plastic housing is fragile. Well, if like me you’ve got a 400D with kit lens, it’s not really any more plastic like than the either of those so don’t be put off.
I’ve only had the lens one day and I’ve already taken some pictures which I’ll treasure. Only downside of the lens is that at 50mm on a 1.6 ratio camera like the 400D it’s a telephoto. In other words, you have to step back a bit to get everything in, so not ideal for indoor group shots. A 30mm lens would be better *but* the one I was looking at was three times more expensive and that’s what swung it for this one.
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