The Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II – a truly classic lens. Cheap, plasticy, but excellent image quality. It’s just about as good as my 24-105 L series lens which is many times more expensive. I regularly use my 50mm 1.8 as a lightweight alternative on my Canon 5D2.

Here’s a shot I just took on my 5D2 at f/3.5 which gives pretty crisp results.

 

daffodils

daffodils

 

Another shot, this time at f/1.8

 

gherkin

gherkin

 

 

OK, these images are relatively lightweight ones on a webpage. And ok I’m not a lens nerd, so I can’t go into the various optical nuances of this lens versus a more expensive one. But to me the above images don’t seem too bad for a lens which costs somewhere around the £80 mark from Amazon. Even blown up to full 20 megapixel glory I find it hard to tell the difference between this lens and my rather more expensive 24-105mm L-series. It still seems amazing to me that it’s possible to get such great image quality from a little lens that’s a tenth the price of its L-series cousins.

By the way, on a lower-end APS-C DLSR the lens works really well as an 85mm portrait lens equivalent.

Pros:

  • good image quality
  • very cheap
  • lightweight. With a heavy camera body like the 5D2 this is sometimes actually more important than you might at first think.

Cons:

  • Hopelessly noisy and slow autofocus. But how often is fast autofocus crucial when you’re using f/1.8 anyway?
  • No image stabilization. Hmmm… not a deal-breaker really.
  • Plasticy body which doesn’t feel like it would stand up to much. In fact, mine ‘fell apart’ once when I dropped it. However it snapped back together easily enough! Works fine still, as the above images testify.