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Canon - Lens - 50 mm - f/1.4 USM - Canon EF

Publisher: Canon
Media: Electronics

Features

• Objektiv 50mm 1
• 4

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Editorial Review

This standard lens features superb quality and portability. Twohigh-refraction lens elements and new Gaussian optics eliminateastigmatism and suppress astigmatic difference. If crisp imageswith little flare are important to you they can be obtained

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Average rating - (more reviews)

Rating: - Beginner or pro, your gonna love this lens. Only not that great for travelling.

I think the most people who are reading this review are thinking of purchasing it. So I won't go in to too much detail.

Just like every single person who owns this lens and wrote a review about it... It's and amazing lens. The first few pics will be so breathtaking you just can't believe it. The quality is so awful great! I don't get it why its not an L lens. Sure the 'L' in the title would make the price twice as much but I don't think its any less better than the L series lenses. (have never owned an L lens).

If your a beginning photographer and just fell in love with photography (what one of the best thing must be in your whole life, ghehe) this is def. a good lens for you. But I think you won't be very suprised because you have never used a bad lens or a simple kitlens. It's so much more fun if you have used lenses with low/normal quality. But thats something rather personal, and it doesn't make the lens different ofcourse.

I have bought a lens hood with it (too bad it doesn't come with the lens so I had to spend 25 euro extra, very clever Canon) and its an accessory I highly suggest to buy (aside filters).
I have been using this lens for 2 weeks. I have just returned from my trip to Dubai (another wow I can say). It kinda changed my mind about the lens.
Sure the portrait photo's where great, but the lens wasn't very useful. I wished I had bought a 10mm lens too, just because I couldn't get the burj Khalifa (largest building in the world) in one photo. :P For a travel lens I cannot suggest it. Get a landscape lens. I think its the one and only 'useful' lens on a trip (an allround lens could be an option, but I has far less image quality).
I still made very very VERY good shots with it. And if you won't use it that much for traveling you will be using it for any other type of photography (wildlife could be possible but it won't be easy).

If there was one lens I could use, if there was only 1 lens I could suggest someone else to buy, if theres one lens out of a milion, it has to be this one.

Rating: - Upgrade from my 50mm 1.8 lens

I was looking for an upgrade to my 1.8 lens. Something that was as light and small as it was, but with better build quality and resolution. The 1.4 has really delivered for me. The extra bokeh at 1.4 is great and at f4 and beyond the sharpness is as good as anything I've seen. I like the physical size of the lens as it's light and neat on my 5dmk II. The build quality is far superior to the 1.8. The only downside to the lens is when using it in manual focus. The focussing ring seems to take 1.5 full turns to focus from near to far. What would be way more convenient would be maybe a quarter turn, like with my 16-35L lens. Besides that though, I would give this a 5 out of 5. Wish I had bought it earlier.

Rating: - So very good

Having borrowed the cheaper version of this lens from a friend (55mm f/1.8)and having been so pleased with the results I decided to splash out and buy the more expensive version. Since it arrived some of the results have been truly fantastic and even though I am little more than a keen amateur I have noticed how much better this lens is. Shots of my 14 week old son smiling, still life subjects such as Christmas lights and Wildlife shots of various birds are so crisp and clear.
I would highly recommend this, I love using it and since purchasing it have not used any other lens.

Rating: - Great prime lens

This is a terrific lens. I started off with a Canon f/1.8 lens about eighteen months ago, and I loved that, despite its one flaw - it was a very plasticky piece of equipment. Alongside the kit lens from my EOS 450D, that really didn't make much odds, and talk of heavier lenses struck me as some sort of fetishism of expensive items.
However, I came home drunk one night and knocked my camera off a table onto the floor - the brave little 50mm lens took the brunt of the blow, and sacrificed itself for the greater good of the body. I grumbled, took the broken 50mm lens off and stuffed it in the back of a cupboard, thinking I'd flog it to some sucker on ebay in a few weeks.
And then I forgot. And six months later I pulled it back out, and demonstrating that if you ignore a problem, it usually goes away, I realised that a few turns of the lens would render it workable again. So the 50mm went back on the camera, and off I went again. Only to find that the front element of the lens was loose, and would fall halfway out of the lens whenever I had a good shot lined up. This wasn't so good.
So, with Christmas approaching I felt it was time for a treat, so I bought myself the 1.4, rather than just replacing the 1.8 with its identical twin. And all of a sudden I noticed all the things that people said were superior about the 1.4:

It feels nicer. It does, it really does, tangibly more solid than the 1.8. But it doesn't weigh a ton, so you don't appear to be paying for the extra weight with your back.

The auto-focus is silent. I didn't even really see this as a feature missing from the 1.8, until I didn't have it whining at me as it focussed.

The auto-focus is better in low-light. The 1.8 isn't bad at all, but it would end up hunting for focus in dark environments - the 1.4 is much, much better at this. Plus, it's got a full-time focussing ring, so instead of having to flip the lens off auto-focus and manually focus on your subject (and then forget to put it back to auto-focus again for later) you can just handle those focussing decisions yourself, as you like.

It's got nicer bokeh. And it's better at taking pictures of fish. Which is a rather arbitrary thing to say, but I spent a lot of time in darkened aquariums recently, and it was great - put the speed to 1/50, leave it on ISO 100 and let it fire away at a lovely low aperture.

On the downside:

It costs about four to five times as much. (Less of a price differential if you're in a camera shop in Taiwan that takes cash, but that's not helpful to the casual Amazon customer).
You could learn to focus things manually.
If you come home drunk and knock it off the table, it will probably break just like the 1.8 does. Not that I've tried yet.
Shooting everything at 1.4 is probably a bit silly. But you can, and you'll get away with it if you're not going for absolute top-notch image quality. Not that any of the fish that I caught looked very blurry.

So, in conclusion, I was perfectly happy with my 1.8. And now I'm perfectly happy with my 1.4. So if you can try both of them, I'd advise you not to: stick with the 1.8 until you've had it for a year, and then take the 1.4. You'll appreciate it more. I guess...

Rating: - No-flash shooting enabler

I bought this lens primarily to be able to shoot inside without a flash and it delivers well in this category. It's background blurr effect is rather strong wide open (@f/1.4) and lets you highlight foreground subjects well. I have some problems in sussing out what aperture to use to get the best depth-of-field for all sharp pictures, but this lens beats my Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L lens hands down in raw sharpness. Only gripe I have and it's not the lenses fault is that at 50mm on a 1.6x crop factor body it is really reduced to upper torso portraits inside as it's 80mm full-frame equivalent. In retrospect if you want to take wide angle room pictures without a flash on your 500D to 7D camera body look elsewhere for a fast lens in the 10-12mm category. Realistically you can take shots without a flash to about f/2 under normal halogen spotlights and about f/2.8 with office type flourescent lights i.e. don't expect a full clarity DOF without a flash and tripod inside with this lens either.

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