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Canon EF 50 mm f/1.8 II Lens
 
Manufacturer: Canon
Customer Rating:
 
List Price: £129.99
Sale Price: £76.46
Availibility: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Product Description

Product Details
  • Magnification - Extension Tube EF12 II: 0.56 -
  • Magnification - Extension Tube EF12 II: 0.68 -
  • Minimum Aperture: 22
  • AF Actuator: Micro Motor
  • The lightest EF lens of all at a mere 130g

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Customer Reviews
Fantastic for the price!!
 
Review Date: November 18, 2006
Reviewer: brainleek007, Manchester, UK
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!

Beautiful, simple little lens that produces wonderful results
 
Review Date: January 16, 2007
Reviewer: J. Brown, North Yorkshire, UK
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!
Made my new camera sparkle
 
Review Date: April 14, 2007
Reviewer: R. BALCH, UK
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.



Wow, it's brilliant!
 
Review Date: September 6, 2007
Reviewer: Liamo, Manchester, England, UK
I bought this at the same time as my Canon 350D. The images taken with the supplied kit lens don't even compare to ones taken with this. I've barely used the kit lens since.

I really love this 50 mm. The colours, the brightness, the depth of field, everything. It really shows off the capabilities of a DSLR.

Have taken beautiful portraits and indoor group shots (when have been able to stand far back enough!) and the results are amazing. When the aperture is fully open (1.8) and ISO set high enough, bright, blur-free shots can be obtained in even dimly-lit rooms, eg parties etc.

And the price.. so cheap!

Don't even think about not buying this lens!
The Most Dangerous Game
 
Review Date: February 10, 2008
Reviewer: Mr. A. Pomeroy, Wiltshire, England
I can only concur with the other reviews. The lens is lightweight and feels like a toy. Whenever I take off the lens cap I am worried that I will pull off the manual focus ring too. When the autofocus motor reaches the end of its travel it stops with an undampened thunk, and I am worried that the lens will burst open.

On the other hand, and this is a huge factor that outweighs all the above, the image quality is very good. The lens is useable at f1.8, with a nice tight depth of field, and it gets sharper from there. At f5.6 it is very sharp indeed, and from the test results I have seen on the internet it is probably sharper than most digital camera sensors can resolve. For the price it is very impressive, and based on image quality alone it would be very impressive at any price. There is a big argument on the internet as to whether the 50mm f1.4 is superior when stopped down to f2.8 or thereabouts. My feeling is that most people who care about such things will buy the f1.8 anyway, and use it as a "beater". I wonder how it compares to Nikon's 50mm f1.8, which has a similar reputation and costs much the same?

On a 1.6x camera the focal length is 80mm, which is one of the classic focal lengths for portrait lenses. It's ideal for faces, head-and-shoulders, upper body shots. For anything else it falls between two stools, neither telephoto enough for lions nor wide enough for crowds. Along with the build quality, this is the only real drawback of the lens. It's a shame Canon couldn't combine the low price and image quality with a 28mm focal length, it would be an ideal party lens.

As a lark, I decided to test it against an old Pentacon 50mm f1.8 M42 lens I had lying around, which is solid and made of metal, and sells for about a tenner on eBay. The Canon lens seemed much sharper at f1.8, and slightly better at all apertures, although not noticeably so unless I zoomed right in; but on the other hand the autofocus was more accurate than my manual focus. Against an old 50mm f1.4 Super Takumar the results were less "dreamy" when wide open, but when stopped down I had to strain my eyes to detect any difference in sharpness, and unless you habitually enjoy photographs by looking at them zoomed in at 500% on a giant monitor I doubt you would notice any difference.

As an added bonus, the lens works fine on full-frame cameras. It also has a very mild cult following. And it's slightly melancholic, in the sense that you start to realise that other lenses, which cost ten times as much, are not ten times better. You pay a lot extra for a little extra.