Canon 50mm F1.8, Brief Review

Canon 50mm F1.8, New York City Street Scene ⇑

The Canon 50mm F1.8 II lens is the cheapest made by Canon, and, one of the sharpest. I will leave it to others to do the technical review of this $89.00 “nifty fifty.” My opinion is based upon using the lens for three weeks on my Canon 10D in New York City. I’ve also used it for some tripod based work in Central Park. First of all, there are some limitations to this lens. It does not have the creamy-smooth out of focus areas (bokeh) that lenses with more aperture blades will produce. This lens has 5 blades, producing a pentagon shape on bright highlights. Also, it tends to focus slowly and looks cheap with its black plastic body. Now for the good stuff. When stopped down to F:8, it is sharp, baby, sharp! The images have good contrast, are distortion free, and usually show no chromatic aberration. It does what a standard lens should do, and quite well, thank you. If you are buying a Canon DSLR and kit lens, this budget wonder should be your next purchase.

Of course on a typical Canon DSLR, this 50mm lens will be equivalent to aprox. 75mm. This makes it a perfect lens for portraits, and groups of people. It has become my favorite lens for street photography.

These New York City street scenes were was shot hand-held using a Canon 50mm F1,8 II lens on a Canon 10D DSLR. It was captured hand-held in raw mode, 1/120 second, F:8. The raw files were converted using Canon Digital Photo Professional.

Canon 50mm F1.8, New York City Street Scene II ⇑