2 thoughts on “Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM Standard & Medium Telephoto Lens for Canon SLR Cameras Reviews”

1. 3,655 of 3,688 people found the following review helpful

   
   Why spend more?, March 15, 2005

   By 

   Careful Critic (Lexington) –

   This review is from: Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM Standard & Medium Telephoto Lens for Canon SLR Cameras (Camera)

   With the 50mm f1.8 lens available for less than a hundred dollars, why spend so much more to get the f1.4? The answer is, you may not need to. It all depends on your seriousness, budget, and how long you need your lens to last.

   If you want a “starter lens” for shooting at 50mm (or with prime lenses in general), the f1.8 would be a great buy. 50mm is a very useful and intuitive focal length to spend some time with, because it will portray the world through the viewfinder at about the same distance as your naked eye on all of Canon’s consumer-priced dSLRs with the 1.6x crop factor*. (*Updated after extensive discussion in the comments.) So you could buy the f1.8 cheaply, regard it as a “play with it” lens, and get a nice introduction to “prime lens quality.” The f1.8 will seem like a substantial step up from kit lenses and most consumer-priced zooms, and amazing bang for few bucks.

   So if the f1.8 is such a great bargain, why would the f1.4 be among Canon’s most all-time popular lenses? It’s that the f1.8 can take the great shot within certain conditions, but the f1.4 delivers within a much wider range of conditions. In other words, “You get what you pay for,” and we’ll save the best for last.

   Affordable-but-Solid Contruction: The f1.4 will likely have a much longer life than the cheaper plastic build of the f1.8, and retain more resale value. It’s an investment, rather than a commodity. And it’ll be more certain on your camera and in your hand. (My first one finally needed some calibration, after 80,000 shots and extreme wear-and-tear from frequent swapping with my other primes.) Users sometimes report the front glass falling out of their f1.8s. For the f1.4, the main issues revolve around the Micro USM focus motor, which is not as sturdy as true USM.

   Focus Versatility: The f1.4 lets your camera autofocus, and then lets you tweak further by hand without flipping a switch – that’s called “Full-Time Manual Focus.” The f1.8 requires switching back and forth between auto and manual focus. The f1.8 is famously noisy/buzzy during autofocus, has a bare-minimum focus ring, and no distance scale. The f1.4 will autofocus more reliably, especially in dim light, though it will fail occasionally when starved.

   Resistance to Abberation: Chromatic abberation (fringe colors) and barrel distortion are evident-but-low for both lenses at wide apertures – that’s “prime lens quality.” But in comparison tests, the f1.8 is more susceptible to vignetting (shadows around the corners), halation (glowing around the highlights), and lens flare. For instance, lens flare within the f1.4 tends to be more tightly controlled – “in focus” – whereas a bright light source is more like to blow out the whole shot in the f1.8. All these factors improve when stopped down, but lag about a stop behind the f1.4.

   Color: However, if the f1.8 catches up at f/8 to the f1.4 by many standards, it rarely catches up to the f1.4’s saturation. The f1.4 has “proper-to-strong” color richness at all but the widest apertures, while the f1.8’s shots are much more likely to require postwork. (I do, however, get better saturation from my 24mm f2.8 and 100mm Macro f2.8. The 50 f1.4’s saturation seems good-not-great by comparison.)

   “Headroom”: The engineering of both lenses lets you choose the tradeoff between “most possible light” or “most possible clarity.” It’s by design that you can choose “more light for less crisp,” or stop down for sharpness. *Samples vary*, but the average 50mm f1.4 should consistently “get down to sharp” more quickly, “sharp enough” by f/2.0, “very very sharp” by f/2.8 (often exceeding the professional 24-70mm f2.8 L when wide open), and delivering “unreal sharp” by f/4. (I saw insane “specks of mascara sharpness” at f/3.5 from my first f1.4.) Again, the f1.8 will probably lag about a stop behind that curve.

   My second 50mm f1.4 performed even better than my first, right out of the box, “marginally sharp” at f/1.4 and increasingly beyond reproach by f/1.8-2. (At f/1.4-1.6, it suffers only from halation and some light fall-off in darker areas.) So if extreme sharpness is necessary for you, shop with a strategy that will let you return your lens or get it calibrated if not up to your needs. My guess is that my first one was more typical out of the box, but it approached the performance of the second after calibration.

   (It’s also worth noting that the premium-priced 50mm f1.2L is drastically more sharp (and better performing generally) at wide apertures, but *less* sharp at f/2.8 through f/8. The f1.4 is a better “walkaround” performer than the f1.2L lens that costs four times as much.)

   Regarding light return specifically, my own experience in lens-swapping baffled me, until I read other reports that the f1.4 exposes a third of a stop brighter than most other Canon lenses. It’s brighter in the viewfinder…

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2. 658 of 664 people found the following review helpful

   
   A review for parents, August 23, 2006

   By 

   Matthew Davidson (Cambridge MA) –
   
     

   This review is from: Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM Standard & Medium Telephoto Lens for Canon SLR Cameras (Camera)

   I bought this lens to take indoor portraits of my nine-month-old daughter using available light. I was tired of the harsh photos produced by the built-in flash on the Canon 20D or Digital Rebel. A bounce flash improves matters great deal, but I wanted to see what could be done with a fast lens.

   The Canon 50mm 1.4 gobbles light. It opens up a world of indoor photography that is not possible with a 4.0 lens. The 50mm focal length combined with available light produces natural-looking results. It is exactly what your eye sees. Shadows and highlights are intact. It is a revelation if you’re used to the harsh drop shadows and evenly-lit faces produced by flashes. This is a jarring step up in quality from snapshot to “wow”

   As noted, focus is soft at /1.4 and begins to sharpen at /2.0 to /2.8. Not a bad thing, though. Some of my favorite pictures have been produced with the aperture wide open. The depth of field is so narrow at this point, that the subject’s face is in focus, but the shoulders start to blur.

   I use this lens with a 20D. The balance is perfect, the combination feels very professional and responsive. Operation is very simple. Move the camera into aperture priority mode (Av), look though the view finder and adjust the aperture until you see the shutter speed is faster than 1/30th a second (30).

   I agonized over the 1.4 vs. the 1.8 versions of this lens. The additional stop does provide more shooting options. Often I’m shooting at the edge of acceptable shutter speed, and juggling both aperture and ISO. Many reviews comparing the two talk about build quality, focus motor speed/noise, etc, but the bottom line for me was the extra stop was totally worth it. If you want to shoot indoors without a flash, get the 1.4. If you simply want a nice sharp lens at this focal length, the 1.8 is for you.

   As a father, my only regret is I wish I had this lens earlier. From one parent to another, I’ll tell you the price of the lens is irrelevant, as the pictures it produces are priceless.

   Now, go make a backup of your photo library.

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