Review: Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens

At about $70 retail, this is the cheapest lens in Canon’s line-up. That’s so cheap it makes the lens practically disposable by photographic standards. So cheap it’s silly to put a filter on the front. So cheap you never need to worry.

Is that a good enough reason to own one?

I’m torn. Conventional wisdom says “yes,” buy one. It's cheap. Lots of photographers out there remember the days of their youth, when all they could afford was that one camera with a 50mm lens, and by god they could shoot great pictures then and still can now, with just a 50mm lens. And there’s the matter of discipline. If you make yourself take just one camera and one lens – a 50mm lens, at that – and one roll of film, then – well, then what, exactly?

I recently did take just one body, my old A2E, with just the 50mm lens attached, into the Sawtooth mountains in Idaho during one week of an annual backpacking trip. Weight was the main reason; this combination of camera and lens weighs something more like cameras used to weigh before they were designed to do and be everything photographic. I liked not having much extra weight in my pack, it’s true, but I found the limitations of the 50mm lens a slight but constant annoyance. I am much more attuned to 20 to 28mm wide angle photography, and having no recourse but the 50 meant I was constantly feeling stuck with a short telephoto on the camera. I suppose I could have seen it as a challenge, but I could probably look at mosquitoes and rain in the same way.

Meanwhile, what of the lens itself? Like almost all 50s, it’s dead sharp at f/5.6 and above. At 1.8 it’s nothing to write home about. It doesn’t have an ultra-sonic motor, which smeans it makes a little bit of noise and is a touch slower than other high end lenses. The build quality is laughable – there are reports of these lenses spontaneously falling apart. If any of this is a problem, you can get the f/1.4 USM version, which is sharper wide open and better built, for quite a bit more money – or you can try to find the L version f/1.0, for a whole lot more.

Dec. 9, 2004