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Canon EF 50/1.8 lens review
and Canon 50mm overview

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Note: This little article will probably help you to decide between different Canon EF 50mm lenses and help you to organize your thoughts about similar lenses of other brands. But it will not give you a scientific comparison and detailed technical test results (the usefulness of them is anyway questionable in many cases).

A 50mm lens was the standard to be sold with every new camera body before the "standard-zoom-revolution" began. Now, every camera comes with a zoom from something like 28mm to 80mm, 105mm or even more. Certainly, they are very useful and also cover 50mm, but this does certainly not mean that there is no reason to have fixed focal length 50mm glass in the camera bag. For technical reasons, fixed focal length lenses and mainly the 50mm type are much faster. What means, that they have a much wider maximal aperture, usually 1.8 or 1.4 for 50mm lenses, and thereby let more light to your film. This allows you to photograph with less light as well as to blur away background (remember a wider aperture means a shallower depth of field) and to get faster shutter speeds. The jellyfish photos on the right were taken in the low-light situation of the the Monterey Bay Aquarium using the EF 50/1.8 II lens combined with a Fuji Sensia ISO 400 film.
In addition, it has to be said, that fixed focal length lenses also deliver a better optical quality than zooms (no debate on that - it's physics).

Canon used to offer 3 different 50mm lenses:

  • The very cheap Canon EF 50/1.8 II (the topic of this article) for around 180 Swiss Francs (sfr) / 120 Euro / 80$.
  • The supposedly excellent EF 50/1.4 USM (around 800 sfr / 500 Euro / 400 $)
  • The super heavy, super fast and super expensive (4500 sfr / 3000 Euro / 2000 $) EF 50/1.0 L USM

Personally, I own the EF 50/1.8 II as a sort of backup for low light situations, or as a second standard lens on the second camera body. Its cheap price makes it affordable for the tight amateurs budget, its size and weight (130g) nearly unrecognisable in the bag. The aperture 1.8 is 2 to 4 stops faster than most consumer grade zooms and 1.5 stops faster than the big and heavy f2.8 professional 28-70mm type zooms.

In addition, on my digital EOS 10D the EF 50/1.8 got another important function: Thanks to the cameras crop-factor of 1.6 compared to 35mm film, the 50mm lens gets turned into a nearly ideal portrait lens.

I don’t photograph newspapers on the wall to test my lenses, but to me this lens seems to be of very good optical quality (Michael Baer made such a test and got very good results for this lens (text in german)). Maybe a little soft wide open, as most fast standard lenses are, but when stopped down one aperture, it gets excellent and superb when considering the price. It will certainly outperform the standard consumer grade zooms and show at least similar optical performance as a pro-zoom, when properly used with a lens hood (a cheap non-Canon rubber hood in my case).

So, what about the negative points? The mechanical quality is quite bad and the lens feels pretty much like plastic. I also discovered some little dust particles between the lenses that were not there when the lens was new – and I did not use it that intensely. But I have to admit that I also got this on my middle range zooms, although to lesser extent after much more intense usage. Also, the AF motor is a non USM micro-motor and therefore a bit slower, noisier and no FTM (full time manual focus) is possible. For me, this is no issue (hey, it's not a super-tele-lens for sports...), but it might be important for others. In addition, the lens does not have a distance scale, which is the main criticism about this lens, that I would make.

Would I buy it again? Probably yes, because I would have a hard time to justify the purchase of the more expensive EF 50/1.4 USM for it’s rare use beside my other lenses. Still, the better built quality of the 1.4 does not make the decision easier (I have the 85/1.8, which is of similar built stile as the later). Best would probably be to find a used EF 50/1.8 MkI, the former version that was much better built and had a distance scale. But they are not easy to find. I actually once stumbled accross one in a well reputated shop in Lausanne, Switzerland, but the lens had a tiny little fungi growing in it. It was the first time that I've seen this myself;-(
The lens was offered for 98 Swiss francs (around 60 to 70 Euros/Dollars), what seems to be a normal used price for the MkI version. Sometimes prices seen on Ebay can be highter, because the lens is quite popular and nomore produced. The used price for the EF 50/1.8 II should certainly be below. For a mint condition EF 50/1.4 USM, the foMag-list (used prices evaluated and published by a german photomagazine) names a price of 360 Euros.

I recommend this lens to everybody who takes pictures with a slow consumer grade standard-zoom (f3.5-f5.6 type of construction), and who wants to have a faster alternative in the bag. It's also going to be the optically much better alternative!
If you buy new equipment on a very low budget, I think you should probably prefer this lens over the very cheap consumer grade zooms (or pay less for the camera body – the film box - and get a middle range zoom like the EF 24-85/3.5-4.5 USM or the EF 28-105/3.5-4.5 USM).
If you use mainly fix-focal lenses and if you use them often, it’s probably worth choosing the EF50/1.4 lens, which is supposed to be an optical champ.

The Canon EF 50/1.8 II lens can be bought via Amazon.de (Shipment to Germany and Austria only).
 

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