Digital SLR Lens Reviews / Slr camera lens

Every Canon owner should buy the Canon 50mm prime lens. The f/1.8 version can be had for under $80. It is one of the sharpest lenses out there. The f/1.4 is more expensive but also very good. At this price there is no excuse not to have this lens. It is small and light, and the best buy out there. In particular, when you buy it, you will see what a simple prime lens can do. If after you buy it, you don’t see what I’m talking about, then return it and ignore the rest of this page!

This will be your portrait lens on the 40D/Rebel. It’s called a “normal” lens in the 35mm market, which is good because normal lenses are the easiest to make, and that’s why this lens is such a bargain. Try shooting some portraits with it from f/2 to f/3.5. Do some landscapes at f/8. See how much more contrast and detail than any big zoom you get. This will start to convince you why you want to change lenses.

Even if you want only one starter long-range zoom lens, get this one also. Even if your zoom lens has 50mm in its range, still get this lens. You spent a lot on your camera, and it deserves this.

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Two great sites will help you compare your lenses. The first is PhotoZone’s lens performance survey. Large numbers of people have given their opinion on quality of various lenses. Compare your choices with some of the others, then search for prices at B&H photo or on eBay. They also have the Lens Test Guide which is based on external sources. Combining all this info, with what’s below, gives the most complete picture.

The other site is PhotoDo. This site has done actual lab tests on the performance of various lenses. The tests are useful, but be careful, as they measure only one particular factor about a lens, and their weighting may not be what you want to use.

In particular, if you have a camera with a small sensor like the 20D, you might be happy to save money on a lens which is terrible at the corners. Perhaps it gets distorted there, or has bad vignetting. On the 10D and similar cameras, you don’t use that part of the lens, so you might save a lot of money by getting a lens that is only good in the middle. Note that you won’t be able to use that lens later on a film body or a full frame body like the 1Ds. It’s hard to predict — digital SLR lens, some people feel full frame bodies will never be cheap — but if they do become cheap your lens won’t have a long life for you.

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Canon “L” series lenses are generally agreed to be the best out there. They are expensive, however. Some 3rd party lenses are also quite good for half the money. Get the Canon if you have the bucks, but if value is important, look at Sigma and Tokina’s high-end lines (L series lens).

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Fast lenses are lenses of large aperture (width), or low f-stop. (F stop is the ratio between the width of the lens you are using and the focal length.) Fast lenses are big and heavy, but you need them. Fast lenses let you do shallow depth of field. That means you can focus on a person and leave the background, and also foreground, blurry. A large fraction of good photography uses this trick to define the composition of a shot. Small digital P&S can’t do this very well, even though their lenses are sometimes quite fast, because shorter lenses don’t have as narrow a depth of field.

Fast lenses can be stopped down to be like slow lenses, and get more depth of field when you want it. However, usually a stopped down big fast lens is better than a wide-open smaller, slower lens. Most lens problems occur at the edges of a lens, and if you stop down, you cover that up —digital SLR lens

Fast lenses can shoot in less light. They’re great, but they cost money and are big and heavy. But most shooters won’t work with less.

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Lens design is hard. In particular, zoom design is hard. The more range you try to put in a zoom lens, the more compromises you must make. You lose quality in order to get range. Or you spend a lot more money, but even with that, expensive zooms won’t approach the quality of non-zoom (”prime”) lenses costing a fair bit less.

Zooms have lots of lens elements, all of which scatter light internally, reducing the sharpness and contrast of your picture. Zooms tend to be “slower” (ie. need a longer exposure) with all the negative issues that entails. Shorter range zooms have fewer compromises than long-range ones. “Super zooms” (4x range or more) tend to be so compromised that serious photographers don’t buy them, no matter how convenient they are, except when they must travel very light. Trust me, if we could get a decent lens like this we would buy it. Canon’s 28-300, at about $2,200 is the only one people liked.—digital SLR lens

So you want short-range zooms and most of all you want prime lenses. If you can change lenses, you can put the right lens on the camera for the job, with less compromise. (Of course, you are going to pay more money, and carry around a bigger, heavier lens bag. And it will take you time to change lenses, which is also compromise, but I refer here to less compromise on image quality.)

Now people still love zooms. The 70-200mm range zooms costing $700 to $1200 are very well made. And you can’t beat their convenience. And each time you change lenses you risk dust. But to get a good zoom expect to pay for it, and then it will be worth it—digital SLR lens.

If you don’t want to change lenses, P&S cameras have many major advantages. They are much, much smaller and lighter. They use tiny sensors with short lenses designed for them. They never get dust on the sensor because they are sealed. The good ones (Canon G series for example) have very fast lenses. However they don’t do shallow depth of field very well, and their pictures will be noisier. (Grain-like speckles in your photos.)

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Many people eager for a high end digital camera buy a digital SLR body and then ask the question of what lens to put on it. Often they seek a wide-range zoom to duplicate what they could do with a point and shoot digital camera. Some have shot SLRs and film before, some P&S film, most P&S digital. A few are new to photography and wealthy enough to start high end.

(New: Because people have asked for even more advice, I have prepared an article on what digital camera you should buy. If, after reading that, you think a DSLR + lenses is the right choice, you can come back here.)

The typical camera choice in this area is similar to the Canon EOS 20D/30D/40D or the new Digital Rebels or the Nikon D100 and cousins. These cameras use 35mm lenses but have a sensor that is under half the area, about 22mm wide. As such they sometimes say they have a “focal length multiplier” of 1.6 or so, meaning that a 50mm lens has the field of view of an 80mm lens on a full-frame 35mm camera. (There are also full-frame cameras like the 5D, for those, the lens choice question is effectively identical to that for film bodies.)

When you take a picture, the lens does most of the work. In fact, in the days of film, the camera body made almost no difference in the quality of your picture. It didn’t matter if you had a $2000 EOS-1 or a $250 Rebel-G. Both would take the same picture on the same 10 cent piece of film if they had the same lens.

As such, it was typical to spend a fair bit more on your lenses than on your camera body.

The digital body is a bit more important. The quality of the sensor is important. But the lens is still the most important item for a good image. All these cameras, even the full-frame 11 megapixel 1Ds, have sensors that are around 7 to 8 microns in size. That’s small enough to need a good sharp lens to get the full benefit. And they’re getting smaller.

Now don’t get me wrong. These cameras are the finest out there. Their large sensors have lower noise, which is probably the most important thing. They have more useful resolution than the point and shoot cameras. So you could, if you are wealthy and don’t mind a big heavy camera, get an digital SLR with just one lens and get some benefit from it.

But the real biggest boon of these cameras is that you can change lenses, and thus you are really wasting a lot of what the camera can do if you buy only one lens for it, especially a highly compromised wide-range zoom.

So the answer to the question of “What lens should I buy?” is in fact not to buy just one lens. If you want to “start” with one lens, you are ignoring the price rules of consumer electronics: that electronic equipment depreciates very fast. The D30 cost went from $3000 to $1200 in about 18 months. The D60 went from $2200 to $1200 in about a year. If you buy just one lens to “start” you’re wasting a lot of the value of your camera while that value depreciates digital SLR Lens.

You would be better off to buy a high end point-and-shoot digital, in most cases, and then sell it when you are ready to get a digital SLR with more than one lens. It will be smaller and lighter, and might even take better photos most of the time. And while you will lose money on it, it won’t be nearly as much as you lose on your 40D.

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