Home > Consumer Reviews > Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Lens

I've got a Canon 400D with the standard kit lens. It's OK but I was a little disappointed by the sharpness that it achieved. After quite a bit of reading up I'd heard so much good stuff about this relatively inexpensive lens that I decided to get one.

Most of my pictures are of my kids and many of them are indoors. This lens is great for portraits and because the aperture can be opened to 1.8 it gets enough light that flashless indoor pictures become feasible. The results are great. Nice, natural colours compared to the flash and as others have mentioned, the blurring of the distant background is very pleasing.

Having read that it had an old fashioned and noisy focus motor I was expecting something horrific which would cause people to look around if you were taking a picture in public. In reality it's marginally louder than the USM lenses and a little slower. We're talking 25% in my view. It's perfectly useable. In low light, manual focussing is preferable and is very easy. People also say the plastic housing is fragile. Well, if like me you've got a 400D with kit lens, it's not really any more plastic like than the either of those so don't be put off.

I've only had the lens one day and I've already taken some pictures which I'll treasure. Only downside of the lens is that at 50mm on a 1.6 ratio camera like the 400D it's a telephoto. In other words, you have to step back a bit to get everything in, so not ideal for indoor group shots. A 30mm lens would be better *but* the one I was looking at was three times more expensive and that's what swung it for this one.

I can only echo what other people say about this lens.

It isn't loaded with state of the art gizmos, it isn't built well and it'll probably break into a thousand pieces if you drop it......but who cares? For £70 you can go and buy another!

OK, so the AF micro motor is loud and it will hunt in low light, but this is not an L series lens. This little piece of Japanese plastic will take stunningly sharp pictures with great colour balance at all apertures. It focuses down to about 18 inches and, wide open, this lens will throw everything out of focus into a rich, creamy background blur on a par with lenses costing many times more.

If you've recently bought a DSLR/EF-S kit lens combination you will have seen the limitations of the lens when viewing pictures at 100%. You certainly won't be disappointed with the image quality of this lens. It is superb in all situations from portraiture to landscape and this lens really excels in low light. The lens has an 80mm equivalent on 1.6x crop-factor bodies and, as others have said, you will need to think more about composition - but one thing is for certain....you will never regret buying this lens.

It is a cheap and obvious progression from the low quality kit lenses that many people encounter through their first DSLR camera.

I don't work for Canon either, but if I did, I'd sell thousands of these!!

Having last year bought a DSLR (350D) with a zoom lens and then experienced its limitations with quality (poor sharpness) and inconsistant AF focussing (hit and miss to say the least) I decided to buy this prime lens to see if that helped improve the situation. Wow, what a difference, this is a real corker for the price. The images captured with this lens is in a different league - pin sharp even at high ISO's and fantastic replication of colour and levels. Yes it is plastic and will hunt if the subject is not central but it gets a highly recommended from me.

Most reviewers of this lens will talk about the lack of build quality and plasticky feel overall - and they are to be believed!!

However, don't let this put you off.

Yes this lens has a plastic mount, yes the focus ring is narrow and fiddly and yes, the autofocus motor is an older, noisier, slower type but do I care one bit - NO!!!

This lens an absolute gem. I thoroughly recommend it as a replacement for the 18-55mm kit lens (I bought it for my Canon 400D) and recommend it simply because it's a great lens in it's own right no matter what you already have. It's a nice focal length for portraits.

Where this lens scores highly is its 1.8 f-stop - very fast!!! Images are definitely soft at this setting but acceptable in a pinch. I reckon you'd need to go above A4 prints for it to be noticeable. You always have to remember that you may not have got the shot at all if you didn't have the f1.8 setting so a bit of softness is the trade-off! Noticeable improvement in shrapness is seen at f2.2 and it just gets better from there on in. Stopped down to around f4 - f11 the lens displays stunning levels of clarity and sharpness for the price (by all accounts rivalling L series pro lenses costing much, much more from what others have said- I can't personally verify this but the results I've had are truly excellent.) It also focuses down to 45 cm!

To sum up, this lens punches far above its weight. For £65 you will get a lens that gives you fantastic pictures typical of lenses costing many times the asking price. Go for it!

This lens is fantastic for the price. I have used it on my Canon 20d since Christmas. The lens does not have the best build quality or the best optics available.However the results are pretty good,much better than the efs 18 55 lens supplied with the camera. Also being a prime lens and not a telephoto, the user is forced to consider the composition of the photo much more. I would recommend this lens to anyone who has just bought a canon digital slr with the efs 18 - 55 mm lens. In fact I wish I had bought the camera body only and this lens.