Canon EF 50 mm 1.8 STM Lens - Compact and Lightweight Lens for Canon DSLR Cameras, Fast Aperture, Smooth Focusing - Ideal for Portraits and Creative Photography

I've just bought this lens to replace my 50mm f1.8 lens which fell apart after 6 years use. I was attracted by others' reviews and the compact design, fast aperture of 2.8 and the fact it's an EF lens so when I eventually upgrade to a full frame Canon, it will still be useful. I've been using it for best part of a week so far and I'm very pleased with it. It's great in low light, ultra compact and great build quality for the money. I paid £150 with p&p, and it's already come down 20 quid in price, but it's worth the extra 20 quid and more.The lens has more detail throughout the frame than my old 50mm f1.8 II Canon lens and I am now feel i should have gone straight to this lens in the first place. It gives me 64mm focal length on my 1.6 x cropped sensor of the 60D I use, which to be fair is perfect for group shots and portraits. I'm slightly more in the face of portrait subjects than with the 50mm, but the lens has a much smaller profile being a pancake design, so it hasn't yet seemed to intimidate any of my subjects. The focusing is quick and near silent. I've used the manual focus ring on the lens which is oddly, but cleverly electronic, so there is a fraction of a second delay, but it's still quicker than auto focus (depending on you of course and how quickly your eyes focus on the viewfinder). The build quality is excellent and it has a nice weighty feel in the hand, but feels perfectly balanced on the camera. Shots are sharp throughout the frame at all apertures that i have found, whereas the 50mm 1.8 could soften a little round the edges at f1.8 (but was ok from around f3.2 and above).I can see me using this lens for most shots now other than wide angle shots. It's not often i use zoom functions on my longer lenses, so this could be my 'walk around lens'. Each to their own i know, but i love it. The 50mm lens was a great lens, but unfortunately, the ease at which it appears to have broken (haven't a clue how it happened, because I didn't drop it or knock it) has put me off buying another. If I ever do go for another 50mm it will probably be the £1200 L series f1.2 when i eventually upgrade to a 5d III.....one day. Right now, that's far too expensive for me to justify as I'm not a pro (not yet anyway ;-)) Right now, this lens fulfils 90% of shooting requirements from a focal length point of view. Clever Canon.It's made in Malaysia, not Japan, which was my only slight apprehension when buying this lens, but I'm very pleased so far and the build quality is great as i said.If you don't quite want to stretch to £300ish for the f1.4 50mm and are, like me, now non-confident in the 50mm 1.8 II, this 40mm f2.8 EF is a great, economically in between alternative and i highly recommend it. By the way, I ordered it on a week day in the morning and had it by tea time the next day direct from Amazon.

This is a beaut of a lens.It is small. Cheap BUT super low f, so bright, fast and stm in this latest version forfast, quiet autofocus.I also got the 24mm and a 55-250 to have a decent selection of lenses after some youtube time.This is perhaps the worlds best selling lens and came highly recommended. This version iseven better with multiple improvements like more metal for plastic and stm autofocus.Great for localisation/bokeh so I can focus in on what I am interested in with lovely background blur a.k.a.bokeh.Being f1.8, get bright images with colours. I have not tried it out in the dark or with fastshutter speeds to test it out BUT it is the best selling lens and the pics that I saw on youtube withit were amazing.As with most things camera wise, worth checking out if can get 2nd hand since get great pricesand as new in most cases.This is ideal for portrait or product photography. 24mm compliments it nicely, for some wideangle. Also remember with crop cameras 50mm behaves like 80mm in full frame.A lovely lens and so far I would say that I would have been just as happy if I only had thislens since I use it for nearly all my pics. I'll play around with the other ones and there are shotswhich the 24mm let me take. Will not regret getting this and will be hard to remember how yousurvived without it once you have it!

This is a very good lens for the price.It's a 50mm prime lens and you should note that on a crop sensor camera this would be around 80mm which basically means the view will be zoomed in.This isn't perfect for in door shots unless you are in a large room but that's just a note to make.The 1.8 F-stop is great for low light situations when compared to the starter lens kit which goes down to 3.5 (i believe) so this means you can shoot in doors or when it gets darker without resorting to a highier ISO shutter adjustments.I shoot video so I need to stick to some rules for my ideal shot when it comes to motion blur etc.The lens has a great focus ring because it's not right on the front like with the starter kit lens, it's set back a little and is a bit larger making it easier to pull focus.You get a nice circular bokeh effect with this lens when doing a depth of field shot.The downside of using this lens specifically when shooting film is the noise.It's not terribly loud but it is noticeable.If you are shooting outside with a lot of ambient noise from the traffic etc it might not be so bad but in doors it's not great.So imagine you are shooting two characters and you want to rack focus between them and the primary sound is the dialogue, well you can be sure you will have to do some ADR to correct that in post so have your actors on standby.Of course for a shot without changing focus it's really niceFor still photography it's greatI am comparing all these things to the starter lens because I would imagine most people considering to buy this lens would be looking for an upgrade to their starter lens and the variable starter lens can also reach a focal length of 50mm (18-55mm).I guess the noise is the only thing you can complain about and that only really counts if you are filming and you are adjusting the focus through the shot.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Good: F/1.8 - Good bokeh and good amount of light let inBad: Auto focus is loud and crazy and focus in general is a little noisy but manual focus isn't that bad unless you are shooting quiet videoGood: Focus ring is a little thicker and it's not right at the front of the lens making it easier to pull focus-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I always use manual focus but i tried the auto focus to test it out and it's horrible, it didn't work great and it makes a crazy noise when doing it.It's not a smooth transition, imagine starting a car engine but altering the noise frequencies.If you have a solid 'subject' in the scene like a person the sound from the lens is like a laser printer when using the auto focus.With the manual focus it's a nice smooth transition/sound so it doesn't sound like your camera is a bag of crap.I have really pointed out the noise but that's the only real negative and it's not that bad especially for taking stills, i just wanted to give you some idea of what to expect.The final thing that makes this lens awesome is if you fiddle with the focus ring moving it back and fourth really fast you can make it sound like BB-8 from star wars.