Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM £350/$330

This veteran Canon lens is starting to show its age

Bearing in mind that DSLR designs are often updated every couple of years or so, this lens seems positively geriatric, at 24 years old. Even so, it’s Canon’s top-spec 50mm lens, unless you’re willing to spend silly money on the f/1.2l edition (see Top Guns, p114). It’s nearly twice as heavy as the EF 50mm f/1.8 lens but still reasonably compact at 74x51mm, and very manageable at well under half the weight of the competing Sigma 50mm f/1.4.

The design incorporates an ultrasonic rather than stepping motor autofocus system but it’s a compact type that uses gearwheels and drive shafts. Compared with ring-type ultrasonic systems, it’s relatively slow and noisy although, unusually for this type of system, it does feature full-time manual override in One Shot AF mode.

Again, as an EF rather than EF-S lens, it’s fully compatible with full-frame as well as APS-C format DSLRS. It beats the other Canon lenses on test for aperture rating, being two-thirds of an f/stop faster than the 50mm and 85mm f/1.8 lenses, and a full two stops faster than the 40mm f/2.8 pancake lens.

Performance

The widest f/1.4 aperture enables marginally more blurring of the background, compared with the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens, and a more noticeable improvement than with the 40mm f/2.8 lens. The trade-off is that this lens is comparatively lacking in sharpness, when used at its widest aperture, and still loses out to the cheaper Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens between apertures of f/1.8 and f/2.8. On the plus side, its wrinkleblurring softness can reduce the signs of premature ageing in wide-aperture portraiture.