Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM

£385/$330 A real veteran in Canon’s lens line-up, can it hold its own against newer designs?

Launched way back in 1993, this lens has a relatively simple optical path, based on just seven elements, whereas Sigma’s 50mm f/1.4 Art lens has 13. An upside is the Canon lens is smaller and more lightweight, at half the length and a third of the weight of the Sigma. Even so, it’s still larger and nearly twice as heavy as Canon’s 50mm f/1.8 lens. With its faster aperture rating, the front element needs to have a greater diameter to let in more light, and the filter thread is upsized from 49mm to a modest 58mm.

Although it’s a ‘USM’ lens, autofocus is based on an ultrasonic micro-motor rather than a ring-type system. Autofocus speed is quicker than the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens’s gear-type STM system, but it’s not fast and is similarly audible. Unusually for a Micro USM arrangement, manual overdrive of autofocus is available.

The main plus point over the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens is that the aperture rating is two-thirds of an f/stop faster, enabling a slightly reduced depth of field and quicker shutter speeds. The design also adds a focus distance scale, absent on the f/1.8 lens.

Performance

Sharpness in the f/1.4 to f/2.8 range is disappointing. Some portrait photographers say that this can give a pleasant softness to image quality but others argue that it’s easier to soften rather than sharpen images during editing. Vignetting is also rather severe at f/1.4 but, again, this can be an attractive facet for portraiture, and all current Canon cameras feature auto-correction for ‘peripheral illumination’.