Review: Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 - Masnun

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM aka the nifty fifty is one of Canon’s best selling lenses. There are several reasons for this. The 50mm focal length is close to the focal length of our eyes. Photos taken in 50mm feels “natural” to us. And this lens is a very good quality prime lens at 50mm with a wide aperture. Lots of light, nice bokeh, not too wide, not too tight – this lens often feel perfect in many occasions. Less glass elements make the lens very compact and light weight. And the reasonable pricing on top of these just seals the deal.

It’s the first lens I bought outside the kit lens. I initially bought it with a Viltrox Speedbooster. The speedbooster let me get close to full frame field of view at 56.8mm and get in more light. Afterwards, I have also used this lens through an adapter. The Crop Factor made it a 80mm full frame equivalent when put on an adapter. If you’re new and do not understand what I just said, please read this post – Adapters vs Speedboosters.

The Nifty Fifty

This lens has been very successful from it’s early days. People loved it, it sold many copies. There have been a few revisions / improvements of this lens. The one I have is the latest one right now. It’s the STM version.

It’s adorably called nifty fifty for it’s wide aperture and the fifty mm focal length. f/1.8 is pretty nifty for many different shooting conditions. And the fifty comes from it’s 50mm focal length which is also quite useful in a number of photography styles.

It’s a prime lens. Prime lenses have fixed focal length, it can’t change focal length like zoom lenses. On this lens we get 50mm if we’re using a full frame camera. But on our Canon M50, depending on how we “adapt” this lens, the focal length can be 56.8mm or 80mm of full frame equivalent.

The aperture is f/1.8. But on the Canon M50, speed boosting is an option. Speed boosters can get some extra light which would other wise be wasted on a crop sensor. This extra light can get us down to f/1.2. We can use faster shutter speeds. But on an adapter, we don’t get this extra light, so we can go down to f/1.8 only. In my opinion that’s good enough for many cases.

The lens quality is good. I really like the images. Prime lenses need less glass elements so the photos are usually very sharp. Speed boosting can affect the image quality slightly but not by a great deal. Considering the price, it’s a no brainer for anyone looking for a 50mm prime lens.

Niftier Fifty Seven (Speed Boosted)

When this lens is speed boosted, I could get a 56.8mm full frame equivalent field of view. There were plenty of light too. I often switched to f/1.2 to take some portraits with amazing background blur.

If you take a look at this album, you can see the how I have used this lens for different kind of subjects. I have taken portraits, I have taken close up photos and I have taken some landscape shots too. In my opinion, this lens is best used as it was intended – a 50mm lens. Although I get 56.8mm on a speed booster, it’s still in the fifties. I like it at this focal length more.

At 56.8mm f/1.2 – portraits have a very nice, distinguished background blur and a decent bokeh effect to the photos. I can have so much of the background in the photos while putting enough emphasis on my subject.

Nifty Eighty?

If you understand Crop Factor, you probably know Canon EOS M50 has a crop factor of 1.6. If we’re not speed boosting it, the lens would give us a 50 x 1.6 = 80mm full frame equivalent field of view. The view gets quite a bit cropped and we can no longer squeeze in a lot of background.

I have two normal adapters – Viltrox and Andoer. I put the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM lens on an adapter and went to see how things looked. At 80mm, portraits should look better. But I tried some street photography with it. I agree it’s not really the most ideal focal length for street photography.

The car photo turned out to be nice. But because of the cropped view, photos didn’t look very good when I shot in landscape orientation. Portraits were of course great, I could get very close to my subject and the background compression looked really nice. I would probably use 80mm more often for portrait shots.

My Opinion

This lens can behave like a 56.8mm prime and a 80mm prime depending on how I am using it. This is one of the interesting things I like about Canon EOS M50. Thanks to it’s crop sensor nature, speed boosting is an option. Instead of buying another 80mm prime lens, I can just use this same lens for both.

However, I am more of a fan of the 50mm range. This is why I also love the 7artisans 35mm f/0.95 which gets to 56mm as well because of the crop factor. I can take portraits and general day to day photos at this focal length. The 80mm is quite good for portraits but I wouldn’t want to use it for anything else.

This lens is really excellent for it’s price. I would put it on a speed booster for most of my needs. And may be, sometimes, I would take some really nice portraits using it on an adapter. But either way, this is a lens I am going to use a lot in the coming days.