going to fall off and so it's kind of useful it not quite a macro lens but you can focus very close micro contrast i do want to note is really impressive for lens also at this price point maybe it's not the greatest micro contrast i've seen on any lens but it retains a lot of detail in highlights this image in particular was actually overexposed a little bit and i brought it down almost a full stop and you can see these lighter parts of the wood in here it retains detail pretty well i'm actually very impressed with this lens and it seems kind of like a no-brainer that you would want to have this in your kit if you're a canon shooter to be able to use it's actually very impressive so as impressive as this lens is for still photography i want to talk about its use for video because i just think it's a lot more limited so if you're doing something like a talking head interview or you're filming a youtube video like this and there's not a lot of focus moving going on things like that it'll probably work just fine however i think for a video lens anytime you need autofocus the stepping motor in here is audible it's going to chirp and move around and you're going to hear it in the microphones the second thing is if you move to manual focus it is focused by wire and it just doesn't have the same feeling as just going with an old manual focus lens and i think that's probably a better use for something like that and then lastly i think the final problem is is that there is an enormous amount of focus breathing with this it's a great lens but if you're doing something like a focus pole where you're focusing on something in the foreground of the background you're going to see the actual field of view change it just breathes a lot having said that again look at the price point consider what it's for i just don't think it's the greatest video lens because it's just going to have a very limited use another thing i want to mention is this lens is part of this little niche that canon has carved out in their lens lineup of very affordable entry-level lenses that perform really well what's interesting is the ef version of this i remember lens rentals had a blog post when they were testing that lens for copy variation and that was one of the best lenses in terms of consistency they'd ever seen so in other words if you have two lenses and a company has some problems with copy variation it means that one copy might perform better than another there could be a significant difference in the two and when they tore down the ef 50 millimeter f 1.8 they noticed that there was just an incredible level of consistency across the board i have the feeling that one of the reasons why is i'm pretty sure canon are using plastic elements in these lenses they mentioned that the aspherical element in here is mpo which i can't find what that stands for anywhere on canon's website but i would imagine molded plastic is what we're talking about now the reason people don't like to mention that is when you mention having plastic elements it sounds like well wait a minute it's super cheap like water bottle plastic and it's not it's optical grade plastic but it allows you to make a mold and companies have done this for years and you get a really high level of consistency you also get a lens that's very affordable you also get a lens that's very lightweight but i think that's kind of one of the secrets in there i think it's really smart idea on canon's part because all of a sudden you have a lens that is very affordable that is very consistent and the image quality is pretty good it's not going to go up against a 5000 lens but at the same time what are the expectations canon will sell a ton of these and i think it's a no-brainer i highly recommend these my feeling is is that they're better than a lens cap even so you could just get one to keep on a camera the image quality is really good and you can just grab that and go and go out and shoot and expect great results so i think canon have done an a-plus job on this there's two other lenses in this lineup too one of them is this one which is the 35 millimeter f 1.8 macro lens and there also is a 85 millimeter f2 stm macro lens also so i'm going to be talking about these lenses because i'm kind of fascinated with this you get an enormous amount of bang for your buck so hats off to canon for delivering on that anyway that's all
Canon RF 50mm f_1.8 - Its REALLY good
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back everybody to another edition of lens days this is where we talk about all things lenses we look at all the lenses and today we're looking at this which is the brand new came out about a week ago this is the canon rf mount 50 millimeter f 1.8 stm so it's got a stepping motor this is very similar to an ef version that they had for dslrs which was the ef 50 millimeter f 1.8 stm which was a great lens very economical very cheap easy on the wallet but it was a really good lens and this is kind of the same approach here now do you want to note that these are not the same lens design they have completely different optics and we'll drill into that in a second but i do want to look at this lens because for under 200 us what do you get for this and it's quite a bit first thing that's quite notable about this lens is the size it is extremely small it's extremely lightweight and it's very compact also features a very close minimum focusing distance of just under a foot or about a third of a meter it has six elements in five groups it features one aspheric pmo element which we'll talk about in a second it features seven aperture blades stm focusing or stepping motor it also features canon's super spectra coating so you can expect very decent contrast i love that it's lightweight and with all of the rf lenses we have a control ring that goes around the lens now because this is focused by wire you can set this up one of two ways you can set this up to be your manual focus control or you can flip it over to some kind of custom function control so you can do this to maybe do exposure compensation or whatever you want to set that to in the settings this lens is clearly very affordable it's also very compact it also is an rf mount and when you consider the rf cameras are typically a little bit higher in the megapixel range i want to talk about resolution on this lens also because i think that actually is important because even at an entry level price it's still going to show any flaws in terms of sharpness that you are or not getting when you do blow it up to 30 megapixels and up so if we look at the mtf charts this is what i would expect to see on a lens at this price point so we do have really good sharpness in the center which is this line on the left and as we go towards the corners which we move out to the right you're going to see that resolution does fall off considerably now i want to compare this real quick you can see this side by side with the former lens for ef mount this is the ef version of the same lens and you can see that they're completely different so this has completely different optics things are cleaned up a little bit we do have some crossing of the lines here so you can expect probably a little bit of chromatic aberration but not too much and of course all this performance will indeed go up as you stop down quick side note these are canon mtf charts and it is worth noting that these are theoretical in other words canon doesn't take readings from lenses they are theoretical this is what the lens is designed to do if you go to lens rentals.com or something like that somebody who does testing like roger sakala you're going to see that there is things like copy variations and the mtfs end up looking very different than the theoreticals it's not a bad thing i'm just saying that that's what we're looking at here now a second thing i want to look at which is going to be very telling and i do this in all of my lens reviews but let's look at field curvature so if we take an image of something that has some texture in this case it is the street i'm gonna run this through the find edges filter in photoshop so we can see exactly and only what is sharp and in focus you can see that there's a little bit of mustachy curvature here but it's actually very acceptable this is straight enough and considering it's a 200 lens i think this performs very acceptably i've tested much more expensive lenses that actually didn't test quite this well so that's a good thing you are going to see on the sides though that fall off that we saw in the mtf chart it just you're going to lose resolution on the side so most of it's in the middle and just for a point of reference canon's really expensive rf mount 50 millimeter lens the 50 millimeter f 1.2 i have a chart on that too and that's what you're going to get so you can see there's an enormous performance difference it is an f 1.2 so that line is going to be thinner because we have a shallower depth of field but you're seeing what's in focus wide open and you can see that lens does perform much better towards the corners however we're talking about 2 000 lens to a 200 lens so there is a big difference this lens is actually an excellent performer i've had a lot of fun shooting with it i think when you look at the technical data and even with the disclaimer and price it still performs very well and what this technical data will tell you is what this lens is really good for so something architectural where you need a lot of corner to corner sharpness this might not be your best option but when you're just using it as a carry around lens you're shooting people street photography that kind of thing it's going to perform really well i think the bouquet on this lens is very pleasing it has just kind of a nice soft look to it it's not too nervous not too frantic of course everybody is going to have differing opinions when it comes to bouquet but i'm pretty satisfied with the way this looks so what i want to do is i want to dive into some more sample images and i want to talk about consistency in this lineup and what you can expect to get for your 200 but real quick i want to give a special shout out to our sponsor this week who are the awesome folks over at skillshare.com skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people like you it is a place to explore new skills you can deepen existing passions and basically just get lost in creativity are you hold up at home spontaneous acts of creativity may help break up the routine of a day spent indoors explore some workshops and classes to help you get out of that rut so one class that i've been looking at a lot this week is street photography unlock the secrets of composition color and confidence this one is taught by craig whitehead who you guys might actually know i've featured him on the show a number of times he goes under the moniker 6th street under on various social platforms this class is excellent as i would expect no less from craig he's a fabulous photographer with a really good understanding of the history of what's come before him but he adds his own personal spin on the top he is an excellent photographer his class is going to teach you things like having confidence preparing to shoot being able to pre-visualizing the scene capturing fleeting moments playing with abstraction making selects editing and everything and so i really recommend this craig is an awesome guy you may be able to check out this class absolutely free and here's how so the first 1000 people to use the link below in this video will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership skillshare is curated specifically for learning so this means there's no ads and that they're always launching new premium classes so that you can stay focused and follow wherever creativity takes you so use the link below check them out and learn something new today and i want to give a special shout out and thanks to skillshare for sponsoring this episode of the art of photography okay so enough charts and graphs let's look at some images that were made with this lens i think you're going to be pretty impressed so in terms of image quality i'm actually very impressed with this lens and i've only been shooting on it for about a week but i feel confident in the shots that i've got that i'm really excited about using this for a little more serious work because i really do think i can get some good images out of it so one thing you're going to notice there is a slight vignetting and a little bit of distortion but i'm going to be honest i'm not really into doing brick wall shots and a bunch of white walls to test all this because i don't think it really is going to help what i want to show you are shots that are more practical in usage so one thing i've noticed is this lens supports a really nice depth of field transition in the way that it falls off so like for this image this is at f 5.6 it's not even wide open and it just looks really beautiful i love the way it transitions from the focused areas to the out of focus areas in fact it's impressive actually to the point where i really want to see what canon does with an f 1.4 in the rf mount system we don't have one yet but i think that could be really interesting the bokeh is beautiful i don't think it's distracting i don't think it's super nervous or frantic or anything it's just very pleasing and i think all around it's really well done on a lens this small that i suspect probably is using plastic elements which we'll talk about in a second but it's actually really nice honestly i thought that fringing and chromatic aberration are going to be a problem on a lens at this price point they're actually really well controlled now you can push it and start to get a little bit to show up but i think you can do that with just about any lens in a really high contrast situation it also handles flare really nicely you do get some flare and the reason i mentioned this is there's no dedicated lens hood that comes with this lens so i was kind of worried that that would be a problem it handles quite nicely and also you have seven aperture blades you can get sun stars this one was at f16 now another thing i want to mention is this lens does support very close focusing and this is actually going to give you the illusion that you've got maybe a smaller aperture than f 1.8 because you can get so close it's just going to fall off and so it's kind of useful it not quite a macro lens but you can focus very close micro contrast i do want to note is really impressive for lens also at this price point maybe it's not the greatest micro contrast i've seen on any lens but it retains a lot of detail in highlights this image in particular was actually overexposed a little bit and i brought it down almost a full stop and you can see these lighter parts of the wood in here it retains detail pretty well i'm actually very impressed with this lens and it seems kind of like a no-brainer that you would want to have this in your kit if you're a canon shooter to be able to use it's actually very impressive so as impressive as this lens is for still photography i want to talk about its use for video because i just think it's a lot more limited so if you're doing something like a talking head interview or you're filming a youtube video like this and there's not a lot of focus moving going on things like that it'll probably work just fine however i think for a video lens anytime you need autofocus the stepping motor in here is audible it's going to chirp and move around and you're going to hear it in the microphones the second thing is if you move to manual focus it is focused by wire and it just doesn't have the same feeling as just going with an old manual focus lens and i think that's probably a better use for something like that and then lastly i think the final problem is is that there is an enormous amount of focus breathing with this it's a great lens but if you're doing something like a focus pole where you're focusing on something in the foreground of the background you're going to see the actual field of view change it just breathes a lot having said that again look at the price point consider what it's for i just don't think it's the greatest video lens because it's just going to have a very limited use another thing i want to mention is this lens is part of this little niche that canon has carved out in their lens lineup of very affordable entry-level lenses that perform really well what's interesting is the ef version of this i remember lens rentals had a blog post when they were testing that lens for copy variation and that was one of the best lenses in terms of consistency they'd ever seen so in other words if you have two lenses and a company has some problems with copy variation it means that one copy might perform better than another there could be a significant difference in the two and when they tore down the ef 50 millimeter f 1.8 they noticed that there was just an incredible level of consistency across the board i have the feeling that one of the reasons why is i'm pretty sure canon are using plastic elements in these lenses they mentioned that the aspherical element in here is an mpo which i can't find what that stands for anywhere on canon's website but i would imagine molded plastic is what we're talking about now the reason people don't like to mention that is when you mention having plastic elements it sounds like well wait a minute it's super cheap like water bottle plastic and it's not it's optical grade plastic but it allows you to make a mold and companies have done this for years and you get a really high level of consistency you also get a lens that's very affordable you also get a lens that's very lightweight but i think that's kind of one of the secrets in there i think it's really smart idea on canon's part because all of a sudden you have a lens that is very affordable that is very consistent and the image quality is pretty good it's not going to go up against a 5 000 lens but at the same time what are the expectations canon will sell a ton of these and i think it's a no-brainer i highly recommend these my feeling is is that they're better than a lens cap even so you could just get one to keep on a camera the image quality is really good and you can just grab that and go and go out and shoot and expect great results so i think canon have done an a-plus job on this there's two other lenses in this lineup too one of them is this one which is the 35 millimeter f 1.8 macro lens and there also is a 85 millimeter f2 stm macro lens also so i'm going to be talking about these lenses because i'm kind of fascinated with this you get an enormous amount of bang for your buck so hats off to canon for delivering on that anyway that's all for today i'll see you guys in the next video until then laterwelcome back everybody to another edition of lens days this is where we talk about all things lenses we look at all the lenses and today we're looking at this which is the brand new came out about a week ago this is the canon rf mount 50 millimeter f 1.8 stm so it's got a stepping motor this is very similar to an ef version that they had for dslrs which was the ef 50 millimeter f 1.8 stm which was a great lens very economical very cheap easy on the wallet but it was a really good lens and this is kind of the same approach here now do you want to note that these are not the same lens design they have completely different optics and we'll drill into that in a second but i do want to look at this lens because for under 200 us what do you get for this and it's quite a bit first thing that's quite notable about this lens is the size it is extremely small it's extremely lightweight and it's very compact also features a very close minimum focusing distance of just under a foot or about a third of a meter it has six elements in five groups it features one aspheric pmo element which we'll talk about in a second it features seven aperture blades stm focusing or stepping motor it also features canon's super spectra coating so you can expect very decent contrast i love that it's lightweight and with all of the rf lenses we have a control ring that goes around the lens now because this is focused by wire you can set this up one of two ways you can set this up to be your manual focus control or you can flip it over to some kind of custom function control so you can do this to maybe do exposure compensation or whatever you want to set that to in the settings this lens is clearly very affordable it's also very compact it also is an rf mount and when you consider the rf cameras are typically a little bit higher in the megapixel range i want to talk about resolution on this lens also because i think that actually is important because even at an entry level price it's still going to show any flaws in terms of sharpness that you are or not getting when you do blow it up to 30 megapixels and up so if we look at the mtf charts this is what i would expect to see on a lens at this price point so we do have really good sharpness in the center which is this line on the left and as we go towards the corners which we move out to the right you're going to see that resolution does fall off considerably now i want to compare this real quick you can see this side by side with the former lens for ef mount this is the ef version of the same lens and you can see that they're completely different so this has completely different optics things are cleaned up a little bit we do have some crossing of the lines here so you can expect probably a little bit of chromatic aberration but not too much and of course all this performance will indeed go up as you stop down quick side note these are canon mtf charts and it is worth noting that these are theoretical in other words canon doesn't take readings from lenses they are theoretical this is what the lens is designed to do if you go to lens rentals.com or something like that somebody who does testing like roger sakala you're going to see that there is things like copy variations and the mtfs end up looking very different than the theoreticals it's not a bad thing i'm just saying that that's what we're looking at here now a second thing i want to look at which is going to be very telling and i do this in all of my lens reviews but let's look at field curvature so if we take an image of something that has some texture in this case it is the street i'm gonna run this through the find edges filter in photoshop so we can see exactly and only what is sharp and in focus you can see that there's a little bit of mustachy curvature here but it's actually very acceptable this is straight enough and considering it's a 200 lens i think this performs very acceptably i've tested much more expensive lenses that actually didn't test quite this well so that's a good thing you are going to see on the sides though that fall off that we saw in the mtf chart it just you're going to lose resolution on the side so most of it's in the middle and just for a point of reference canon's really expensive rf mount 50 millimeter lens the 50 millimeter f 1.2 i have a chart on that too and that's what you're going to get so you can see there's an enormous performance difference it is an f 1.2 so that line is going to be thinner because we have a shallower depth of field but you're seeing what's in focus wide open and you can see that lens does perform much better towards the corners however we're talking about 2 000 lens to a 200 lens so there is a big difference this lens is actually an excellent performer i've had a lot of fun shooting with it i think when you look at the technical data and even with the disclaimer and price it still performs very well and what this technical data will tell you is what this lens is really good for so something architectural where you need a lot of corner to corner sharpness this might not be your best option but when you're just using it as a carry around lens you're shooting people street photography that kind of thing it's going to perform really well i think the bouquet on this lens is very pleasing it has just kind of a nice soft look to it it's not too nervous not too frantic of course everybody is going to have differing opinions when it comes to bouquet but i'm pretty satisfied with the way this looks so what i want to do is i want to dive into some more sample images and i want to talk about consistency in this lineup and what you can expect to get for your 200 but real quick i want to give a special shout out to our sponsor this week who are the awesome folks over at skillshare.com skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people like you it is a place to explore new skills you can deepen existing passions and basically just get lost in creativity are you hold up at home spontaneous acts of creativity may help break up the routine of a day spent indoors explore some workshops and classes to help you get out of that rut so one class that i've been looking at a lot this week is street photography unlock the secrets of composition color and confidence this one is taught by craig whitehead who you guys might actually know i've featured him on the show a number of times he goes under the moniker 6th street under on various social platforms this class is excellent as i would expect no less from craig he's a fabulous photographer with a really good understanding of the history of what's come before him but he adds his own personal spin on the top he is an excellent photographer his class is going to teach you things like having confidence preparing to shoot being able to pre-visualizing the scene capturing fleeting moments playing with abstraction making selects editing and everything and so i really recommend this craig is an awesome guy you may be able to check out this class absolutely free and here's how so the first 1000 people to use the link below in this video will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership skillshare is curated specifically for learning so this means there's no ads and that they're always launching new premium classes so that you can stay focused and follow wherever creativity takes you so use the link below check them out and learn something new today and i want to give a special shout out and thanks to skillshare for sponsoring this episode of the art of photography okay so enough charts and graphs let's look at some images that were made with this lens i think you're going to be pretty impressed so in terms of image quality i'm actually very impressed with this lens and i've only been shooting on it for about a week but i feel confident in the shots that i've got that i'm really excited about using this for a little more serious work because i really do think i can get some good images out of it so one thing you're going to notice there is a slight vignetting and a little bit of distortion but i'm going to be honest i'm not really into doing brick wall shots and a bunch of white walls to test all this because i don't think it really is going to help what i want to show you are shots that are more practical in usage so one thing i've noticed is this lens supports a really nice depth of field transition in the way that it falls off so like for this image this is at f 5.6 it's not even wide open and it just looks really beautiful i love the way it transitions from the focused areas to the out of focus areas in fact it's impressive actually to the point where i really want to see what canon does with an f 1.4 in the rf mount system we don't have one yet but i think that could be really interesting the bokeh is beautiful i don't think it's distracting i don't think it's super nervous or frantic or anything it's just very pleasing and i think all around it's really well done on a lens this small that i suspect probably is using plastic elements which we'll talk about in a second but it's actually really nice honestly i thought that fringing and chromatic aberration are going to be a problem on a lens at this price point they're actually really well controlled now you can push it and start to get a little bit to show up but i think you can do that with just about any lens in a really high contrast situation it also handles flare really nicely you do get some flare and the reason i mentioned this is there's no dedicated lens hood that comes with this lens so i was kind of worried that that would be a problem it handles quite nicely and also you have seven aperture blades you can get sun stars this one was at f16 now another thing i want to mention is this lens does support very close focusing and this is actually going to give you the illusion that you've got maybe a smaller aperture than f 1.8 because you can get so close it's just going to fall off and so it's kind of useful it not quite a macro lens but you can focus very close micro contrast i do want to note is really impressive for lens also at this price point maybe it's not the greatest micro contrast i've seen on any lens but it retains a lot of detail in highlights this image in particular was actually overexposed a little bit and i brought it down almost a full stop and you can see these lighter parts of the wood in here it retains detail pretty well i'm actually very impressed with this lens and it seems kind of like a no-brainer that you would want to have this in your kit if you're a canon shooter to be able to use it's actually very impressive so as impressive as this lens is for still photography i want to talk about its use for video because i just think it's a lot more limited so if you're doing something like a talking head interview or you're filming a youtube video like this and there's not a lot of focus moving going on things like that it'll probably work just fine however i think for a video lens anytime you need autofocus the stepping motor in here is audible it's going to chirp and move around and you're going to hear it in the microphones the second thing is if you move to manual focus it is focused by wire and it just doesn't have the same feeling as just going with an old manual focus lens and i think that's probably a better use for something like that and then lastly i think the final problem is is that there is an enormous amount of focus breathing with this it's a great lens but if you're doing something like a focus pole where you're focusing on something in the foreground of the background you're going to see the actual field of view change it just breathes a lot having said that again look at the price point consider what it's for i just don't think it's the greatest video lens because it's just going to have a very limited use another thing i want to mention is this lens is part of this little niche that canon has carved out in their lens lineup of very affordable entry-level lenses that perform really well what's interesting is the ef version of this i remember lens rentals had a blog post when they were testing that lens for copy variation and that was one of the best lenses in terms of consistency they'd ever seen so in other words if you have two lenses and a company has some problems with copy variation it means that one copy might perform better than another there could be a significant difference in the two and when they tore down the ef 50 millimeter f 1.8 they noticed that there was just an incredible level of consistency across the board i have the feeling that one of the reasons why is i'm pretty sure canon are using plastic elements in these lenses they mentioned that the aspherical element in here is an mpo which i can't find what that stands for anywhere on canon's website but i would imagine molded plastic is what we're talking about now the reason people don't like to mention that is when you mention having plastic elements it sounds like well wait a minute it's super cheap like water bottle plastic and it's not it's optical grade plastic but it allows you to make a mold and companies have done this for years and you get a really high level of consistency you also get a lens that's very affordable you also get a lens that's very lightweight but i think that's kind of one of the secrets in there i think it's really smart idea on canon's part because all of a sudden you have a lens that is very affordable that is very consistent and the image quality is pretty good it's not going to go up against a 5 000 lens but at the same time what are the expectations canon will sell a ton of these and i think it's a no-brainer i highly recommend these my feeling is is that they're better than a lens cap even so you could just get one to keep on a camera the image quality is really good and you can just grab that and go and go out and shoot and expect great results so i think canon have done an a-plus job on this there's two other lenses in this lineup too one of them is this one which is the 35 millimeter f 1.8 macro lens and there also is a 85 millimeter f2 stm macro lens also so i'm going to be talking about these lenses because i'm kind of fascinated with this you get an enormous amount of bang for your buck so hats off to canon for delivering on that anyway that's all for today i'll see you guys in the next video until then later\n"