I t’s fair to say there are more successful photos and films shot on 50mmprime lenses than any other focal length. With its ‘standard’ field-of-view approximating what the human eye sees, and the fact that many cameras were supplied with a 50mm lens over the past 100 years of image-making, the nifty fifty is plentiful, affordable, fast and useful. Lots of the greats, from the reportage stills of Henri Cartier- Bresson to the masterpiece movies of Alfred Hitchcock and even Quentin Tarantino, have been shot with a 50mmprime. So if you can’t get good results with one then it’s not the lens that’s at fault. While the 50mmgives the ‘standard’ look on a full-frame 35mm sensor, a Super35 sensor crops the centre of the image, so the angle of view is less wide and becomes the equivalent of a short telephoto. A 35mm focal length, used on a Super35 or crop-sensor camera, gives roughly the same angle of view as a 50mmon a full- frame camera. But the depth-of- field will be different, as a 35mm lens always acts like a 35mm lens in terms of depth-of-field and bokeh, whatever camera it is fixed to. But not all 50mm lenses are created equal, and there is a big difference in what you get if you spend around £100/ $100 on the original ‘nifty 50’ Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens or 200 times that on a master prime from a high-endmaster lens maker like Cooke or ARRI . There’s not only a difference inmaterials and ultimate build quality, but handling, optical design, how the glass is sourced and polished, number and shape of aperture blades and lots more. For use on a typically-sized cinema camera, for example, a fully manual cine lens offers superior handling and ease of use; it just can’t be matched by small, DSLR- type glass. But on a mirrorless camera designed to work with small autofocus lenses, a large cine lens can dwarf the tiny body andmake it hard to handle.
With the slowest of the lenses we tried having an f/2.0 aperture and the fastest a full stop faster at f/1.4, letting in twice the amount of light, the screen is bright and a lot of light is gathered in. So you can keep your ISO lower for better quality. And of course there is optical quality. A typical zoom lens is a compromise as it has to work at a whole variety of focal lengths while a prime is optimised to work at just one. And while youmay not be using a prime wide open all the time, by the time it has been closed down a couple of stops to f/4 you are getting the best in optical quality. By comparison at that same aperture, most zooms will still be wide open, with all the image mushiness that may come with that. Compared to similar-quality zooms, primes are cheaper, smaller and lighter too. As a further bonus, all the 50mm primes we tested focused as close as 45cm/17.7in. It’s not quite a macro lens, but is significantly closer than a mid-range zoom. So to investigate what really works on today’s crop of digital video cameras, we took four different styles of full-frame 50mm primes at very different price points and with very different spec. We tried themon a variety of mirrorless full-frame and crop-sensor cameras. We not only tested optical quality but things like flare and contrast, as well as handling and ease of use in real-world shooting situations. All the lenses are current and available brand new, although the Nikon AF-D is an old design that’s been around and unchanged for more than two decades. To get it to fit our Sony cameras, we also used one of the popular Metabones adapters which cost an additional £139/$99. As it’s not a speed boosting-type adapter, there is no glass inside. And for a total wild card and for a bit of fun, we also threw into the mix a 51-year-old Nikon 50mm all- manual lens that had been sitting unused and unloved for around 30 years. We just dusted it off and gave it a go, to see what a real old-school manual lens could be capable of on modern cameras.
Whichever 50mm lens you try, it’s the pure speed that impresses most.
“We took four different styles of 50mm primes at very different price points”
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