What is there to say about the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4? It's the EOS system's fast standard lens, and has been since 1993, when it was launched. It's almost a quarter of a century old and has been reviewed by all of the major photography websites. Back in 1993 Popular Photography, a print magazine, concluded that it was naff wide open but splendid when stopped down.
They used that very word, splendid. They used some other words as well, see for yourself:
Nothing has changed since then. Ducks still cannot count. The 50mm f/1.4 remains on sale and is just as it ever was; lots of photographers who use Canon gear have a 50mm f/1.4 lurking in a cupboard for a rainy day. They never use it, but it's there.
When digital SLRs became affordable the 50mm took on a second wind as a portrait lens, because on an APS-C camera it becomes an 80mm. For the images in this post I stuck it onto an EOS 50e, an old film SLR which has eye-controlled focus.
On a physical level the 50mm f/1.4 is "second generation EOS". It uses the same design language as the 28mm f/1.8, 85mm f/1.8, and 100mm f/2, which were all released within a few years of each other.
The star begins with black tapes, and early closing.
What was eye-controlled focus? It was a Canon thing from the 1990s. A handful of film SLRs used it, but it was abandoned in the digital era and has never been brought back.
The idea is that you pick an autofocus point in the viewfinder by looking at it. The viewfinder has an infrared sensor that tracks the movement of your cornea. It sounds slightly worrying, but if you don't mind having the camera shine infrared beams at your eyes the system works surprisingly well, albeit that the EOS 50e only has three autofocus points. When I glanced left, the left-hand focus point lit up; when I glanced right, etc.
The problem is that sometimes you want to look at the whole frame, not just the little part that you are focusing on. In the following image the focus is wrong because I stopped looking at the correct spot:
Canon's 50mm EOS lens range has always had a schizophrenic quality. The low-end 50mm has always been Canon's cheapest prime; the high-end 50mm has been among the most expensive, with the 50mm f/1.4 floating in the huge gulf that separates them.
Back in 1987 the 50mm f/1.8 was part of the first batch of EOS lenses. It was bundled with the very first EOS cameras as a kit but was also available separately for $70-80 or so. Two years later Canon launched the 50mm f/1.0, which remains to this day the fastest autofocus lens ever made. At a price just shy of $3,000 it was one of the most expensive EOS lenses, beaten only by some of the exotic telephotos.
In 1990 Canon replaced the 50mm f/1.8 with the cheaper, plastic-bodied 50mm f/1.8 MkII, which is still on sale today.
At some point in the 1990s or early 2000s the 50mm f/1.0 was quietly discontinued. From that point onwards Canon didn't have a high-end 50mm until 2007, when the 50mm f/1.2 came out. In the mid-2010s Canon also launched the pancake-sized, not-actually-50mm 40mm f/2.8 STM, and the normal-sized, actually-really-50mm 50mm f/1.8 STM, which both use a silent stepless focusing system optimised for video, but there has been no direct replacement for the 50mm f/1.4 and so it soldiers on much as it was in 1993.
Canon also sells a 50mm t/1.3 cinema lens, which is apparently similar to the 50mm f/1.2 but in a tougher body, with external teeth for manual focusing gear. Of note Yongnuo, a Chinese company more famous for its cheap, decent-quality flash units, makes a clone of the 50mm f/1.8, which apparently isn't quite as good but is slightly cheaper.
Design-wise the 50mm f/1.4 has aged well. Technologically however it's behind the curve. It uses a variation of Canon's ultrasonic focus system called micro-USM, which is apparently slower and more fragile than the ring-type USM used in Canon's more expensive lenses. Compared to my 70-200mm f/2.8 the 50mm f/1.4's focusing "feel" is less smooth, but not offensively so. The manual focus ring feels like plastic moving on plastic. Unusually for a Micro-USM lens you don't have to flick the AF/MF switch to enable manual focus, you can just twist the manual focus ring.
The 50mm f/1.4 poses something of a conundrum. The f/1.8 is very cheap, so masses of Canon fans have one. They probably bought it as their second lens. The f/1.4's image quality is better, and it's slightly faster, but it's not overwhelmingly superior and the speed difference is negligible.
Meanwhile the 50mm f/1.2 is very expensive, and the image quality is optimised for f/1.2, which is to say that it's no better than the f/1.4 stopped down. The 85mm f/1.2 is much better, so why not buy one of them instead? They're roughly the same price. The 40mm f/2.8 aims at a slightly different market. The end result is that if you want a good fast 50mm for the EOS system and you don't want to pay a fortune the 50mm f/1.4 is essentially the only option and yet it's disappointing, because the image quality is just good, but not great.
50mm is a classic focal length. Manufacturers use it to showcase their expertise, because it's relatively simple to make a fast 50mm lens, and people like fast lenses. Over the last few years there has been a wave of 50mm lenses from other manufacturers, notably Carl Zeiss and Sigma. They're generally better-made and optically superior to the 50mm f/1.4, but much more expensive.
For all its slightly-underwhelming reputation the 50mm f/1.4 is a good performer, but as Popular Photography pointed out a quarter of a century ago accurate focusing at f/1.4 is difficult. Here are a trio of shots - they're 100% crops from the centre of a 21mp image, taken at f/1.4, f/1.8, and f/8. I focused on the 11 in the clock face:
It was taken near the close focus distance, at which range the depth of field was minuscule. Wide open there's quite obvious vignetting, which seems to affect autoexposure slightly; there's also purple fringing on highlights, and furthermore if you look at the background it's slightly green, which is a consequence of bokeh fringing. I conclude that sharpness in the middle at f/1.4 is fine if the focusing is correct. At f/8 it is, like every other 50mm lens, terrific.
And that's the 50mm f/1.4. You probably already have one, or you don't!
