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I love 50mm lenses but a lot of this stuff is ridiculously academic since photography is artistic & creative in nature. DPreview largely seems to write for the

I love 50mm lenses but a lot of this stuff is ridiculously academic since photography is artistic & creative in nature. DPreview largely seems to write for the crowd that doesn't even care about the art aspect and just wants validation that they have better photo gear than others. These new 50mm lenses often defeat the point cause they're enormous, heavy, very expensive, and have little benefit over the slower versions of old lenses since most of the time we don't walk around shooting everything at f/1.0-f/1.4, and when we do we're actually looking for some artistic weirdness. I've mostly had Canon.. I've owned the old f/1.8, the f/1.4, currently have the newer f/1.8, and have rented the f/1.2. Even the Canon f/1.2, it's older, and not as big/heavy as some of these more recent ones, but it's already so big it feels silly most of the time compared to the smaller/cheaper ones. It was useful as a rental for specific scenarios, and the new huge/expensive ones are likewise. They're great though if you're going to compare your gear collection instead of your photographs though.

bayindirh 5y ago
> DPreview largely seems to write for the crowd that doesn't even care about the art aspect... As a hobbyist photographer and a reader of DPReview, I can tell that you can find what you're looking for. There also guys who are in for the art, in for the studio photography or just for gear. These kind of technical articles makes me happy and piques my interest deeply, because I love to know how things work, and why they're designed this way. I'm personally aware that better gear makes my photography better, however I love to know theoretical capabilities and limits of my gear. Understanding my gear made my photography better and DPReview's both articles and forums helped me a lot TBH. For the most light and scenarios, f2.8 is very suitable from my experience, esp. with latest generation of sensors (A7III, Z6/7, etc.), however in extreme dim light (I shoot tango dancing, BTW), f1.8 is really helping. Since you're away from subjects too, DoF becomes very acceptable too. I agree that unless you've a specific need, f1.4 and f1.2 lenses are halo products. As a Sony shooter, that 2.5/40mm lens [0] is very compelling for street photography from perspective. At the end of the day, new lenses are giant leaps when compared to older ones in terms of resolution and sharpness. Older lenses indeed have character but, newer ones are not always devoid of it. [0]: https://www.sony.com/electronics/camera-lenses/sel40f25g https://www.sony.com/electronics/camera-lenses/sel40f25g
ISL 5y ago
Sounds like the 40mm f/2.8 might resonate for you :).
thetinguy 5y ago
Dpreview is owned by Amazon.
agloeregrets 5y ago
I have the older f1/4 EF that I use adapted to an M6. It's way soft under 2.2 or so and basically unusable for any non-flat objects under 30 feet at wide-open as the shallow DoF will blur a cheek if the nose is in focus. That said, it works magic at night.
intpx 5y ago
> photography is artistic & creative in nature. This is a pretty broad generalization. There is plenty of photography that is nothing but technical. Also, the technical side of photography is what drives the innovation to enable the creative side. Do hobbyist landscape and portrait photographers need to be pouring over test data like this or even benefit in appreciable ways from these advances? Not likely. But the R&D that is done in optics begins with some of the most technical fields and trickles down.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cratermoon 5y ago
> DPReview largely seems to write for the crowd that doesn't even care about the art aspect and just wants validation that they have better photo gear than others. DPReview, FStoppers, PetaPixel, and back in before the web the Popular Photography and Modern Photography magazines. There's a big market for prosumer gear that costs a lot, has ideal technical specs, and hangs around the owner's neck like a prize. Of course these outlets, and the magazines before them, get almost all their money from advertisers, and run lots of review articles (totally objective of course /s) and are of almost zero interest to anyone working in the industry. Great photographs can be taken with any camera.
- jgalt212 5y ago
  slight correction: In good light, great photographs can be taken with any camera.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    That's true although the best smartphones have made pretty significant gains. I've been slowly working my way through my catalog of photos to clean it up and go back to a lot of my older phone photos taken in dim restaurants and the like and the photos were generally pretty awful.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    "Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography." -- George Eastman The trick is knowing what can be made with available light.
- vgeek 5y ago
  Seconded. Kai W (& Lok) was solid when he was there, since he would trash things that deserved it and his juvenile objectivity was humorous. Now they seem more generic in the "this marginally better camera is 100% worth buying" sense.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  DPReview seems to have rather balanced reporting (I'm not a regular reader), so they do seem to be at least somewhat independent of being directly sponsored by whoever they're reviewing at the time. Compare this to pretty much every photo-vlogger/blogger/grammer out there, which have massive audiences while making unclear claims of independence and un-biasedness while shilling very hard.
breischl 5y ago
Yeah, you're not wrong. There are people who are into photography for photographs, and then there are people are into it for the gear. Not that the latter is necessarily a bad hobby - no worse than any other collecting type of hobby - but it's not the same thing at all. I do like reading Roger's work (here and at his LensRentals blog) just for curiosity about how lenses actually work, though.
diarrhea 5y ago
Yes, pretty much. I loved my low-range Canon gear (100D, Sigma lenses). When the Sony a7R3 came out, I got it alongside an array of GM lenses. My God do they blow everything out of the water. It's an insane kit. The best part is the great autofocus of the body; even in low light, even in rapid movement, even in burst shots. Among 1000 shots, I can count focus misses on one hand. However, the entire thing feels artificial. It's hard to describe. I don't want to go back, but getting shots is so easy now that it's less of a rewarding feeling nailing a shot. Messed up ISO? Doesn't matter, sensor is ISO-invariant, just adjust exposure in post at no cost to quality. You cannot mess up focus anymore. At 10fps, you cannot miss a shot anymore (mostly).
- agloeregrets 5y ago
  I had this feeling coming from a Canon DSLR (at the time) to my friend's A7RIII, something was...lost in it. Every shot looked perfect and it felt like there was no art really to it. I'm sure that to a portrait photographer they feel as it it lets them just focus on comp but wow.
  - heartbreak 5y ago
    Yeah if you're using the camera as a tool to make money, the perfection of the recent Sony Alpha full frame cameras is exactly what you want. I recommend analog to people who want fulfillment from the process itself.
- gowld 5y ago
  To me, "artificial" is going out of your way to make the job harder so you can have a more "handmade" feeling. By rejecting the "artificial" camera, you are coosing a more artificial photo shoot. I like good pictures, so I find it more rewarding when a shot succeeds and I can move on to other shots or try a harder shot for a better picture. I can play video games when I need extra fake challenge because life is too easy.
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  I watched a couple of movies back to back this weekend, and it was so striking the difference in quality. One was a middle-budget movie from the 70s, the other a recent lower-budget indie (well I imagine, three actors and one location). The movie from the 70s had so many out of focus shots, tracking shots were a bit hit or miss and colors were rather poor (mostly just flat but also color balance issues between scenes). The modern indie movie looked almost like any triple-A movie, with crisp focus, smooth tracking and with lovely natural colors, even in low light. Not like it came as a surprise as such, but just the back to back experience highlighted the contrast. Really made me sit and appreciate the technological advances.
74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
beginners care about cameras, amateurs care about lenses, pros care about motifs.
Sharlin 5y ago
> DPreview largely seems to write for the crowd that doesn't even care about the art aspect and just wants validation that they have better photo gear than others. To be fair, the author of this article is Roger Cicala of LensRentals fame [1]; optical testing is his bread and butter. He's also the first to point out that optimal lens performance is neither necessary nor sufficient for good photography, and is famously snarky in his writing towards "spec sheet warriors" and sharpness-obsessed gearheads. [1] https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/author/roger/ https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/author/roger/
- ben7799 5y ago
  I'm not trying to pick on Roger he writes well and his stuff is way higher quality than most DPReview content. He rents lenses, and a big point of what I'm saying is these fancy lenses are very often specialist tools that are much better to rent from someone like him occasionally when you need something very special, but that doesn't make them better items to own vs the less expensive & smaller/lighter 50mm lenses.
- subhro 5y ago
  This is so much correct. Modern lenses feels very clinical to me. It is like showing someone a passport photograph and asking if it is a good portrait.
- hyperbovine 5y ago
  (S)he's got a point about though DPReview, Fred Miranda, and all the rest. Dear God, those forums---on the rare occasion when someone stops wanking about "bokeh" long enough to actually post a photograph, it tends to serve as a stark reminder of how little time most of those users spend creating art vs. talking about machines.
hrktb 5y ago
Would you make the same line of comment on a anandtech chipset review, arguing it's ridiculously technical and doesn't take into account the art of progamming ? I am pretty glad dpreview does these kind of technical reviews, it nicely completes other photographer reviews who'll dig more on the experience and real world impact side of things.
- breischl 5y ago
  A lot of photographers buy amazing gear, and ignore the fact that they lack the skill that would use it well or even require that gear. I think the closest analog might be someone that reads the reviews, buys the latest-and-greatest computing hardware... and then uses it to surf the web and play Tetris.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    Even if it were the case, what is wrong with that? I mean, we can buy fancy cars without having a background in engineering, right? All the sneering about people being bad photographers and not needing the latest gear is out of touch. Average photographers benefit immensely from fast autofocus with full frame coverage, better sensors and better optics that make taking pictures in difficult conditions easier. Besides, some people like the technical optical engineering aspect of it and are happy to follow the latest developments in the same way that some people feel the urge to read articles on the latest HPC Xeon. Gatekeeping and condescension is completely unwarranted.
    - breischl 5y ago
      Average photographers can certainly benefit from better gear to a degree. But for many people (myself included) a $300 lens will work as well (or even better) than a $3000 one. Which I think is the point the original commenter was making. The sneering is pretty typical for any hobby that lumps practitioners and collectors under the same heading. The former group tends to see the gear as mere tools, to be used as needed to achieve some other end. For the latter group the gear is the whole thing - or perhaps talking about the gear. Neither is bad, but it would probably work better to call the hobbies by different names. Perhaps "photographers" and "camera collectors" or something. But then, being a collector doesn't have quite the same cachet as being an artist.
dheera 5y ago
I love my Contax Zeiss Planar 50/1.4. It's small and compact, feels like a precision instrument, has lovely rendition, is sharp as a tack in the center at f/2 and sharp corner-to-corner at f/4, built like a tank, has a super long focus throw for precision focusing, and cheaper than most equivalent modern lenses. It's perhaps my second most frequently used lens, after the 28/2 "Hollywood" Distagon (which isn't really all that sharp off-center, and sports very strong vignetting, but produces a beautiful, dramatic quality).
- dekoruotas 5y ago
  Unfortunately these are now nearly impossible to find without spending silly money... Where did you acquire yours?
  - dheera 5y ago
    Several from old grannies and grandpas selling stuff on Craigslist, a couple from the MIT Swapfest and other flea markets, some from the FredMiranda and MFLenses Buy&Sell forums. A few from eBay, some good deals pop up every now and then if you're patient for a few months and set up notifications based on keywords rather than thinking "I need this lens right now". Sometimes if you see an auction on eBay with a high starting price and no bids, it's possible they have been re-listing the item for a long time, and you can message the seller and say you'll buy it right now at a lower price if they turn on that option; many would be happy to be "done with it" and sold. Sometimes if the seller is local you can convince them to cancel the listing and do an off-eBay, in-person sale for cash at a discount (eBay charges a lot of seller fees). If you bid on an actual eBay auction, place your bid with the highest price you are actually willing to pay and ONLY in the last 10 seconds, or preferably last 3 seconds. By doing that you will either lose OR win but get it at just slightly higher than the next highest bidder's max price and significantly less than your stated price, while leaving that second bidder with no time to re-think and re-bid. By doing the single last-minute bid, you effectively turn the auction into a sealed-bid, second-price (Vickrey) auction for yourself, which is most efficient for you in a game theoretic sense. KEH has very reasonable prices on most old lenses. Not cheap, but very reasonable. Also, if you're willing to take apart a lens with a slight amount of haze/fungus, sanitize and clean the hell out of it (not for faint of heart), and put it back together, you can get some very, very steep discounts. Or if the lens has a couple of scratches, you can get steep steep discounts due to loss of antique value, you don't need to take anything apart, and it will have zero noticeable impact on wide aperture images.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sanitycheck 5y ago
Completely agree with this, if I open a 50mm to f/1.4 I usually don't care about extreme sharpness, I want the shallow DoF. I'm a Pentax weirdo, I have a couple of old 50's - one of them is even AF. (OTOH if I open a 200mm as wide as it goes I definitely do prefer it sharp - different scenario.)
dukeofdoom 5y ago
People that are just getting started get suckered into buying expensive niche gear. You can quickly go down the rabbit hole, and listen to people that talk about the size shape of their Bokeh balls, from radio active lenses they keep in their bedroom dresser all day long on youtube.

bayindirh 5y ago

> DPreview largely seems to write for the crowd that doesn't even care about the art aspect... As a hobbyist photographer and a reader of DPReview, I can tell that you can find what you're looking for. There also guys who are in for the art, in for the studio photography or just for gear. These kind of technical articles makes me happy and piques my interest deeply, because I love to know how things work, and why they're designed this way. I'm personally aware that better gear makes my photography better, however I love to know theoretical capabilities and limits of my gear. Understanding my gear made my photography better and DPReview's both articles and forums helped me a lot TBH. For the most light and scenarios, f2.8 is very suitable from my experience, esp. with latest generation of sensors (A7III, Z6/7, etc.), however in extreme dim light (I shoot tango dancing, BTW), f1.8 is really helping. Since you're away from subjects too, DoF becomes very acceptable too. I agree that unless you've a specific need, f1.4 and f1.2 lenses are halo products. As a Sony shooter, that 2.5/40mm lens [0] is very compelling for street photography from perspective. At the end of the day, new lenses are giant leaps when compared to older ones in terms of resolution and sharpness. Older lenses indeed have character but, newer ones are not always devoid of it. [0]: https://www.sony.com/electronics/camera-lenses/sel40f25g https://www.sony.com/electronics/camera-lenses/sel40f25g

ISL 5y ago

Sounds like the 40mm f/2.8 might resonate for you :).

thetinguy 5y ago

Dpreview is owned by Amazon.

agloeregrets 5y ago

I have the older f1/4 EF that I use adapted to an M6. It's way soft under 2.2 or so and basically unusable for any non-flat objects under 30 feet at wide-open as the shallow DoF will blur a cheek if the nose is in focus. That said, it works magic at night.

intpx 5y ago

> photography is artistic & creative in nature. This is a pretty broad generalization. There is plenty of photography that is nothing but technical. Also, the technical side of photography is what drives the innovation to enable the creative side. Do hobbyist landscape and portrait photographers need to be pouring over test data like this or even benefit in appreciable ways from these advances? Not likely. But the R&D that is done in optics begins with some of the most technical fields and trickles down.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cratermoon 5y ago

> DPReview largely seems to write for the crowd that doesn't even care about the art aspect and just wants validation that they have better photo gear than others. DPReview, FStoppers, PetaPixel, and back in before the web the Popular Photography and Modern Photography magazines. There's a big market for prosumer gear that costs a lot, has ideal technical specs, and hangs around the owner's neck like a prize. Of course these outlets, and the magazines before them, get almost all their money from advertisers, and run lots of review articles (totally objective of course /s) and are of almost zero interest to anyone working in the industry. Great photographs can be taken with any camera.

jgalt212 5y ago
slight correction: In good light, great photographs can be taken with any camera.
- ghaff 5y ago
  That's true although the best smartphones have made pretty significant gains. I've been slowly working my way through my catalog of photos to clean it up and go back to a lot of my older phone photos taken in dim restaurants and the like and the photos were generally pretty awful.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  "Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography." -- George Eastman The trick is knowing what can be made with available light.
vgeek 5y ago
Seconded. Kai W (& Lok) was solid when he was there, since he would trash things that deserved it and his juvenile objectivity was humorous. Now they seem more generic in the "this marginally better camera is 100% worth buying" sense.
formerly_proven 5y ago
DPReview seems to have rather balanced reporting (I'm not a regular reader), so they do seem to be at least somewhat independent of being directly sponsored by whoever they're reviewing at the time. Compare this to pretty much every photo-vlogger/blogger/grammer out there, which have massive audiences while making unclear claims of independence and un-biasedness while shilling very hard.

breischl 5y ago

Yeah, you're not wrong. There are people who are into photography for photographs, and then there are people are into it for the gear. Not that the latter is necessarily a bad hobby - no worse than any other collecting type of hobby - but it's not the same thing at all. I do like reading Roger's work (here and at his LensRentals blog) just for curiosity about how lenses actually work, though.

diarrhea 5y ago

Yes, pretty much. I loved my low-range Canon gear (100D, Sigma lenses). When the Sony a7R3 came out, I got it alongside an array of GM lenses. My God do they blow everything out of the water. It's an insane kit. The best part is the great autofocus of the body; even in low light, even in rapid movement, even in burst shots. Among 1000 shots, I can count focus misses on one hand. However, the entire thing feels artificial. It's hard to describe. I don't want to go back, but getting shots is so easy now that it's less of a rewarding feeling nailing a shot. Messed up ISO? Doesn't matter, sensor is ISO-invariant, just adjust exposure in post at no cost to quality. You cannot mess up focus anymore. At 10fps, you cannot miss a shot anymore (mostly).

agloeregrets 5y ago
I had this feeling coming from a Canon DSLR (at the time) to my friend's A7RIII, something was...lost in it. Every shot looked perfect and it felt like there was no art really to it. I'm sure that to a portrait photographer they feel as it it lets them just focus on comp but wow.
- heartbreak 5y ago
  Yeah if you're using the camera as a tool to make money, the perfection of the recent Sony Alpha full frame cameras is exactly what you want. I recommend analog to people who want fulfillment from the process itself.
gowld 5y ago
To me, "artificial" is going out of your way to make the job harder so you can have a more "handmade" feeling. By rejecting the "artificial" camera, you are coosing a more artificial photo shoot. I like good pictures, so I find it more rewarding when a shot succeeds and I can move on to other shots or try a harder shot for a better picture. I can play video games when I need extra fake challenge because life is too easy.
magicalhippo 5y ago
I watched a couple of movies back to back this weekend, and it was so striking the difference in quality. One was a middle-budget movie from the 70s, the other a recent lower-budget indie (well I imagine, three actors and one location). The movie from the 70s had so many out of focus shots, tracking shots were a bit hit or miss and colors were rather poor (mostly just flat but also color balance issues between scenes). The modern indie movie looked almost like any triple-A movie, with crisp focus, smooth tracking and with lovely natural colors, even in low light. Not like it came as a surprise as such, but just the back to back experience highlighted the contrast. Really made me sit and appreciate the technological advances.

74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago

beginners care about cameras, amateurs care about lenses, pros care about motifs.

Sharlin 5y ago

> DPreview largely seems to write for the crowd that doesn't even care about the art aspect and just wants validation that they have better photo gear than others. To be fair, the author of this article is Roger Cicala of LensRentals fame [1]; optical testing is his bread and butter. He's also the first to point out that optimal lens performance is neither necessary nor sufficient for good photography, and is famously snarky in his writing towards "spec sheet warriors" and sharpness-obsessed gearheads. [1] https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/author/roger/ https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/author/roger/

ben7799 5y ago
I'm not trying to pick on Roger he writes well and his stuff is way higher quality than most DPReview content. He rents lenses, and a big point of what I'm saying is these fancy lenses are very often specialist tools that are much better to rent from someone like him occasionally when you need something very special, but that doesn't make them better items to own vs the less expensive & smaller/lighter 50mm lenses.
subhro 5y ago
This is so much correct. Modern lenses feels very clinical to me. It is like showing someone a passport photograph and asking if it is a good portrait.
hyperbovine 5y ago
(S)he's got a point about though DPReview, Fred Miranda, and all the rest. Dear God, those forums---on the rare occasion when someone stops wanking about "bokeh" long enough to actually post a photograph, it tends to serve as a stark reminder of how little time most of those users spend creating art vs. talking about machines.

hrktb 5y ago

Would you make the same line of comment on a anandtech chipset review, arguing it's ridiculously technical and doesn't take into account the art of progamming ? I am pretty glad dpreview does these kind of technical reviews, it nicely completes other photographer reviews who'll dig more on the experience and real world impact side of things.

breischl 5y ago
A lot of photographers buy amazing gear, and ignore the fact that they lack the skill that would use it well or even require that gear. I think the closest analog might be someone that reads the reviews, buys the latest-and-greatest computing hardware... and then uses it to surf the web and play Tetris.
- kergonath 5y ago
  Even if it were the case, what is wrong with that? I mean, we can buy fancy cars without having a background in engineering, right? All the sneering about people being bad photographers and not needing the latest gear is out of touch. Average photographers benefit immensely from fast autofocus with full frame coverage, better sensors and better optics that make taking pictures in difficult conditions easier. Besides, some people like the technical optical engineering aspect of it and are happy to follow the latest developments in the same way that some people feel the urge to read articles on the latest HPC Xeon. Gatekeeping and condescension is completely unwarranted.
  - breischl 5y ago
    Average photographers can certainly benefit from better gear to a degree. But for many people (myself included) a $300 lens will work as well (or even better) than a $3000 one. Which I think is the point the original commenter was making. The sneering is pretty typical for any hobby that lumps practitioners and collectors under the same heading. The former group tends to see the gear as mere tools, to be used as needed to achieve some other end. For the latter group the gear is the whole thing - or perhaps talking about the gear. Neither is bad, but it would probably work better to call the hobbies by different names. Perhaps "photographers" and "camera collectors" or something. But then, being a collector doesn't have quite the same cachet as being an artist.

dheera 5y ago

I love my Contax Zeiss Planar 50/1.4. It's small and compact, feels like a precision instrument, has lovely rendition, is sharp as a tack in the center at f/2 and sharp corner-to-corner at f/4, built like a tank, has a super long focus throw for precision focusing, and cheaper than most equivalent modern lenses. It's perhaps my second most frequently used lens, after the 28/2 "Hollywood" Distagon (which isn't really all that sharp off-center, and sports very strong vignetting, but produces a beautiful, dramatic quality).

dekoruotas 5y ago
Unfortunately these are now nearly impossible to find without spending silly money... Where did you acquire yours?
- dheera 5y ago
  Several from old grannies and grandpas selling stuff on Craigslist, a couple from the MIT Swapfest and other flea markets, some from the FredMiranda and MFLenses Buy&Sell forums. A few from eBay, some good deals pop up every now and then if you're patient for a few months and set up notifications based on keywords rather than thinking "I need this lens right now". Sometimes if you see an auction on eBay with a high starting price and no bids, it's possible they have been re-listing the item for a long time, and you can message the seller and say you'll buy it right now at a lower price if they turn on that option; many would be happy to be "done with it" and sold. Sometimes if the seller is local you can convince them to cancel the listing and do an off-eBay, in-person sale for cash at a discount (eBay charges a lot of seller fees). If you bid on an actual eBay auction, place your bid with the highest price you are actually willing to pay and ONLY in the last 10 seconds, or preferably last 3 seconds. By doing that you will either lose OR win but get it at just slightly higher than the next highest bidder's max price and significantly less than your stated price, while leaving that second bidder with no time to re-think and re-bid. By doing the single last-minute bid, you effectively turn the auction into a sealed-bid, second-price (Vickrey) auction for yourself, which is most efficient for you in a game theoretic sense. KEH has very reasonable prices on most old lenses. Not cheap, but very reasonable. Also, if you're willing to take apart a lens with a slight amount of haze/fungus, sanitize and clean the hell out of it (not for faint of heart), and put it back together, you can get some very, very steep discounts. Or if the lens has a couple of scratches, you can get steep steep discounts due to loss of antique value, you don't need to take anything apart, and it will have zero noticeable impact on wide aperture images.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sanitycheck 5y ago

Completely agree with this, if I open a 50mm to f/1.4 I usually don't care about extreme sharpness, I want the shallow DoF. I'm a Pentax weirdo, I have a couple of old 50's - one of them is even AF. (OTOH if I open a 200mm as wide as it goes I definitely do prefer it sharp - different scenario.)

dukeofdoom 5y ago

People that are just getting started get suckered into buying expensive niche gear. You can quickly go down the rabbit hole, and listen to people that talk about the size shape of their Bokeh balls, from radio active lenses they keep in their bedroom dresser all day long on youtube.