EF 50/1.0 L USM

I was lucky and could test this lens. It is very good and be used at full aperture. Normal pictures look great. This lens has the electric ring-USM. AF is slow compared to mechanical ring-USM lenses. Manual focus is only possible with camera power on and camera activated. This is very annoying.
I tested the lens against a Ricoh 50/2.0 (very similar to Canon EF 50/1.8) and Canon EF 35-80 III. Test target was a building 30m away. I also tested the EF 50/1.0 at 2m with USAF test charts.
EF 50/1.0 at 1.0 was better than Ricoh at 2.0. At 2.0 the EF 50 was very good. At 8 both EF 50 and Ricoh was excellent with the zoom almost as good.
The vignetting was high at 1.0, mucher better at 1.4 and almost gone at 2.0. Sharpness was very good wide open but improves of course when stopping down. Corners were a bit softer at all apertures but very good at 5.6.
Normal pictures look great, even wide open.


The back side of the lens with the contacts.


The vignetting at full aperture. Distance 2m.
Strange shading is due to JPEG compression?
Vignetting looks bad because of contrast enhancement in Photoshop.
[Test] Larger image
Test at different apertures. Distance 2m.
Vignetting looks bad because of contrast enhancement in Photoshop. Maybe 2 stops wide open at 18mm off center.

HOME 1