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.
> 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.
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.
(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.
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.
> 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.
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.
DPreview was owned by Amazon last time I looked. They exist mostly to pump up the camera market and generate sales.
Their writing is very much in the vein of "your gear is inadequate if a new version has come out."
They are really the bottom of the barrel. They continually write about how some new piece of gear is so revolutionary because it allows you to take a particular photo and it was impossible before, as long as you didn't know about the 50-100 year old technique to get around the issue that actually works better even if you have the brand new camera.
A while ago I read a comment that was really eye opener: most big YouTube photography channels out there are mostly about gear, not about "taking pictures". It shows how much money the industry moves (or how prevalent GAS is).
Same situation with my hobby, making electronic music. While there are a ton of amazing tutorials for how to write music there are way more gear review videos with orders of magnitude more views. Its fun to shop for new toys, learning new things is work.
The forums for guitar players are often dominated by gear discussions unless carefully moderated. The good forums make efforts to sequester all the GAS discussions to their own corner.
Haha... I was getting sucked into this, still am in a way. I spent about a year (2019) with a now cheap Sony Nex-5n with an 18-55 kit lens... but wanted to upgrade, more MP, higher video quality... got an A7II (24MP, 1080P) and then an A7RIII (42MP, 4K) ... I bought a 12-24mm F4 G lens at $1.3K __USED__ which to me is insane and that's not even that much in this space. It's just my car is $2K... I still can't comprehend it... I've been poor most of my life till recently, I still am poor but yeah... just interesting climbing the levels... Since the last month or two purchased 6 other lenses recently all under $1K but yeah... it's like "I need that 55mm" or "I need "12mm" just funny... then you think, this money is just sitting on your shelf not invested... idk.
I am self aware though, FIRE and make more money in general, try to avoid the above.
On contrast, I've been into photography for more than 20 years, and I currently own a Nikon D60 that was gifted to me 2 or 3 years ago (and that would cost less than $200 if I would have bought it instead). I can afford an A7IV or whatever is the latest gear, I just don't want to.
Yeah the Nex-5n with the kit lens was $140 and it was fun to shoot around with. That's what I shoot for primarily other than creating YouTube content is to go outside/be in the park, mostly doing macro since the place I live at sucks landscape wise. But yeah I shoot to have my own wallpaper and that's gotta be 4K res at least.
All my stuff is used, the latest Sony Alpha 1 is $6.5K ha a bit out of my budget.
Anyway the talk of money is bad/pointless, I saw one cinema lens that was $100K like wth... levels in life.
Huh. I’ve never owned a car or tried to buy one—I live in NYC and I never got around to getting a driver’s license. I was just under the impression cars cost many times that much at minimum.
The price floor for a barely-usable car in a US state that doesn't require an inspection to register it is probably around $500, but that can fluctuate as low as $0 (I literally watched a friend give a beat up, but driveable old van to a random construction worker in the apartment complex they were moving out of).
$2000 could easily get a 15 year old Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla or similar compact car with a reputation for longevity, without major issues. Shopping in that price range can, however be risky if you're not mechanically inclined enough to inspect the condition of the car and don't have the aid of someone who is.
A lot of people did recommend Honda Civics, I considered it but they also apparently are at a higher risk of getting stolen too... so I didn't get one.
Most big YouTube photography channels have video descriptions absolutely stuffed with affiliate links. They have a strong incentive to both attract viewers who are already interested in buying gear, and to convince viewers who aren't sure they want more gear that they really do want more gear.
Most people putting out high-production-value videos regularly aren't doing it for fun or to make the world a better place; they're closely watching how much money they make from it.
As an amateur, and speaking at the amateur level, I always find myself disagreeing that with that last statement whenever I see it.
I've used a bunch of cameras ranging from smartphones to high end point-and-shoots all the way up to full frame "prosumer" mirrorless. While I have no doubt someone whose work gets featured in say, NatGeo, can take an iPhone4 and make wonderful shots, I can't help but feel the rest of us Average Joes and Janes get a tremendous boost from having better gear.
And even that NatGeo featured pro would produce much better pictures with a FF DSLR than being limited to a iPhone 4, no?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
The think with an Anandtech chipset review is the faster chipset doesn't have big negatives unless power consumption is a major concern.
The excessive weight of these modern 50mm lens can be a real detriment to getting better photographs. It makes you less mobile, and you can only carry so much weight. If you're carring 10x more weight for your 50mm lens than an older design that is 95% as high quality you inevitably have to leave something else out of the pack.
Chipsets have all sort of properties, including the instruction set, the consumption as you mention, their physical size and heat profile (related to consumption, but can be influenced by other factors) that make them better or worse for some applications.
Your point on lens weight is valid, but I don't see it as something that should be in every single lens optic review, all the more so the use case of 50mm lenses are not just street snaps for instance.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I agree somewhat, which is why I mostly use a cheap lens, and an ancient EOS 60D. However, I think the $3,000 lens is a red herring. The vast majority of lenses sold are kit lenses or cheap plastic. Because whilst there is an awful lot of average photographers, not all of them are millionaires. Now, to actual millionaires $3,000 are probably worth less than $300 for me, so I don't see how I would have a moral high ground.
Honestly, this is a made up problem. Some people prefer working on composition, some are better at capturing subtle lights, and some have a technical mind. These people still buy camera and take pictures, as a hobby. So why wouldn't they be called "hobbyist photographers" like the rest of us? And why does it have any importance whatsoever?
The expensive lenses are usually big and heavy. If you don't need that degree of sharpness, then it's potentially a worse tool than a lighter (and cheaper) lens.
>So why wouldn't they be called "hobbyist photographers" like the rest of us?
I feel like I explained my thoughts on that in my previous comment. Basically if you're in it for the love of the gear rather than to make photographs that's fine, but your hobby is collecting rather than photography. Or, to put it another way, photography gear rather than photo-making.
>why does it have any importance whatsoever?
Sometimes the photo-makers get annoyed at being lumped in with the gear collectors. And a fair number of people get taken in reading the gearhead commentary and end up buying expensive lenses that won't actually help that person take better photos.
> I feel like I explained my thoughts on that in my previous comment.
Yes, you did. Sorry, it shouldn't have sounded so personal. My real problem is with the community in general.
> Basically if you're in it for the love of the gear rather than to make photographs that's fine, but your hobby is collecting rather than photography.
The thing is, it is a spectrum between pinhole photographers and gear heads. There are different optima for different people along the way, but fundamentally they all do the same thing: taking pictures. So where do you draw the line, and who gets to choose who is branded a legitimate photographer instead of some weirdo with too much money?
I have never seen any evidence that "collectors" (in the sense of people who buy modern gear without taking any picture with it; there are plenty of legitimate collectors of old cameras) really are that common, or any more common than soccer moms who buy a camera to collect dust. Every time they are mentioned it is as bogeymen on a photography forum. It is puzzling that a community would show so extreme sentiments towards one of its subsets. And I am a railway modeller, so I am not stranger to strongly opinionated hobbyists.
> And a fair number of people get taken in reading the gearhead commentary and end up buying expensive lenses that won't actually help that person take better photos.
Sure, that is a problem for some people who are eager to give themselves the right tools and get to overspend. And to be honest most of us are willing to fall into that trap.
I think the problem with enthusiasm for unnecessary consumer goods is the environmental impact.
I do agree consumers don’t deserve condescension for geeking about technical details, but I still see it as at least ironic when somebody buys an overengineered product.
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).
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.
One day we’ll be watching personalised auto-generated content and it’ll blow everything else out of the water.
Imagine if content can be generated, real-time, by an AI that monitors your brain for signs of engagement. Holy shit, what if that’s what this life actually is!
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.
You could make things hard mode for yourself by shooting manual lenses. There are some amazing manual lenses for Sony such as the Voigtlander ones. I personally found it quite fun to shoot digital with modern manual lenses --- the image quality is so good but you still have to work to get it.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.