I'm still waiting for mine to ship. My excitement has definitely waned though with every post.
Perhaps, and I hope, I'm wrong, but it's just seeming like it's an average lens for photographers and I had hoped for something better. Oh well, that's Canon for ya.....
I'll wait to try the lens before I decide, but I couldn't care less about video if I tried, so whatever features they built into this for video people are completely lost on me.
i don't care about video myself, either
really, the only reason i can see to get this lens is for the size. is it worth $200 to you to have a pancake 40?
for me it'll all come down to two things: how it performs optically, and how often i use it. and honestly, the latter is pretty much as important as the former.
if i get a useful street/walk around lens for $200, great. if i don't use it much i can unload it and it won't cost me much.
goosemang wrote:
i don't care about video myself, either
really, the only reason i can see to get this lens is for the size. is it worth $200 to you to have a pancake 40?
for me it'll all come down to two things: how it performs optically, and how often i use it. and honestly, the latter is pretty much as important as the former.
if i get a useful street/walk around lens for $200, great. if i don't use it much i can unload it and it won't cost me much.
Thanks for the info.
I actually have several lenses that could have worked for me (2x 50's) but most of my lenses are 800 miles away. I ordered this as an interim lens, possibly using it until I get back to my normal lenses.
I've also always wanted a Canon pancake (made for photographers, not videographers) so I jumped. I almost ordered a 50mm f/1.8, but I wasn't excited about buying it; this lens seemed like just what I wanted though. In the last two weeks I've been hopeful, and almost disillusioned, but I sure hope it works out.
i can't comment on the IQ yet, but regarding build and AF:
build is good, not L but definitely feels way better than the 50 1.8 and even the 50 1.4. the MF ring is easy to turn but is very smooth and doesn't have any of that plastic on plastic feel of the non-L 50's. you have to put the lens on MF to manual focus. the lens telescopes a little bit when close-focusing - about 1/4". the focus ring seems to control the focus electronically - it's not physically connected at all. so you can't MF with the camera off. there's no infinity stop or MFD stop, the ring can just turn endlessly.
the STM drive is very quiet. kind of sounds like listening to an old dot matrix printer that's inside a cardboard box 200 meters away. like this faint, kind of muffled whir/buzz. i can see how the video people will dig it. also, the AF is very smooth... the movement isn't jerky at all, it's very fluid. again, something i'm sure video folks really care about. the focus definitely *seems* slower than my other lenses... but i'm not sure how much of it is that the smoothness of the AF just feels so controlled and slow. i think if you need *REALLY* fast AF you won't like it. but it certainly seems quick enough to lock on for street type use. i haven't tried servo focusing with it yet, so that's completely up in the air.
mounted on a 5d mk. iii, the front element of the lens only sticks out about 1/4" further than the hand grip. ...Show more →
Can you please comment on the AF in video? I'm very curious about STM and cameras other than the 650D. TIA.
I think it looks great. Let's face it, many lenses in the 35-50mm range deliver nice results. This one seems to fall right in that illustrious pack. But I happen to like the 40mm focal length. Had a buch of them, such as Hexanon 40mm 1.8; Voigtlander Ultron 40mm f/2; Minolta QF (?) 40mm 1.7 in the Hi-Matic E, 40mm Rokinon 2.8. Liked them all. Different experience from 50mm. No better, no worse, just different. So, for $200 and being this tiny, I think it's great for street photography, especially when you combine it with a quiet SLR, like the (film) Elan 7N.
