Anyone have opinions about this lens? There is a very nice looking one on ebay. I would be mounting it on my 5D. The 21mm f3.5 seems to get all the publicity but it is a lot more expensive.
Zuiko 24mm is an excellent lens. I have used mine on my 5d extensively.
It is very good for landscapes, and, rather surprisingly, an excellent low light lens, due to being very sharp wide open. Combined with the 5d's good high ISO perfor4mance at 1600, you can use it for night time street photography. It is a very high resolving lens.
The only negative is slight barrel distortion, but this is of a type that photoshop can easily fix.
Because of the distortion I tend to prefer the zuiko 18mm on my 5d, but the 24mm is a close second.
I have and use one on my 5D and yes it is sharp and a good buy. But, make sure you use the hood with it. It seems prone to flare and resulting low contrast if strong light reaches the front element.
I have a 24/2.8 single-coated and a 21/3.5 multi-coated. The 24mm is much, much more prone to flare even with a hood, although the hood helps. I believe there are multi-coated 24's around, it will have a greenish reflection rather than purpleish.
But you can easily use it at f/2.8 making it nice for low-light. I've taken a lot of nice shots with it just be careful with light sources.
I love mine (multi-coated)! I use it on a 20D, but it is reputed to be excellent in the corners, and I'm looking forward to putting it on a FF body later this year. It's cheap (mine was about $125, I think, and I wouldn't pay much more than $150-175), Very small & light, very good wide open, and excellent stopped down. Perhaps because of the coating, I have not seen a huge flare problem with mine (and I don't have the hood). But I haven't torture-tested it either. BTW, the 24/2.8 is often reputed to be better then the f/2 version -- I haven't tried the faster lens, this is just what I read when I was researching them. If you can get past the frustration of searching, there are lots of threads about this lens on this board over the past couple of years. Good luck.
I have a multi coated ( I think based on the brownish reflection on the elements) version of the 24mm f2.8 that I use on my SLRc (14MP full frame) and Olympus E3/e510 (4/3rds).
On the 4/3rds, it behaves like a normal lens (50mm effective FOV) and given the compact size and weight of this lens, it is a very good match for the 4/3rds system.
On full frame, this lens is quite good - especially for the price. The colors are very nice and rich and the sharpness is there even wide open. Stopped down to f5.6, you get very good corners and edges as well. Distortion is minimal and I have not had a very big issue with flare.
I am surrprised the lens goes for under $200 - you can find a brand new copy / new-old stock - with box and everything else if you look around a little. The f2.0 version sells for around $350-$450 and is slightly bigger - about 1/5 times the length / size of the f2.8 version - of course you are also paying for the larger aperture.
Another little jewel / sleeper lens I recently came across was the Tamron 25mm f2.8 adaptall lens. I managed to get a Tamron Adaptall-2 to Canon EF mount adapter with focus confirm chip to use with this lens. The Tamron is exquisitely sharp and the colors are simply wonderful from such a reasonably priced lens. The lens uses 55mm filters and is slightly larger than the Olympus OM 24mm f2.8. However, they can be had for much less than what you woud pay for the OM lens.
I love mine and use it a lot in portrait orientation for stitched panos. On my 1Ds2 it provides the perfect vertical FOV for many of my landscapes.
I would recommend getting a late model multi-coated version if you can and would also recommend this lens well before the 21mm. I had 3 x 21mm and none of them came within a bull's roar of the 24's image quality.