Canon EF 50mm f/1.0L USM

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Out of this world expensive; you pay 2,000 US$ for one aparture stop! Heavy.

Would never have bought this animal new. It just isn't cost effcient to pay 2,000 US$ for one aparture stop. Still, it is a thrill to have and I use it a lot. Not only a collectors item, but a tool with some unique application areas. Like night city scenes. Hand held, mind you. People tend to think that you are only fooling around since it is too dark for normal photography. Then they relax.

Does that one click stop, that magic 1:1,0 mean so much? It does. It makes it possible for you to shoot hand held down to EV 6 (100 ASA) which is light from a 60 W bulb. Or, at this time of the year, you can shoot 24 hours a day, - hand held, through the northern Scandinavian bright summer nights.

Equally, it is ideal for outdoor shooting, - at all, at dull and gray Scandinavian winter days with equally marginal light. Hand held. The only lense around for that kind of conditions.

It is extremely difficult to use to what it was intended to be used for; portraiture. The DOF is only millimetres thick at full opening. But it leaves a beautiful bukeh-background and slides in and out of focus nicely.

Solidly built. Something it shares with all the white tele lenses and the equally designed 85 mm/1,2 L. Far more rigid than anything else on the EOS/EF program. More in line with Carl Zeiss/Hasselblad. Heavy like a hand grenade out of WWI.

Heavy, Slow AF, Expensive

This lens has some major drawbacks - too slow AF, too heavy to carry around. This lens may not be an every-day lens.
But this lens has some special ability which other lenses can never deliver - "F1.0", very shallow depth of field, big-bang like bokeh at wide open.
F1.0 saves a full stop of ISO for digitals, it produce clearer image in low light. The large amount of background blur (bokeh) make a special atmosphere but it somewhat drops with digitals. In calculation, F1.0 on full size is almost equivalent to F1.48 for D60 and F1.25 for 1D.
Some may say the electric focus ring is too loose but this may not be a flaw as this lens is mainly used in Full-Time-manual-Focus with just a finger tip movement.
The AF is too slow but the lens has focus limiter. However, it still slow with the limiter, not a same league to 50/1.4 or something else.
Speaking of image quality, this lens produce decent image with good tonality. The sharpness at wide-open F1.0 is good but not so good; I like the sharpness at f1.1 or f1.2. The sharpness decreases at closest distance (60cm) even the lens has floating elements. IMO, this lens produces good tonality than 50/1.4.
Color is rich but warmer, I think. The lens contains four of high-refractive index glasses and it affect the color balance. (According to the canon brochure, this lens use a unique coating to cancel the color cast by such glasses)
Note this lens is too huge with a hood attached and the hood blocks AF assist light of D60.

Here is sample photo for this lens with D60.

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~eg3y-ssk/photo/tstar/machi53/index.htm