I go though carefully with my equipment to, but this one is used very often and is then always in the backpack along for the ride. Of various known and through Internet forums from sensitive inner tube of 1: 1.4er warned the (even when wearing the backpack) quite often to give up his spirit by vibrations, I concluded this lens out of my selection. Therefore remained the 1: 1.2 L to choose from - a top lens with high quality finish and excellent properties, but it costs 14 times. Since Amazon has granted the right to redeem, I decided it simply times with 1: try 1.8er. Would it have been useless, I could indeed send it back. But of "unusable" can be no question!
Yesterday it was finally time: The "yoghurt pot" was in the mail. The Geli, the Canon can be paid at the cheaper models especially, came just two days before. So the object of desire was then unpacked quickly. The first impression: very light in the hand (130g!) And as expected, entirely of plastic. However, the lens does not thereby cheap, but simply feels only slightly. On my heavy EOS 7D with battery grip actually a very pleasant feeling compared to heavy 24-105 L, which serves me as always top lens. With a maximum aperture of 1.8 and a focal length of 50mm, I can do without a functioning anyway only with rigid motifs image stabilizer. The placement of the sun visor was with the latching mechanism only times a bit unusual, but is not a problem and after repeated insertion and removal yesterday I got used to it quickly. Even the admittedly very small focus ring for manual focus is getting used to but also easy to handle after a short familiarization period. Very pleasant I that the lens does not rotate during focusing, thus allows the use of a pole filter. As far as my first impression was therefore very positive.
So far so good. The main focus of a lens is indeed usually on the optical properties. So I have only once snapped, like mad and am all stops gone through. The focus is very fast, but also quite noisy. On the 3-inch monitor my camera saw everything quite well made, but known to the disappointment comes only when can the details look at the big monitor. But because of disappointment: I was thrilled with the results! In Aperture 1.8 to Aperture 4 a nice soft bokeh effect sets and even at the beginning of the panel focused areas are quite sharp. And so it will be really sharp at f 2.8, with an aperture so that I do not have my 24-105 L. I could tell neither great nor distortion, vignetting, although the 7D supports this objective no vignetting. Chromatic aberrations occurred only when shooting a backlit subject and in vanishingly small scale and could be removed easily on PC. I guess also with an L lens I had aberrations, because the L means "low dispersion" and not "no dispersion."
My conclusion: The only thing that really bothers to this objective, is the very loud autofocus. But when the lens can not necessarily used in quiet concerts or meditative events to live with it and receives for tight money not a fixed focal length lens L-class with high-quality construction and excellent image quality, but a very light lens with high light intensity and very good imaging characteristics similar to those of L-zoom, if not even superior. So here's the full five stars for this amazing useful "yoghurt pot" in this price-performance ratio.