Lens advice & lens reviews
The purchase of a good lens guarantees years of pleasure. And there are very good reasons to buy a new lens. Since the advent of digital cameras, technology has advanced so far that lenses are now being made that are so good that a few years ago it was not possible that you could design such a lens.
Recent lens (p)reviews
We test lenses in 2 ways:
When designing a lens, distortion, color separation and vignetting are deliberately not optimally corrected. This allows them to use less expensive lens elements or exotic types of glass, which results in a more attractive selling price. The lens manufacturer relies on automatic correction of these features in the camera or in photo editing software. Our “jpg-score” gives for an objective / test camera combination: “What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG”) “if you apply all available lens corrections in the camera.
With more expensive lenses, a manufacturer often goes to great lengths to prevent lens errors from the lens design. Costs of effort are saved. This can be recognized by the use of exotic types of glass and many lens elements. Our “RAW score” approximates the intrinsic quality of the combination of lens and test camera, with CameraStuffReview trying to bypass any automatic lens corrections of RAW files.
“Who does not see the small things in life, can’t really be happy”. Macro lenses are not bright, but offer extremely high image quality. Not only up close, but also at “normal” distances.
Favorite among architecture photographers and real estate agents. A tiny room becomes a ballroom in the photo. Thanks to in-camera corrections, good and affordable.
12mm on micro-43, 18mm on APS and 24mm on full frame: Lighter and more compact than a wide-angle zoom. And a higher image quality. What else do you want?
It starts with the kit lens on your first camera. A zoom range from wide angle to portrait. Very versatile. But what if you want more image quality?
If you buy your first camera, there is a cheap standard zoom lens on it. Good start. But which zoom lens do you choose if you want to achieve a higher quality?
Bright short telephoto lenses (~ 85mm full-frame equivalent) with a beautiful bokeh. There are toppers for every sensor size.
Zoom lenses that correspond to 70-200 mm zooms for cameras with a full-frame lens. It is not without reason that these zooms have
a fixed place in many a photo bag.
Recommended for nature photography. Lens designs of telephoto zooms have improved enormously. They approximate the image quality of fixed focal points, for a fraction of the price.
Bright telephoto lenses are large, heavy and expensive. But you get a lot in return in terms of build and image quality. Indestructible and absolute top class image quality.
SEARCHING A LENS FOR SPECIFIC CAMERA?
What’s the best lens for me?
An interchangeable lens for every application |
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| Do you want to go carefree with your camera on vacation? Or are you going into the Himalayas on the hunt for a snow leopard? It does affect which lens you bring. To better tailor-make our series of lens advice, we've divided photographers into 4 types in "How do I choose a lens?": starters, amateurs, prosumers and professionals. We've asked you for your favorite subject because that determines partly what the best lens is for you. To make the lens offerings clearer, we divide lenses into 10 groups, which you may already know from our overview of lens reviews: | |
What is distortion?
| When an image does not match reality, it's distorted. There are several ways a lens can distort your image ans some are associated with the design of the lens, while other types of distortion are caused by the photographer. Distortion of an image doesn't necessarily have to be visible to the naked eye. Usually, you'll encounter horizontal and vertical geometrical distortion. These two types of distortion are no lens errors, but have to do with the perspective from which the photo is taken. Vertical and horizontal distortion are caused by the orientation of the camera relative to the subject. Barrel or pincushion distortion is caused by lens errors. Less than 1 percent of barrel or pincushion distortion is no longer visible in most photos, except for architecture images. With a fisheye lens, this distortion is very large, but deliberately present. | |
What is chromatic aberration
| Chromatic aberration occurs when light breaks in a lens: colors shift towards each other. The most famous example of refraction is probably a rainbow, where the rain drops shift the colors of the sun towards each other. In practice, we mostly see chromatic aberration in the farthest corners of recordings with sharp transitions from dark to light. How do you recognize chromatic aberration? The picture on the right shows an extreme example of chromatic aberration, where, next to the branches, ugly magenta and blue spots come into existence. | |
