This lens is a very nicely priced alternative to the 35 f/1.4 and other very pricey primes. It even covers a full-frame camera, but, as they say, there’s no free lunch. It’s soft wide open and really needs to be at f/2.8 to sharpen up (although it’s good at f/2.2 in the center).

Being an older design, it has chromatic aberration in the corners and edges that can be removed in postprocessing. I’d suggest shooting RAW if you have any backlit objects in the scene. The CA isn’t really any worse than what you’d see with the 35 L though, so don’t get all worked up about it.

One last hint: this is not a lens you want to shoot into the sun. Unless you really like spectacular flare and ghosting – I’m talking Aunt Bertha, look at this picture I just took of a UFO flare and ghosting. However, I can’t think of a lot of reasons to shoot an f/1.8 lens into the sun, so I probably just wasted a bit of bandwidth with this last paragraph.
June, 2010