Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II

For years this was the cheapest new lens you could buy with a red EF mount, and Canon knew it. The nickname stuck on two fronts. "Nifty fifty" for what it does. "Plastic fantastic" for how it feels, which is to say like a lens cap with glass in it. The mount on the II was plastic, the focus ring a thin token strip near the front, and the autofocus a micro-motor that buzzed and hunted in dim light. None of that mattered to the millions of people who bought one as their first prime, because the picture coming out the back end punched several times above the price.

Stop it to f/4 and the 50 is genuinely sharp across most of the frame, sharp enough that it embarrassed zooms costing five times more. Wide open at f/1.8 it goes soft and glowy, with visible spherical aberration and a halo on specular highlights, the kind of dreamy look people either chase or curse. The contrast drops too. By f/2.8 it cleans up fast, and from f/4 to f/8 it is doing real work. The optical recipe is a Gauss-derived formula, six elements in five groups, the same basic lineage Canon had been refining on its fifties since the FD days. That odd five-group arrangement is part of why it never renders quite like the cleaner double-Gauss fifties it borrows from.

The bokeh is the honest weakness, and it comes down to the diaphragm. Five straight blades. Out-of-focus highlights render as little pentagons once you close down even slightly, and the background can get nervous and busy rather than smooth. The later f/1.8 STM fixed this with seven rounded blades, and the f/1.4 USM was always the better-rendering, better-built option for people who cared about the look of the blur. This II is the blunt instrument of the family.

Who shot it. Everyone, basically. It was the lens that taught a generation of digital shooters what fast glass and a shallow plane could do, and on film bodies like the Elan or the EOS 3 it is a perfectly good walk-around fifty for portraits, street, and available-light work. Fifty millimeters on 35mm gives you the standard near-human angle, so it disappears in use and you stop thinking about the gear.

In low light this is exactly the lens you open all the way to f/1.8 and meter wide. Dial that maximum aperture into Zone Light Meter when you are working a dim interior or a bar at night, read for the shadow you care about, and let the spherical glow be the point rather than the problem. The 52mm front thread is small and cheap to filter, which made yellow and red contrast filters or a basic ND trivial to stack on a budget.

Today the II is discontinued, replaced in 2015 by the STM version with its metal mount and quieter motor. People still hunt the old one used for almost nothing, and it remains the standard advice for anyone asking which first prime to buy. It is not refined. It is not pretty in the corners. It just makes good photographs for less money than any other piece of glass in the system.