Canon New FD 50mm f/1.4

Put it next to the Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 Ai-S, the lens every FD shooter eventually compares it to, and shooters tend to describe the Canon as a hair warmer and a touch smoother wide open. The Nikon gets called the slightly more clinical of the two, a bit more contrast at f/1.4, a bit more bite. The New FD 50mm f/1.4 trades some of that for a rounder, easier rendering that flatters skin and forgives a little. Neither is wrong. People pick the Canon when they want the gentler look and the lighter, more compact barrel that came with the New FD redesign of 1979.

Wide open it is soft in the way fast double-Gauss fifties are soft. Specular highlights pick up a faint glow at f/1.4, a slight veiling that lifts the blacks, which is the undercorrected spherical aberration doing exactly what it does in lenses of this lineage. Stop to f/2 and most of it clears. By f/2.8 to f/4 it sharpens into a properly crisp lens, and by f/5.6 the center and midframe are as sharp as anyone needs a 50 to be; the extreme corners want f/8 to fully tighten up. The bokeh divides people. Against a clean background it falls away smoothly and the discs stay round through the middle of the frame, but busy backgrounds can turn nervous in the transition zone, and the same soft-focus trait that gives you the wide-open glow is what stirs them up. Stopped down a stop or two, the eight-blade aperture keeps highlight discs reasonably circular instead of going hard polygonal.

The optical formula is a classic seven-element double-Gauss, the same broad lineage as the Planar, and it behaves like one. Field curvature is mild but present, which is part of why the extreme corners stay soft at wide apertures. Flare control is decent for an early-eighties coating but not bulletproof. Shoot into a hard backlight without the hood and you can pull a low-contrast wash or the odd green ghost across the frame. The 52mm filter thread is shared with most of the FD line, which makes carrying one set of NDs or a polarizer across several lenses painless.

This is a documentary and available-light lens more than a studio one. It is what an FD shooter reaches for indoors, in bars, on the street after dark, anywhere f/1.4 buys a usable shutter speed. If you meter wide open in low light, Zone Light Meter lets you set the aperture at f/1.4 and read the shutter you actually get, which matters when you are a stop or two from a tripod and deciding whether to push the film.

The honest weakness is that veiling glow at f/1.4. If you need clean, snappy contrast with the aperture all the way open, you will not get it here; you have to stop down to f/2 to lose the haze. Some people love that softness for portraits and hate it for anything that needs edge, and the same disagreement follows the bokeh around.

Today it is one of the great value fifties. FD glass cannot mount on most modern mirror cameras without a corrective adapter, which has kept prices low for decades. You can find a clean copy for less than a fast modern fifty costs in filters alone. People still buy it because it renders beautifully, focuses smoothly, and shrugs off use. The usual cross-shop is the cheaper New FD 50mm f/1.8, and the f/1.4 earns its small premium mostly in that extra two-thirds of a stop and the nicer out-of-focus rendering against simple backgrounds.