Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 USM Wide Angle Lens for Canon SLR Cameras

This lens is *beautiful*. The quality of shots taken vs the lens that shipped with my camera (even though its a totally different lens) is huge.
Very impressed.

i have had this lens for well over a year since i bought it from here. i still use it about 70% of the time along with my 85mm f1.8 and 135mm f2. its a great length for indoors and the 1.8 aperture helps with indoor shutter speeds. has a short minimum focus distance, lets you take close ups of food and small objects.

few cons i can think of are the edge sharpness is a little soft and it tends to back focus sometimes.

The Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 lens focuses quickly and accurately, and can produce nice pictures as long as you either stop it down or keep your subjects away from the edges of the frame. The center of the frame is sharp, but even with an APS-C (cropped frame) sensor, the edges are quite soft at f/1.8 and remain noticeably softer than the center no matter how far you stop it down. The lens also shows strong chromatic aberration around high-contrast edges; for example, one shot I took of the street outside my house on a sunny day had very noticeable purple fringing around the highlights on parked cars. Stopping down does not reduce the CA significantly, but I have not noticed it to be a problem on indoor shots as long as sunny windows and unshaded lamps are kept out of the frame.

My goal in purchasing this lens was to improve my indoor sports (mostly martial arts) photography, and I think it will do a good job at that. But I can't give more than three stars to a lens with the flaws that this one has. Canon lenses, especially primes, are usually better than this.

I bought mine in August for use with my Canon EOS Digital Rebel 300D (as a complement - and emergency backup - for the Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM Standard & Medium Telephoto Lens for Canon SLR Cameras I'd been using as my standard lens). I read many reviews on Amazon and elsewhere before buying, and I had my concerns about this lens because of reports it was soft around the edges. I assumed, however, that any soft parts would be effectively cropped by the smaller sensor in my camera, and this does appear to have been correct.

Focus is fast and quiet, and the lens is very sharp except when opened as wide as it will go, but this is the tradeoff you get with almost every fast prime. At f/8 the results are hard to beat. Field of view on a 1.6x crop camera (like mine) is equivalent to about a 45mm lens on a full-frame SLR, and since the smaller sensor crops out the edges for you there's little distortion to worry about.

My concerns with this lens are the reported edge softness (which I have no way of testing, since I don't own a full-frame Canon body - film or digital) and the external lens barrel, which like the 50mm 1.4 protrudes from the front of the lens and makes it susceptible to shock. Having had to send my 50mm for repair I opted for the lens hood when I bought the 28mm. For image quality alone on my camera I'd rate this a five-star lens, but since I have these concerns I'm knocking a star off.

I have no complaint with focus accuracy, but the depth of field can be hard to manage in full program mode. Shooting indoors in low light I generally bump the ISO up to about 400 and shoot in aperture priority mode to give myself a better chance of getting the shot I think I'm getting. Otherwise with moving subjects (people), at close range (likely when indoors), and with a wide aperture (low light indoors) I find that even a small shift is enough to result in front- or back-focus and a lost shot.

If you're outdoors or have very good light this is an excellent lens for candid shots of friends or family, and in low light it's still quite a good lens for candids, just as long as you pay attention to the aperture. The angle of view is adequate for scenic photos when traveling, but since a true wide angle lens on an APS-sensor camera is prohibitively expensive, 'adequate' is good enough for me. If you grew up with a film SLR and a 50mm fixed lens (as I did) this lens will come very close to the same utility you remember, and I recommend it highly.

I have a Canon EOS Rebel XT, and I have a number of lenses for it, but I use my 28mm f/1.8 mostly for low light conditions! It works great in low light without flash, as long as there is no quick movement! I recently attended a banquet and went around the room and took candid shots of everyone, without flash, and they all turned out great. I took a group shot of everyone and had to stitch the two shots together, and even that worked fairly well. I recommend this lens highly, but you can expect a shallow depth of field in low light, so your focus has to be right on.