I waited a long time to get my hands on the Canon EF 24mm f/1.4L II lens. Back in december 2008, I wrote a small ruby script to help me determine what focal lengths I favored, and concluded that this particular lens would be the perfect match for my EOS 50D, for low-light photography. I still hadn’t managed to turn up the funds for one when The Digital Picture published a glowing review of it a couple of months later, but later that year I gutted my piggy bank, and finally received the lens after waiting in a back-order queue for 5 weeks.

Now, after using the lens for some months, I wanted to share my impressions with you, the internet. I won’t go into nearly as much detail as the DP review, and if you’re interested in this lens I’m sure you’ve already read it (you should), but instead focus on my impressions of using it on a APS-C camera, specifically the EOS 50D, since I haven’t found many reviews covering that aspect.

I don’t own many L-series lenses, and no L-series primes, and before the 24mm II my favourite lens was the fabulous EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS, which I loved for it’s low-light capabilities. Now, my favorite lens on the 50D is the 24mm II, because of it’s outstanding image quality, combined with a 38mm equivalent field of view, and an impressive maximum aperture of f/1.4.

Image quality

I am continually impressed with the image quality of this lens. It’s way better than the 17-55mm f/2.8 IS, which was already good, with wonderfully saturated colors, outstanding sharpness even wide open(!), and negligible chromatic aberration. If you manage to get the focus right, even f/1.4 will be sharp. The photo below is an example of that, though perhaps not a work of art in itself

Landscape photography is not my area of expertise, but one thing I have noticed, is that the lens controls flare very well, as you can see from the image below, and some of the samples, where the sun is in the scene.

Other reviews will have more details and charts for you, as well as more basis for comparison, so let it suffice to say that the image quality of the 24mm II has impressed me, compared to the other I own, notably the 17-55mm f/2.8 IS, 70-200mm f/4 IS and 50mm f/1.4.

38mm equiv. field of view (on an aps-c camera)

It’s not easy to find fast primes that are wide on an APS-C camera, such as the 50D/40D/500D/7D, and the 50mm f/1.4 has always been a bit too narrow for my style of shooting, as I like to get a lot of context in my shots, and often shoot indoors in close-quarters, which makes 80mm equiv. unpractical.

The field of view (FOV) took a bit of getting used to, and the fact that it is a prime means I’ve been getting more exercise running around, but I absolutely love it. I have to get closer to fill the foreground, but the wide angle can create some very dynamic and engaging compositions, where you really are “in” the scene you’re photographing. It allows me to get a lot of context into the shot, while still separating the foreground from the background, further aided by the low depth of field enabled by the large aperture.

Images taken with the 24mm II up-close and wide-open get a distinct “feel”, which I suppose is because it’s unusual to see images with low depth-of-field taken with a wide lens.

Large f/1.4 aperture

One of the major “features” I was looking for in a fast prime, to supplement my already-excellent-for-low-light-shots 17-55 f/2.8 IS, was a large aperture. I was expecting a marginally more “handholdable” lens, for indoor shots, with much better bokeh.

In my experience, the 24mm II is not significantly more “handholdable”, because although it has a two-stop advantage over the 17-55, the latter sports an image stabilizer which promises 3-stop stabilization. I don’t have any hard statistical data, but my “feeling” is that this pretty much levels the playingfield between these two lenses, at least where stationary objects are concerned. For moving targets, the 24mm II should theoretically have the advantage, since the larger aperture enables faster shutter speeds. However, I do a lot of dance photography, and for this purpose, IQ aside, the 24mm II’s f/1.4 aperture doesn’t really help: It has proven to be extraordinarily difficult to accurately focus on anything moving (such as dancers), with the shallow depth of field at f/1.4. In short, image quality may be better, and f/1.4 may enable faster shutter speeds, but good luck focusing on anything that moves.

If I was slightly disappointed with the 24mm as a replacement for my “dance lens”, which isn’t really a fault of the lens, as much as my own expectations, the bokeh rendered by the 24mm II is a thing of beauty. If you can control it, you will get beautifully smooth out-of-focus backgrounds and foregrounds. It’s addictive

All-in-all…

…this is a wonderful lens on a APS-C crop camera, such as the 50D. The field of view is approximately equivalent to a 35mm lens on a full-frame camera, and as one of canon’s newest L-lenses, the image quality is unmatched at this focal length. It’s expensive, but I’m inclined to think this is a case of you-get-what-you-pay-for.

I think this focal length is good as a walk-around lens on a crop-camera, and the bokeh combined with the wide FOV, makes for some really unique shots. I have especially loved it for environmental portraits because of the FOV and shallow depth-of-field, as the sample pictures demonstrate.

I hope you’ve found this useful, and feel free to ask questions if there’s anything you feel I’ve left out. I’ll try my best to answer. Enjoy the samples, or check out my images on Flickr tagged with this lens.

The following will be a small review of the Canon EOS 50D, focusing on the low-light performance. If you want to get a more technical or extensive review of the 50D, the following sites might be interesting to you:

• DPR’s pre-view and forum
• Roland Lim’s thorough use-oriented review, and comparison with 40D and D3.

For my own little test, I setup some items in a dark room, lit only by a single table-lamp. Don’t be fooled by the brightness of the pictures – to achieve that at ISO 100, a shutter speed of 2-3 seconds was needed. Seeing how the 50D would perform in this kind of setting was exactly what I wanted to know.

Test of ISO 100 to 12800

Below are test shots of ISO’s 100 through 12800. The images were all downloaded with DPP, at its default settings, and exported to JPG. Click on the images to view the large versions.

ISO 100:

ISO 200:

ISO 400:

ISO 800:

ISO 1600:

ISO 3200:

ISO 6400:

ISO 12800:

As you can see, the 50D performs pretty well up to ISO 1600-3200, but above that, visible noise starts to kick in. In some quick low-light test I did this evening, noise at ISO 3200 is a bit more apparent than in the sample shots above, but 1600 seems perfectly usable. Noise is most visible in the dark areas of the picture.

Cropped photos

Below I’ve compared images shot with the 50D with images shot with the 400D. Because of the higher resolution of the 50D, I have downsized the jpg’s in the second column to match those of the 400D native-resolution jpegs, to make it easy to compare. The third column contains the actual 100% crop of the 50D samples.

100 ISO, 400D, 100%	100 ISO, 50D, downsized	100 ISO, 50D, 100%
200 ISO, 400D, 100%	200 ISO, 50D, downsized	200 ISO, 50D, 100%
400 ISO, 400D, 100%	400 ISO, 50D, downsized	400 ISO, 50D, 100%
800 ISO, 400D, 100%	800 ISO, 50D, downsized	800 ISO, 50D, 100%
1600 ISO, 400D, 100%	1600 ISO, 50D, downsized	1600 ISO, 50D, 100%
	3200 ISO, 50D, downsized	3200 ISO, 50D, 100%
	6400 ISO, 50D, downsized	6400 ISO, 50D, 100%
	12800 ISO, 50D, downsized	12800 ISO, 50D, 100%

From these shots, you can see that the 50D clearly outperforms the 400D.

The 400D is fine up to about ISO 400, but at 800 visible noise starts to kick in, and at 1600 it’s too much for anything but an emergency shot. This is also my experience from using the camera.

The 50D, on the other hand, seems to have no visible noise up to around 1600 ISO, with ISO 3200 being usable, although with a little noise and loss of detail.

Conclusion

Compared to the 400D, which could only shoot good quality pictures up to 400 ISO, the 50D can shoot good quality pictures at 1600 ISO, and OK quality at 3200 ISO. That is 2-3 stops in light sensitivity, and means that a shot with the 400D that needed a 1/10 second exposure, can now be shot with a 1/40 or 1/80 second exposure.

For me, that can easily mean the difference between sufficiently freezing dancers in motion, or a big blurry blob where your subject was supposed to be, and I’m eager to test the camera more in real-life situations, to see if the “lab-tests” prove to be the same as results in the field.

Anyway, I hope you have found this useful, if you’re considering upgrading from the xxxD to the 50D.