Latest Lenses

If you bought an SLR before the Nineties it wouldn’t have come with a kit zoom, but a ‘standard’ lens of around 50mm with a fast maximum aperture of f1.8 or thereabouts instead. On a film camera, 50mm equates more or less to the angle of view seen by the human eye, so these were considered the ‘ideal’ focal length to start with. Since then, we’ve all got used to the convenience of zoom lenses, but while they might be versatile, zooms have limitations too. At

Zoom lenses are all very well, but while they’re certainly sharp enough, they lack the distortion and aberration control found in older prime lenses. More than that, though, they have much smaller maximum apertures. A generation of photographers raised on kit zooms may think that f3.5 is pretty reasonable, but 20-30 years ago that would have been considered slow. Most ‘standard’ lenses were f1.8 or f1.4, a 28mm wide-angle would be an f2.8, and while you might put up with a 135

The 18-55mm kit lens shipped as standard with most Pentax DSLRs is not one of the world’s greatest lenses. The zoom range is modest and the optical performance is a little below average, with soft-edge definition and a fair amount of chromatic aberration. We’ve been looking at possible alternatives from the Pentax lens range and last month we tested the 17-70mm f4 and found it a useful improvement. There’s another option, though – the Pentax 16-50mm f2.8. This doesn&rsqu

Superzoom lenses like this one are so convenient. You don’t need to carry around extra lenses and you don’t have to keep swapping lenses as you work (and risk getting dust inside the camera). A single superzoom lens is potentially capable of just about any photographic project you might want to undertake, from travel shots to sports, portraiture and even close-ups. But lenses like this are heavier and more expensive, and these are just the obvious issues. There are optical compromis

Image stabilisation is really taking off. Each manufacturer calls it something different, but the principle is the same: tiny sensors within the lens instantly detect any camera movement during the exposure and counteract it by shifting a special element within the lens to keep the image centred on the sensor. The makers reckon this can give you sharp shots using two to four shutter speeds slower than usual. Indeed, Canon claims a four-stop advantage for this lens. Although it is available sepa

The Canon EF-S 55-200mm is equivalent to a 88-400mm lens on a film camera. This makes it a great all-round telephoto lens that’s capable of capturing the action even when it’s a long way away; football, rugby and cricket matches are good examples, as well as most types of motorsports. It should also prove ideal for fans of wildlife photography, and would make an ideal portrait lens – its shortest focal length, equivalent to 88mm, is ideal for producing flattering facial perspec

This Tamron 18-270mm is a digital-only lens, which means its designed specifically for DSLRs with APS-C sized sensors and can’t be used on full-frame SLRs or older film cameras. Its equivalent focal range is 18-419mm, so it can replace the camera’s standard kit lens and a super-telephoto too, which makes it an extremely attractive proposition because it can effectively replace two to three separate lenses. At longer focal lengths, camera movement becomes a problem, and to counter th

By any standards, this Canon EF 24mm f1.4 is a pretty specialised lens. It’s a fixed focal length optic in a camera world now dominated by zooms, and compared to the average zoom it’s also fantastically expensive. But it does have that f1.4 maximum aperture, and this gives it a two-stop aperture advantage over even a fast, professional zoom lens. There are two benefits to this. One is that it enables you to shoot in light that’s much dimmer than usual without risking camera sh

This new version of Tokina’s 12-24mm super wideangle lens incorporates an autofocus motor in its Nikon version, so it’s now compatible with Nikon cameras which don’t have a motor in the body, including the D40/D40x and D60. Tokina says it’s also improved the lens coatings, which should reduce flare and increase contrast. Otherwise, this lens appears very similar to the original Tokina 12-24mm which we reviewed in issue 78. This time we tested the Canon version on an EOS

Nikon’s 10-24mm f3.5-4.5 is a new super-wide-angle zoom for DX-format Nikon bodies (ie, not full-frame). Its 2.4x zoom range offers an equivalent focal length of 10-36mm, which is pretty much state of the art right now. The extra zoom range is important. At the wide-angle end, it means you can cram even more in and produce even more dramatic perspective effects, while at the long end, the 36mm equivalent focal length is verging on an everyday ‘standard’ focal length (for many