A Quick View At Some Canon Camera Lenses

Canon Camera lenses are classified into six categories. Knowing these categories, as well as their features, is important for your knowledge when purchasing one in the future.

Cheap Canon Camera lenses

Cheap lenses are located at the bottom of the consumer line and are known for their very affordable cost, inferior, slow lenses with plastic mounts, and the absence of distance scales. These lenses are manufactured for cheap marketing, thus, they lack the good optical qualities and other features found on more high-end camera lenses. However, not all cheap Canon camera lenses are of low-quality. One exception to this is the 50mm 1.8 II – plastic lens mount. It has quality optical lenses even though it is manufactured cheaply.

Midrange zooms

Midrange Canon camera lenses are more improved lenses with better optics, stronger quality, metal mounts, and scales that can capture farther distances. Midrange zooms usually have ring USM motors, with the 24-85, 28-105 and 100-300 USM as the most common examples. They are good consumer lenses though they lack visual clearness that high-quality professional lenses boast of. On the other hand, these lenses are more affordable compared to their top-of-the-line counterparts. There are also lenses that fall under this category that are respectably and elegantly designed, containing slightly curved and pointed lens barrels.

Affordable primes

Canon also manufactures a lot of prime lenses with satisfactory optics and standard manufacturing quality, like the 28mm 2.8 and 50mm 1.8 metal lens mount. Notwithstanding the lenses’ affordable price and quite ordinary design, they nevertheless offer fairly respectable photographable outcome. Lenses belonging to this category are typically standard or near-standard lenses and contain no extra large angles and no extended telephotos.

Good primes

This is a group of prime lenses which offer excellent optics and decent build quality, but which do not really need, and thus don’t use, ultra low-dispersion glass or calcium fluorite crystals or other traits of L-class lenses. Remarkably good lenses like the 85mm 1.8 and the 100mm 2.8 macro fit into this category. They normally look like the category 2 lenses – a little bit round and conical lens barrels. These are sophisticated lenses, though they are not that quite as long-lasting as the fancier L lenses.

The L series lenses

Canon manufactures a series of posh lenses which the company assigns as the L for luxury. The L series lenses are allocated for expert and durable use for photojournalists, studio photographers, and hobbyists. Among the L series’ most popular models are 16-35 2.8L USM, 28-70 2.8L USM and the 70-200 2.8L USM.

The L series lenses today are assembled using metal or heavy plastic. They also contain ring USM drives and are easily recognized by the characteristic red ring painted on the end of the barrel. Each of the L series’ lenses has a common technical design aspect: one fluorite, instead of glass, ground aspheric, instead of molded/imitated aspheric, or ultra-low dispersion lens component.

Specialized lenses

Canon also makes some of the most expensive specialized lenses in the world, used for extraordinary applications. Canon Camera lenses, falling under this category, include the tilt-shift TS-E lenses, the MP-E 65mm macro lens, and the newly launched DO (diffractive optics) lenses.