Cheap lens, huge aperture... would you buy it?

Why I decided to try this focal length

For years, I wasn’t really attracted to lenses around the 50mm range. It’s a range that gives you a feeling very close to how we’re used to seeing the world, what you see is more or less what you get. For me, that means I need to be a little more creative than usual if I want to create a world that looks different from what we simply see in front of us.

At some point, Ria bought a 50mm lens and really loved what it gave her, and in some cases, that’s exactly the advantage of it, it simply lets her capture what her eyes saw, and at the end of the day, that’s important too.

And that made me curious. After all, Ria is the reason I moved from DSLR to mirrorless, and Ria is also the reason I gave the 85mm a second chance, a focal length I didn’t connect with at all in the beginning, but after trying it again, it became my favorite lens.
 

So I decided I should try something around this range too, but I wasn’t willing to buy a very expensive lens before I even knew if I would use it enough.

And then Canon released the 45mm f/1.2, and it looked like a bargain. A huge aperture that allows you to work in difficult light, small size and almost no weight, basically a tiny pocket lens, and all of that for around €500-550... give
or take, don’t hold me to the exact price.
 

Almost a year later, what do I think?

Almost a year after buying it, and I’m still not 100% sure.

On one hand, it really is a great solution for the end of a session, when evening arrives and there’s almost no light left outside. When it starts getting too dark for the f/1.4, the f/1.2 can buy me a few more minutes, sometimes even another 15 minutes, and that’s not nothing when you’re trying to squeeze out the last photos of the session.

What the 45mm gives me

When it comes to the angle of view, it does exactly what I expected. When the scene in front of me already looks exactly the way I want it, the 45mm doesn’t need to do much to it, it simply lets me photograph what I’m seeing. It doesn’t cut half of the surroundings out of the frame or change the feeling of the location too much, and sometimes that’s exactly what I want.

Image quality and the extra editing work

In terms of quality? This is where you start to feel where Canon saved some money. It’s actually very sharp in the center for the price, but it relies quite a lot on software corrections for distortion and vignetting, and the color fringing, especially magenta and green/cyan in bright, high-contrast areas, is some of the worst I’ve seen. The bokeh also isn’t always as clean and nice as with more expensive lenses. Most of these things can be fixed in editing, but that’s extra work that I simply don’t always need to do with more expensive lenses.

Is it worth having in the bag?

It doesn’t hurt to have such a cheap lens in the bag. An f/1.2 aperture is a luxury that usually comes with a price tag to match, and if you can have an f/1.2 lens without breaking your savings, maybe the extra work in editing is worth it.

On the other hand, saying I use it a lot would be a lie. I find myself taking it out for maybe one photo every 7-8 sessions, sometimes even less.
 

So for now, it stays in my bag... I don’t reach for it often, but every now and then, it gives me a photo I’m glad I didn’t miss.