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Detailed Lens Buying Guide

When it comes to professional photography gear, most people underestimate the importance of choosing the right lens. Most beginners start off by purchasing an expensive full-frame or professional camera body but then end up with a very tight budget for their lens. Eventually, you end up only owning a cheap kit lens, which is a pity.

Why Is The Lens So Important?

So now you might be wondering, why the lens plays such a big role, well there are a couple of factors which the lens has a significant influence on.

Field Of View

Depth of Field

Sharpness

Distortion

Chromatic Aberration

Vignetting

Flare

Lowlight Performance

Autofocus Performance

These are just a few factors, that the lens influences a lot. Notice that all these issues are quite important and affect the way your images eventually look. So now that you’ve got a basic understanding of why you should care about choosing the right lens, we should get into a more detailed buying guide, explaining the specifications & features to look for, but also how you can understand reviews the best.

Technical Data:

When looking for a lens, it makes the most sense to first begin by going through technical data, that every manufacturer has to provide! There are 3 essential factors to look for;

Focal Length

As you should know, the focal length tells you how narrow or wide your field of view is, but also how much a lens can zoom. But since there are many different sensor sizes, focal lengths might get a bit confusing at the start. So make sure to check that the lens was made for the right lens mount.

The 3 most common sensor formats are;

Full-Frame

APS-C (1.5x crop)

MFT (2x crop)

So a 24mm full-frame lens would give you a field of view of 36mm on an APS-C sensor, whereas you shouldn’t use lenses made for smaller sensors on cameras with larger sensors as it would result in a heavy vignette.

Aperture

Another vital aspect is the Aperture of the lens, as it decides how much bokeh you would get. Furthermore, it is critical when it comes to low light performance, as it declares how much light the lens lets in.

Aperture is measured in F-stops, whereas the lower the number the wider the aperture. Anything below F2.8 is considered as quite fast, and a good option for portrait & low light photography.

Size & Weight

Last but not least, people tend to forget that size & weight are necessary to be considered when purchasing a lens. You really don’t want to end up purchasing a heavy lens that you never use because you don’t want to carry it. Therefore please make sure to double-check, especially if you travel frequently!

Sharpness

Overall, sharpness is the most important aspect to go through when reading a lens review. Obviously, you want to avoid soft corners & poor sharpness, since it drastically limits the optical performance of your camera system.

To gain a better understanding of sharpness you should go through this sample review.

Final Words

Share this article with others if you found it helpful! Keep experimenting with photography & have fun out there!