Which Lens Should I Buy?

We were asked two great questions on our Beginner's course recently and I want to elaborate a little more on the answers we gave on the day so that it might help readers here.

The first question was something along the lines of "Are third party lenses any good?"

The main camera manufacturers (eg Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc) make their own lenses to fit their own cameras - let's call these 'own brand' lenses. 'Third party lenses' are those made by other manufacturers to also fit those cameras and these include makes such as Sigma, Tamron and Tokina.

One thing to note is that the technology used in the cameras and lenses is not licensed to these companies so they have to reverse engineer it to make their lenses work with other peoples' cameras. In the early days of autofocus and electronic metering this meant some third party offerings weren't really up to scratch but these days it is not so much of an issue.

What we find is that all manufacturers tend to have two main ranges of lenses, generally these can be thought of as consumer level lenses and professional level lenses. For each equivalent offering from a third party manufacturer, they are generally quite a bit cheaper than the own brand.

The price points generally go something like this:

1 - Third party consumer level  (cheapest)
2 - Own brand consumer level
3 - Third party professional level
4 - Own brand professional level  (most expensive)

And generally, like most things in life, you do get what you pay for as the quality of these lenses does seem to follow the same progression.

There are a few exceptions and some of the Sigma lenses in particular are extremely good value for the quality of image they provide.

Some types of lens (eg a particular focal length zoom range) are available from one manufacturer and not another. For example Sigma do an absolutely cracking 120-300mm f/2.8 lens and Tamron do a 200-500mm, neither of which specifications are available from Canon. So you might find yourself making the selection of manufacturer based on the specification of the individual product - which is probably the right thing to do.

However, it really does depend on what you want and what you can afford. And this leads me to the second question we were asked: "Are professional level lenses worth it?"

Unfortunately, only you can make this decision.

Canon's professional lenses have the 'L' designation in their name and Sigma's are their 'EX' range.

Generally, these will give a number of benefits over the consumer level lenses:

• Usually a wider maximum aperture (allowing faster shutter speeds and narrower depth of field)
• Often a constant maximum aperture across the whole zoom range (rather than limiting your choice of apertures depending on how zoomed in you are)
• Better build quality (often with weather sealing)
• Usually faster to focus
• Able to resolve image detail better leading to sharper images with greater clarity and better colour rendition
• Work better at the extremes eg widest or longest zoom setting and narrowest or widest apertures
• Less distortion at the edges of the frame

Whether this is worth it to you is down to two things: whether you really need or will even notice the benefits and of course whether you can afford them.

For most general purpose scenarios the own brand consumer level lenses are perfectly adequate. Those with more of a serious interest may want to look at the third party professional lenses. But if you are taking images that will be published, printed at very large scale or otherwise scrutinised in great detail, or of course if you can simply afford to buy the best, then you should perhaps be looking at the own brand professional lenses.

I have owned and used loads of lenses over the years and find that I can tell which lens I took which photo with due to the difference in image quality. Remember that anything the light passes through will affect the image quality so having better glass will give you better image quality. With the sort of work I do now I therefore need to have good lenses and have gradually upgraded all of mine to professional level own brand ones. If I had known the difference and what I would be photographing way back when I started out I could have saved myself a fortune on part-exchange losses and just bought decent glass to begin with!

To learn more on how to get the best from your cameras, lenses and accessories come on one of our photography courses.

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