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Saturday 9 May 2009

Another broken 50mm lens!!

I can't believe my bad luck. And how p**s-poor Canon's build quality is. Yes, I have another faulty lens. This time it is my £308, 9 day old Canon 50mm f/1.4. Today it stopped focussing on anything closer than 1 meter away. Yes, you read that right, this lens cost over three hundred pounds, ie not a cheap, bottom of the range lens. Even if it was a very cheap lens I would have expected it to have lasted a lot longer than 9 days!!

To check that it wasn't my camera, I patched together my broken 50mm f/1.8 and took the photo of thr 50mm f/1.4 above using the 1.8 lens. It focusses fine where as the 1.4 lens would not focus on the 1.8 lens when I swapped them over.

To say that I am not happy is an understatement. I was really looking forward to getting some moody low light shots at the Japan Day I'm going to tomorrow. Luckily my broken 1.8 just about works but makes a horrible crunching noise so although I don't think it is long for this earth it should just about suffice for tomorrow.

Regular readers will know that I've had big problems with Canon's 50mm f/1.8 budget lens in the past few months - see here and here for examples - so when I decided to replace my broken 50mm f/1.8 I decided not to replace it with another bottom of the range £85 lens but with a £308 lens instead. I assumed that this would be better built and less prone to breaking down. Obviously I was wrong.

I decided to buy the lens from the website of a shop in Leeds which is only 45 mins up the road. Unfortunately they aren't open on the weekend so I will have to try to get to them during the week which isn't ideal.

So not happy at all. Perhaps I should have spend an extra £50 and got the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 instead...

2 comments:

  1. Sorry to hear that.

    I have never seen that lens go down before, though guy said he had three of them. I am at a loss for you really. This is one of the reasons people are moving to Nikon, but the cameras do render a nice full image compared to Nikon, so it is a catch 22 really.

    I am sure it will be sorted out. In the meantime, having seen a mates Sigma, I can say I rate it a lot and AP said it was better than Nikon's new AF-S f/1.4 which is saying something as that is a superb lens....

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  2. Thanks Pete. I will look more into the Sigma.

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