Why are good camera lenses so important?.
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Camera lenses are more important than the camera they are attached to, at least in most situations. An entry-level DSLR with a great lens will take great photos, while a $10,000 professional camera with a terrible lens will take terrible photos. This is why.
The cameras are really good
A big reason why cameras don’t matter as much anymore is that even the entry-level models are great. Think about how much your smartphone camera has improved over the past decade. With the much larger sensor found in DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, the difference is even clearer.
Here’s a photo I took with my entry-level (and five-year-old) Canon 650D with a 50mm f/1.8 lens.
And here is a shot with my newer professional Canon 5D III using the same lens.
When you shoot in good light and display your photos online, there isn’t much difference in quality between the images produced by both cameras. There are other advantages to more expensive cameras, but raw image quality is no longer the most important.
What gets in the way of light matters
So, let’s get to the heart of the matter: anything that gets between the scene you’re shooting and your camera’s sensor affects image quality. It’s easy to try it yourself: just take a photo through any window. Although you can see it clearly, the quality of the photo you take will be greatly affected.
Just look at this photo I took from an airplane. It’s a nice photo, but it’s easy to see how the extra glass panels make everything look a bit blurry.
Each lens is made up of several different lens elements. Each element affects the light in its path. With expensive lenses, manufacturers go to great lengths to use the highest quality techniques and materials to minimize any chromatic aberration, distortion, or vignetting from how elements interact with light as it passes through. Expensive lenses also tend to be sharper across the entire image for the same reason. With cheaper lenses, manufacturers can’t afford to spend as much money on materials or research. They try to do everything they can, but compromises have to be made and image quality is one of the things that suffers.
Don’t get me wrong, there are great lenses at reasonable prices, check out our articles on good lenses for Canon and Nikon cameras, but they still cost $150-$600. Anything cheaper is probably poorly made and has a serious effect on quality. of your images.
Lenses control what you can shoot
Your camera is just a silly image capture brick. Without a lens, all you’ll be able to do is take selfies like this:
i’m so hot
It is the different lenses you have that allow you to photograph different situations and subjects. If you want to shoot at night, you’ll need something with a good wide aperture. For sports or wildlife photography, a telephoto lens is ideal. The best portraits and the best landscapes use totally different lenses.
While it is possible to shoot different subjects without the “right” lens (I shoot a lot of sports stuff with a wide angle lens), it makes your life a lot more difficult. Choosing the right focal length lens for your subject is a big part of photography.
latest lenses
Cameras go out of date every few years. New developments, new technologies, etc. The lenses, however, are updated much less frequently. If you take care of your lenses, they’ll last through multiple different camera bodies as long as they’re compatible, so we recommend thinking carefully about buying crop sensor-specific lenses.
Buying good glasses is an investment. It’s much better to spend $500 on a camera and $1000 on good lenses than vice versa. They have more of an effect on image quality, determine what you can shoot, and will last a lot longer.
