Canon New FD 50mm f/1.2L

I’ve been wanting to review this lens for a while. From what I’ve read, it’s an extremely sharp lens, but maybe doesn’t have bokeh that’s as appealing as some other lenses – mainly do to the aspherical glass. I wanted to see for myself.

Placing this lens on my New F-1 makes the camera only slightly larger and heavier than with the 50mm f/1.4. I think it’s quite pleasant to carry. The slightly longer lens actually makes carrying a bit easier.

Many times I don’t use any kind of camera strap, I like to just carry my camera around and take photos. If I have a strap on the camera, I’ll sometimes wrap it around my wrist just to get it out of the way, and carry my camera like that. Unless I’m at a sports event, and have to carry multiple bodies, I don’t like anything “hanging” on me.

So, initially, I would say this is a nice looking lens. It’s easy to carry and shoot with. But what I’m really interested in is what the images look like. Here are a few that I just got back from processing…

I can see some of the backgrounds are not quite as soft as I’d expect, but I don’t think any are undesirable. I’m going to shoot some others wide open at 1.2 to see if I can tell the difference between this lens, and my other 50mm f/1.4 lens. I’ll do a comparison in another post. Overall, I think image quality is very nice.