Primes still better than Zooms

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Eddie1

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This Q may have be done to death, in which case pls point me to earlier threads
but do primes still give better image quality than zooms ?
 
Yes. But the difference is closing up.

Because a zoom needs more elements then there will always be a loss of quality. And any improvements they make to the optics of a zoom can also be applied to a prime.
 
Primes can be: smaller, lighter, sharper, cheaper. Or none of those things.

The one thing primes can do that zooms cannot is really fast apertures, like f/1.4.
 
depends how much you spend. The quality of the premium lenses from all the major manufacturers is so good, you're really just looking at issues like weight and max aperture.
 
All depends on your use and where you are!
 
I prefer the IQ of my 70-200mm f2.8 over my primes. But as above, primes can often be faster.
 
simonblue said:
I am going to say no,in the real world i would say they are on par :)
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In the real world primes can have the advantage of a wider aperture but if you don't shoot in low light or need razor thin DoF then I agree.

One thing that strikes me more and more is that people rant and rave about the smallest of differences. Yes, this is a gear forum populated by obsessive geeks :D but even so, I think we often discuss and argue about things that really don't matter.
 
I'd say the Canon 70-200 f2.8 II is a as good if not better than most primes.
 
It is a general question, if we will talk about the best zoom vs the best prime, then what we can see? Macro prime lens alone is slaughtering a lot of zooms even the best ones, my sharpest lenses i have is the macro, whether it is my Canon or my Hasselblad.
 
The Greek said:
I'd say the Canon 70-200 f2.8 II is a as good if not better than most primes.
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As good as, if not better than, the 85/1.2LII, 100/2.8L macro, Zeiss 100/2 macro, 135/2L, Zeiss 135/2 APO, 180/3.5L macro or the 200/2 IS, Chris?

Bob
 
Canon Bob said:
As good as, if not better than, the 85/1.2LII, 100/2.8L macro, Zeiss 100/2 macro, 135/2L, Zeiss 135/2 APO, 180/3.5L macro or the 200/2 IS, Chris?

Bob
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Hi Bob, I did say "most" not all.
As it happens, I sold my 135 f2 after purchasing the 70-200 II mainly because I could see no advantage in keeping it followed by the 85mm f1.8 100mm f2 non macro.

Oh, also sold my 200mm f2.8


Just my opinion Bob.
 
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I think age of the design / technology is probably a big factor eg a modern zoom design would probably outperform an older prime design. That said the modern prime designs seem pretty spectacular (sigma ARTs, nikon 1.8g's etc etc)
 
Lens design is a compromise, so the less compromises you have to make, the better the performance can be.

The main factors are focal length range, maximum aperture, and format size. Reduce any of those, and performance potential goes up. Size/weight and cost considerations always apply.
 
My experience is modern zooms of a reasonable quality are certainly almost indistinguishable from older primes. Not across the board, naturally, just in some cases.

Take the Canon 70-200 F2.8 II - this is one sharp lens. Gives my older primes (including the canon 85mm F1.8) a run for their money at equivalent apertures. But, you pay a price for that. That price is still well over £1000. Move onto lenses in the same proce bracket/range and it becomes a different story.

Overall the primes still win - especially current generation primes (such as my 35mm F2 IS) - but as other have said, the gap is not as wide now.
 
What keeps me away from zooms is still the maximum aperture, although the new Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 ART is pretty cool. When I can get a 24-85mm f/1.4 (DX) I will buy it...
 
RichardTaylor said:
What prime and what zoom?
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And this^

My 50mm 1.8 is great compared to an 18-55 kit lens, but less good compared to a 24-70L, however my 35mm Art knocks the 24-70L into the long grass.
 
It's not easy to see the difference between a good zoom and a good prime at f8.
 
chris malcolm said:
It's not easy to see the difference between a good zoom and a good prime at f8.
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Impossible actually, in terms of sharpness. F/8 is well beyond the diffraction ceiling of most high quality lenses - the best ones peak at f/5.6 or even f/4, and at a correspondingly higher level.

The sharpest lens I've ever tested is the Zeiss Otus 85/1.4 prime. It's in the current edition of Professional Photo mag if anyone's interested, along with several other 85/1.4s - and they're all stonkingly sharp. But what sets the Zeiss apart is sharpness at f/1.4 and f/2, which is in another league compared to rivals, and extremely low CA with an almost total lack of bokeh fringing. Optically it's in a class of one, but it's huge and very heavy, manual focus only, and costs £3400.
 
Phil V said:
But what about those of us that only shoot at and higher F8 about 5% of the time?
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I guess, Phil, the answer is to choose the lens that performs best at the apertures you must use.
I almost never use an aperture wider than f 2.8 and therefore prefer not to carry lenses that are heavier than I need.
Sometimes it is useful to have a very wide aperture just to get a bright image in the viewfinder, but that can be done with a lens that is not all that sharp wide open (and is probably cheaper).
Not at all easy to separate zoom and prime lens performance based upon on screen results.
 
arclight said:
I guess, Phil, the answer is to choose the lens that performs best at the apertures you must use.
I almost never use an aperture wider than f 2.8 and therefore prefer not to carry lenses that are heavier than I need.
Sometimes it is useful to have a very wide aperture just to get a bright image in the viewfinder, but that can be done with a lens that is not all that sharp wide open (and is probably cheaper).
Not at all easy to separate zoom and prime lens performance based upon on screen results.
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Which is great; and was my point.:D
Very often in 'which lens' debates, people who mostly shoot landscapes throw about statements which completely ignore things like focus speed and wide aperture performance which for many people can be hugely important.
 
arclight said:
I guess, Phil, the answer is to choose the lens that performs best at the apertures you must use.
I almost never use an aperture wider than f 2.8 and therefore prefer not to carry lenses that are heavier than I need.
Sometimes it is useful to have a very wide aperture just to get a bright image in the viewfinder, but that can be done with a lens that is not all that sharp wide open (and is probably cheaper).
Not at all easy to separate zoom and prime lens performance based upon on screen results.
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Stangely enough, fast, wide apertures at f/numbers lower than f/2.8 don't show a brighter viewfinder, nor do they show true depth of field (though true DoF is visible in live view, of course). And that applies to pretty much all DSLRs unless they're fitted with a non-standard focusing screen (eg Canon Eg-S Precision Matte for the 5D3).

Most focusing screens are designed for AF use and the narrower angle of the microprisms doesn't allow them to 'see' apertures that are physically wider than f/2.8.

Edit: correction - meant the non-standard screens for the 5D MkII. 5D3 has fixed, non-interchangeable focusing screen.
 
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HoppyUK said:
Stangely enough, fast, wide apertures at f/numbers lower than f/2.8 don't show a brighter viewfinder, nor do they show true depth of field (though true DoF is visible in live view, of course). And that applies to pretty much all DSLRs unless they're fitted with a non-standard focusing screen (eg Canon Eg-S Precision Matte for the 5D3).
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I had understood that modern DSLRs use an aperture of about f/2.2 though the viewfinder and for focusing assuming those speeds are available. Although that understanding is based purely on a geeky few minutes spent adjusting aperture and pressing the DoF until doing so starts to make a visual difference. f/2.5 seems to be the first aperture on Nikon bodies where doing so makes a difference to your viewfinder.
 
boyfalldown said:
I had understood that modern DSLRs use an aperture of about f/2.2 though the viewfinder and for focusing assuming those speeds are available. Although that understanding is based purely on a geeky few minutes spent adjusting aperture and pressing the DoF until doing so starts to make a visual difference. f/2.5 seems to be the first aperture on Nikon bodies where doing so makes a difference to your viewfinder.
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I dare say it varies between brands. I've seen both f/2.8 and f/2.5 referenced as the limit. Ironically, the alternative focusing screens for fast lenses are actually less bright than standard, being optimised for manual focusing across the frame. They also need the metering system to be recalibrated, that reads off the focusing screen from inside the pentaprism.
 
Apart from IQ and speed, I love using primes due to their size and weight, can't be beaten :)

(On a lens by lens basis!)
 
chris malcolm said:
It's not easy to see the difference between a good zoom and a good prime at f8.
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That depends.

A 24-105L at f/8 might be as sharp as the Canon / Siggy 24mm, but it would have a lot more barrel distortion, which would be very noticeable!
 
The main reason I prefer primes to zoom is that they're far easier to calibrate accurately. It's rare that you find a zoom that performs equally well at both ends of the focal range - something that is usually a calibration issue. Yes, some bodies allow both ends to be adjusted, but it's by no means universal.
 
There is one clear difference. With a prime lens you are going to do the "step back and step forward" photographers dance to get the shot. With a zoom you only have to pretend to be a statue, saving on shoe leather. So if your good at dancing or not will determine which lens is better.:exit:
 
HoppyUK said:
Impossible actually, in terms of sharpness. F/8 is well beyond the diffraction ceiling of most high quality lenses - the best ones peak at f/5.6 or even f/4, and at a correspondingly higher level.
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Only for centre sharpness, and they can also vary a lot in how quickly they lose central sharpness as aperture is closed down past the optimum.

There isn't something as simple as a a"diffraction ceiling". There is diffraction softening at all apertures. It's caused by a light beam passing an edge, and there's always an aperture edge. (Let's ignore apodising filters. :-) ) The effect on the image increases as the aperture gets smaller because the amount of diffracted light is proportional to the amount of edge which is proportional to the diameter of the aperture, whereas the amount of undiffracted light is proportional to the area of the aperture, which proportional to the square of the diameter. On the other hand many image imperfections due to lens imperfections reduce as the aperture gets smaller. So with the kinds of lenses we have,which are rarely at their best wide open, optical imperfections lessen as aperture gets smaller, whereas diffraction softening gets bigger. This is still a simplification, but less of one than talking about a "diffraction ceiling". For similar reasons there isn't a ceiling or cut-off point where camera sensor MP out-resolves the capacity of a lens, as anyone who actually checks their own lenses on different cameras as opposed to reading web pages can discover.

If image quality was uniform all over the image, this would mean that for each lens there would be a single optimum aperture where decreasing optical imperfections balanced increasing diffraction softening. Not a ceiling in the sense of a hard boundary beyond which things change, just the optimum trade off point at which shifting in either direction made things a bit worse. But optical imperfections aren't uniform across the image. Typically the centre is better than the edges. So I've got lenses where I've found that the centre is sharpest between f4 & f5.6, but the extreme edges are not at their sharpest until somewhere between f8 & f11. So with the same lens if doing a sharpest possible flower portrait I might set the aperture to f5, whereas if doing the sharpest possible edge to edge landscape I'd set it to f10.
 
realspeed said:
There is one clear difference. With a prime lens you are going to do the "step back and step forward" photographers dance to get the shot. With a zoom you only have to pretend to be a statue, saving on shoe leather. So if your good at dancing or not will determine which lens is better.:exit:
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:LOL::LOL:
 
odd jim said:
That depends.

A 24-105L at f/8 might be as sharp as the Canon / Siggy 24mm, but it would have a lot more barrel distortion, which would be very noticeable!
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True, but very easy to correct in post-processing. Many lenses are designed with a degree of post-processing in mind, as it releases the designer to improve other aspects of performance. A lot of cameras include corrections options in-camera, and some even apply them to Raws, whether you want them to or not - the Leica T being a somewhat surprising example.

Primes are certainly not immune to aberrations. Perhaps generally less prone to distortion (unless they're Samyangs!) but CA and vignetting are often prominent. Even the mighty Zeiss Otus I mentioned above has not found a cure for vignetting.
 
Phil V said:
But what about those of us that only shoot at and higher F8 about 5% of the time?
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Of course it varies with what you do. I shoot a lot of urban landscapes, in which I rarely use apertures less than f8. Flower portraits vary between around f4 to f22 depending on the size of the flower and focal length. Whereas for dimly lit indoor events I'll rarely be using more than f2.8.

The point I wanted to make was that some people don't realise that the image quality you get from a lens is far from unidimensional. We've all seen posts from photographers who've just bought an expensive DSLR and lens and can't understand why they're not getting images as sharp as they're easily getting from the good compact camera they thought they'd upgraded from. There are kinds of photography where not only is a good general purpose zoom not only good enough for holiday snaps, but hard to beat even for big gallery prints.
 
The problem with a subject as broad as primes vs zooms is that there are always exceptions, and quite a lot of them, that are at odds.

chris malcolm said:
Only for centre sharpness, and they can also vary a lot in how quickly they lose central sharpness as aperture is closed down past the optimum.

There isn't something as simple as a a"diffraction ceiling". There is diffraction softening at all apertures. It's caused by a light beam passing an edge, and there's always an aperture edge. (Let's ignore apodising filters. :) ) The effect on the image increases as the aperture gets smaller because the amount of diffracted light is proportional to the amount of edge which is proportional to the diameter of the aperture, whereas the amount of undiffracted light is proportional to the area of the aperture, which proportional to the square of the diameter. On the other hand many image imperfections due to lens imperfections reduce as the aperture gets smaller. So with the kinds of lenses we have,which are rarely at their best wide open, optical imperfections lessen as aperture gets smaller, whereas diffraction softening gets bigger. This is still a simplification, but less of one than talking about a "diffraction ceiling".
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The diffraction ceiling may not be a hard limit and there's certainly a softer cut-off zone, but it's there and it affects all lenses regardless. A good quality lens will be diffraction limited across the frame by f/8 (on full-frame - diffraction hits harder and earlier on smaller formats) and the very best at lower f/numbers. I refer to good quality lenses as with anything less there can be so much going on in terms of general aberrations improving while diffraction gets worse, that it's impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions and yes, for sure, I have a few lens MTF tests that show edge sharpness improving all the way to f/11. They're pretty rubbish lenses though ;)

For similar reasons there isn't a ceiling or cut-off point where camera sensor MP out-resolves the capacity of a lens, as anyone who actually checks their own lenses on different cameras as opposed to reading web pages can discover.
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I agree, but not for 'similar reasons'. Those theories that predict a sharpness limit below a certain pixel size are wrong not because of diffraction, but because they only consider resolution - and not lens contrast which is the other side of the coin we call 'sharpness' and is actually the more significant contributor visually.

If image quality was uniform all over the image, this would mean that for each lens there would be a single optimum aperture where decreasing optical imperfections balanced increasing diffraction softening. Not a ceiling in the sense of a hard boundary beyond which things change, just the optimum trade off point at which shifting in either direction made things a bit worse. But optical imperfections aren't uniform across the image. Typically the centre is better than the edges. So I've got lenses where I've found that the centre is sharpest between f4 & f5.6, but the extreme edges are not at their sharpest until somewhere between f8 & f11. So with the same lens if doing a sharpest possible flower portrait I might set the aperture to f5, whereas if doing the sharpest possible edge to edge landscape I'd set it to f10.
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I see your point, and there is certainly some truth in it. Again I would refer to 'good quality' lenses (or perhaps 'best quality' on this point!) where there generally is an optimum aperture where both centre and edge sharpness is at its peak and shooting at apertures either side will show a slight decrease across the frame. On the other hand, if you were to say centre sharpness vs corner sharpness, then you're probably right! Once more, generalisations - both yours and mine - can be easily disproved by specific examples :)

Edit: sorry, this is getting a bit anal and off-topic :D
 
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I have always used zooms and had like a 50mm prime knocking about, but kind of lost my mojo in photography. Now I have the D750 i'm trying something rather radical by just shooting with 2 primes. No matter where I am or what situation thats what I am doing.

I have started my new flickr feed called project 365/35/85 and I am hoping it will turn in to a fun and challenging adventure. This is of course not everyones cup of tea and some may think I am restricting myself, but I am hoping it will turn in to a succesful project.

Not that it means primes are better than zooms lol
 
JJ! said:
This is of course not everyones cup of tea and some may think I am restricting myself, but I am hoping it will turn in to a succesful project.
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Not at all, I think it's a perfectly reasonable use of lenses.

In fact, I'm perfectly happy with using a Fuji X100 (35mm-e prime) for all my holidays. It is sharper than Canon zooms (17-40mm L and 24-105mm L) and it actually takes better photographs because I find myself actively go and try to find best composition.


End of the day, no one is going to view your photo 1:1, so the IQ argument between zoom and prime are pretty pointless. A photo is all about timing and composition, it doesn't matter whether a piece of hair is 10% sharper if the composition is boring.
 
Both are better than the other.

I first got into photography when I was travelling around the world and because I needed the flexibility of a zoom I used to swear by them. Since I've moved to m4/3 for weight and size reasons I've learned to really love those tiny little primes and often select them over my zooms whenever I can. But that's the point, there's always times when one focal length or changing lens just isn't going to work (like the fast moving kids party I went to yesterday), so a decent zoom always wins. Different tools for different jobs, hence I own both.

On a related note, I've always suspected I prefer primes because they tend to be a less constrained design. Zooms normally have extra and more complicated elements to try and counter aberrations at different focal lengths and things like focus breathing, all of which messes around with the light more and more. This manifests itself in intangible ways that's often just called "drawing style", or perhaps something a bit more obvious like slightly nervous bokeh. There's something just so simple and natural about primes that I can never quite put my finger on.
 
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