Bower - 85mm f/1.4 High-Speed Portrait Lens for Select Canon Digital Cameras - Black

The Bower 85mm f/1.4 lens is surprisingly good for its price. Its image quality ranks right up there with most of my other lenses. Sharpness is very good, and while vignetting is visible, it is usually desirable for portrait work (the most common use for this lens). But even though you can get fantastic images out of this lens, it can be very difficult to do so. With its super shallow depth-of-field at f/1.4, achieving critical focus would be hard with an autofocus lens, and it is very difficult to achieve with manual focus. At 5 feet, for example, usable depth of field is less than an inch on a full frame camera, just over a half an inch on a crop-sensor body. This makes it very difficult to focus accurately without using the 10x zoom feature on the Live View screen. If you rely strictly on the viewfinder, your focus is likely to be off. This is made worse by the fact that this lens doesn't have an AF confirmation chip on the Canon mount, so your camera will never tell you when you have achieved proper focus. Also, since the camera really doesn't even know that a lens is attached, you get annoying "Please attach lens" warning messages whenever you enter live view or video mode. The message is easy enough to dismiss, but if you find yourself switching in and out of live view or video mode frequently, these errors do become irritating. Bower should really have spent the extra $3 to add the chip. But ultimately I'm glad I bought it and I do recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind taking the extra time to manually focus. You can get some spectacular images through this lens.