Alvar
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The wide aperture is great to have, even if it is slow compared to some other prime lenses, but I think this lens performs better in the middle to narrower range instead of shooting wide. Auto-focus works very well, at least better than the rest of my cheap lens collection. This is my fifth lens, my other four being the kit, a prime, a zoom, and a wide, making this more of my practical lens. The EF-S 24mm ƒ/2.8 STM will move in and out during focusing without twisting and this is one of my favorite features of this lens because it makes circular polarizer so much more convenient. It has no image stabilizer but I don't think it needs one because it seems fine without one given the small size, and to include one would push up the price and increase the size. The small lightweight lens is really cool to have, especially as my DSLR is one of the smallest ever made, so it can be a bit fun to go compact. I would've bought this lens long ago had I known how useful it is for tight spaces. There tends to be some slight chromatic aberration on average, so take a deep look at your images. The colors seem to be generally true but I often have to increase the saturation like normal. I never actually take off my circular polarizer, so I have no day time images on hand without it. The filter I use is made by Ultimaxx.
My post-process suggestion, in Canon's software that is, is that you do not use Digital Lens Optimizer, Color Blur, or Peripheral Illumination, and start the Unsharp Mask with a Strength of 8, Fineness of 5, and Threshold of 2. Keep Chromatic Aberration on as I usually have to slide the red slider to the left while the blue slider is generally left alone or pushed to the right, while 100 is mostly all you need. This of course varies overall depending on situation variables but this is what I found works best for me with this lens.
This lens generally goes for $120, but I paid $134 because the $120 lenses were sold out and I needed this for a project. The full price is $150. If you're tight on money, I think this is a good buy, depending on what you want to shoot. If you have no specific subjects to shoot, this is a great choice for hobbyists because of the versatility. You can probably make it work if you're a professional but I wouldn't know because I actually need to use this lens some more. I uploaded some of my pictures, half were images I had on hand while the other half I went out to shoot just for Amazon. My videos always look grainy so I need to learn how to take better videos, but it's a nice lens for videos. One suggestion I found online after making my video was to use Auto-Intelligent Scene and auto-focus for videos on high resolution. I was using 60fps but I will now change to 30fps. Auto-focus from what I found is not silent, so I rate the lens 4.5 for that, in addition to auto-focus not being totally good but the touchscreen makes it good.
Remi