100 best lenses of all time
We’ve all got a favourite lens. It’s the one we keep coming back to at every available opportunity, the one that just feels right for how we love to shoot. While camera bodies are continually being revamped and updated, high-quality lenses are more likely to stay with us for longer, really standing the test of time.
Picking out the top 100 lenses of all time is a hard task. Many of the criteria are highly personal, with photographers putting specific aspects of performance and image quality in varying positions on their ‘must have’ list. From our perspective, we’re naturally biased towards lenses that are best suited to digital rather than film photography.
We’ve put hundreds of lenses through their paces over the years, both in our test lab and with extensive real-world testing. On the following pages, we list the 100 lenses that have made the biggest impression on us, in terms of build quality, handling, image quality, all-round performance and value.
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Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye USM
A fisheye that covers all the angles
Type of lens: Specialist lensh
Year: 2010 Weight: 540g
Revolutionary when launched, this Canon zoom for full-frame cameras is a real two-in-one optic. It’s a circular fisheye at its shortest focal length, and a diagonal fisheye at its longest, delivering both classic options with a simple twist of the zoom ring. Nikon followed suit with a similar 8-15mm fisheye zoom about seven years later.
Price when new: £1,199/$1,249
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Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L II USM
A winning formula
Type of lens: Wide-angle prime
Year: 2015 760g
Building on the success of the original, the Mark II ups its game, being the first lens to feature Canon’s BR (Blue-spectrum Refractive) optics. Based on an organic material that’s engineered at the molecular level, it refracts short-wavelength light particularly effectively. Used in conjunction with UD (Ultra-low Dispersion), Super UD and fluorite glass, the overall design delivers fabulous sharpness and contrast, with negligible colour fringing.
Price when new: £1,599/$1,699
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Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM
Cheap and very cheerful
Type of lens: Standard prime
Year: 2015 Weight: 160g
The antidote to lens snobbery, this Canon prime is amazingly cheap to buy but delivers good sharpness and contrast, along with quick and whisper-quiet autofocus. It’s better built than previous editions, with a metal rather than plastic mounting plate, and a more well-rounded seven-blade diaphragm. It’s a good lightweight low-budget standard prime for full-frame DSLRs, and ideal as a cheap portrait lens for APS-C format bodies.
Price when new: £99/$125
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Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L III USM
The third and best edition
Type of lens: Wide-angle zoom
Year: 2016 Weight: 790g
With a progression from good to better, then best, the Mark III edition of this lens is brilliant for landscape and architectural photography – and a significant upgrade over the Mark II. Corner sharpness is much better, especially at the short end of the zoom range, while colour fringing and coma are much better controlled. It also works really well for astrophotography shoots.
Price when new: £1,849/$1,899
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Canon EF 40mm f/2.8 STM
Canon’s first EF pancake prime
Type of lens: Standard prime
Year: 2012 Weight: 130g
We’ve grudgingly got used to the increasingly large and hefty nature of most modern lenses, but this is something completely different. Although it’s full-frame compatible, it squeezes a standard focal length and fairly fast f/2.8 aperture into a slim-line ‘pancake’ design that’s incredibly light. The similar EF-S 24mm f/2.8 STM for APS-C format DSLRs followed a couple of years later; they’re both refreshingly affordable.
Price when new: £190/$179
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Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS III USM
Reassuringly similar to the Mark II
Type of lens: Fast telephoto zoom
Year: 2018 Weight: 1,480g
One of the best telephoto zooms on the planet, the Mark II edition of this lens was so good that it left very little room for improvement. Sure enough, the Mark III is incredibly similar, with fabulous image quality and super-fast autofocus. The main enhancement in the Mark III is that it gains a high-tech Air Sphere Coating to further reduce ghosting and flare, and fluorine coatings on the front and rear elements.
Price when new: £1,929/$1,799
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Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM
A lens for all reasons
Type of lens: Standard zoom
Year: 2012 Weight: 805g
There’s no beating a 24-70mm f/2.8 zoom for sheer versatility, and this second edition of Canon’s pro-grade standard zoom is particularly good. It’s a lens for all seasons, with a tougher, more durable construction than its predecessor, featuring better weather seals and fluorine coatings. It’s super-sharp throughout the zoom range, with nicely smooth bokeh and significantly less colour fringing, ghosting and flare than the original edition.
Price when new: £1,699/$1,599
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Canon 50mm f/0.95
A properly dreamy lens
Type of lens: Vintage lens
Year: 1961 Weight: 605g
Treated in 1961 as a technical showpiece for the Canon 7 rangefinder camera, the 50mm f/0.95 ‘Dream Lens’ was the fastest of its day, and a whole lot more manageable (and affordable) than the new Nikon Noct. Its headline specification
