EF 50mm f1.0 rarity -drool zone

The metal and electronic parts will last almost forever, I am afraid the oxidation of the small plastic and rubber parts which will become fragile.

Or may be I am worry to much.

I was able to try this rare lens this past summer (I think I posted a thread about it back in July) and I was left under-whelmed. For the cost, it seemed to be of the same optical quality as my 50f1.4; the colour and contrast were not up to the L standards in my opinion. As I said then as I do now, this is really a collectors lens........it's cool to have f1 showing in the viewfinder but that was about all the excitement that it gave me! Granted, I was only able to use it for about 45 minutes. Looks and feels exactly like the 85L......seemed fairly soft wide open and almost impossible to use at f1 in the daylight!! I would recommend the 50f1.4 before this baby.........

I have heard several similar statements about the lens, comments about it not being very good optically until you stop it down to at least f/1.4, then why would you buy one if you can get the f/1.4 at a tenth of the price!

I think Canon made the lens just to say "we told you so" after all one of the claims of the EF system when it was released was that it was designed to support f/1.0 lenses.

like said earlier, i think it's more an collectors item.

i once got to use one for about 10 minutes but i aso wasn't very impressed with the qaulity at f1.0 .
the qaulity got better from f1.4 / f1.8 .

but i have to say that the looks of the lens are great

Does anyone know why such a lens costs so much? I'm interested in know what makes a lens like this so expensive. Is it that the glass is so hard to make it's almost like making a diamond, or something?

I think it is just because there is so much 'glass' (most probably fluorite, of UD, which is not cheap), and the fact that few have been made.

I have heard it described as 'one big cube of glass'.

Because there's so much glass, and aside from the sheer quantity involved when you start making big fat lens elements, they require more big fat lens elements to compensate for the unavoidable aberrations introduced by the first elements. All this adds size, weight, and design effort to the process. And regardless of the wonders of computers, there's a little more to lens design than feeding a program the glass-maker's catalog, a focal length, and an aperture and pressing "Run".