I've read alot about the nifty fifty

I have a 18-55 kit lens. What advantage if any would a nifty-fifty have over the 18-55?

Nifty Fifty is a faster lens and is a prime lens.

f/1.8 is MUCH faster than f/5.6.

egordon99 wrote in post #7789464
f/1.8 is MUCH faster than f/5.6.

This pretty much sums it up. F/1.8 is approximately 3 1/3rd stops faster than F/5.6. To put it in real world terms, a scene captured at F/5.6 with a shutter speed of 1/25s could be taken at F/1.8 w/ 1/250s. That's the difference between a blurry vs. crisp basketball player!

Faster and should yield better results than the standard kit lens @ 50mm of course.

Or, to put it another way, the 50mm f1.8 passes on over 8 time more light than than the kit lens can in the same situation. That gives it a great practical advantage in low light when you need a fast shutter speed. The wide aperture also allows you to blur out the background so you can seperate your subject from the background.

I keep telling my sister to use her 50mm over that same slow kit lens but she does not understand. She feels limited by the set focal lenth of the 50mm prime especially when taking indoor pictures of people who are posing. I guess people have to use whatever they are comfortable in using.

The Nifty, in addition to being faster, is also sharper. Stopped down to f/2.8, the 50 will give you crisp detail the kit lens can't touch. That's generally the advantage of prime lenses--since they're not changing focal length, they excel at resolving detail. It's a tradeoff of convenience vs. image quality. The early zooms were so optically bad it established a bias that's persisted to this day in some corners. Generally speaking, a quality prime will always be better than a zoom at a particular focal length, but modern zoom lenses have gotten really good.

You also need to seriously look into what sort of shots that you are doing. Go back and see if you use 50mm all that much.

Also consider the build quality of the lens. I had one for about 1 day before I returned it and purchased the 50f1.4. Its night and day better build but does cost more. I personally would prefer a lens that is going to last me a good while and am willing to pay a bit more. I found the nifty fifty to feel just too cheep. It has problems getting a focus lock in dim light. it seemed to do a lot of focus hunting. As well it just didn't come off as being durable. The one thing it has going for it is price. You can't get a much cheaper lens.

Matt.

Thanks guys. I guess the part I missing was the "prime" part. Basically just shooting everyday vacation/nature type shots.