Prime lens? Zoom lens? Differences, advantages and disadvantages.

I was recently asked by a friend of mine these couple of questions: “Prime lens? Zoom lens?”. He wanted to buy a new lens and  was a little confused by these 2 terms. After I explained to him, I decided to share this “lesson” with the rest of you. So here it goes.

What is exactly a Prime lens?

Well, a prime lens is a lens that has a fixed focal lengths. Some examples of prime lenses: 14mm, 15mm, 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, 100mm, 200mm, 300mm, 400mm, 600mm, etc. (There are a lot more that i have missed). So bottom line there is no zooming involved. These are similar to our eyes, you cannot zoom with your eyes, you can only distinguish things at a relative close distance and depending on the size. And if you want to see something more clearly, you get close, exactly what you have to do with your camera that has a prime lens mounted on it.

What about Zoom lens?

The zoom lens it’s a different story. It has a range of focal lengths available in one lens. So you can have a wide and telephoto lens in just one lens. So you have the ability to zoom and take a shot. Some examples of zoom lenses: 18-55mm, 17-40mm, 24-70mm, 70-200mm, 18-200mm, etc (There are hundreds of lenses with different combinations).

Now I will try to put a ruff list of the advantages and disadvantages of these 2 types of lenses. Some people might disagree with me since this is more of a personal choice and you can see a lot of contradictory discussions around the web about how one outperforms the other (like Canon VS Nikon “wars”).

Prime Lens.

Advantages:

• Are very light weighted, since there are fewer component elements than the zoom lens
• Relative lower prices than zooms (depends of the lens, there are cheap and expensive prime lenses) since there having a simpler construction
• Are faster (in terms of aperture) and allow you to shoot in low light without the need of a flash. So you’ll encounter prime lenses with the biggest aperture opening of f/1.2
• Some important fact is that the primes are sharper and have superior image quality than zooms. (Nowadays appears zooms that are as sharp as primes , especially Canon’s “L” lenses)

Disadvantages:

• Obliges you to move a lot (but this might be considered as an advantage since you might find the perfect spot for that subject. so it boosts creativity)
• No ability to zoom. there are situation where there’s no time to change the lens.
• Less exposure for the image processor. Since you will change a lot the primes, it increases the chances that dust enters to your image processor.

Zoom lens.

Advantages:

• Zoom ability. This can be useful in situations where you have to go from wide to telephoto and vice versa
• Portability. You can buy 2-3 lenses and you can cover a focal range from 17 to 300mm
• Flexibility. It offers you a lot of space “to move” and shoot whatever pops up without thinking what lens you have on

Disadvantages:

• Can be quite pricey since their construction it’s a lot complicated.
• There a lot heavier since there are a lot of moving part in their construction.
• Creativity. Can make a photographer lazy and miss composition occasions because they tend to stay in one place and only zoom in an out.
• Are slower since the biggest aperture opening is f/2.8

Now you might ask which is a better lens? Well this comes down to you personal choice and style. Personally I use both of them. I have used combinations of 85mm f/1.8 (borrowed, and on my “to buy” list) , 50mm f/1.8 (i love this lens and it’s extremely cheap, around 70-80$, for the results it gives), 24-135mm f/3.5-f/5.6, 24-70mm L f/2.8 (borrowed), etc. As you can see you can work with both types depending on the situation.

As a side note: there are a lot of zoom lenses that compete with the prime ones in terms of sharpness and quality. For Canon users there are the “L” type (Luxury) lenses that have pretty amazing sharpness, but are quite expensive. For Nikon users, well from what I now the only thing that Nikon marks a good quality lens is that golden ring. Usually what Canon has in “L” class Nikon had it too in the quality bag.

Tags: Camera Gear, Canon, Lenses, Nikon, Photography