One great lens is the "Nifty Fifty" -- the 50mm f/1.8 lens that lets you shoot in lower light, is sharp for most of its range of apertures (it tends to be soft "wide open" at f/1.8) and, the important part, costs less than $100USD! I passed mine off to my daughter to use with her Canon 400D and bought myself the f/1.4 version for more range (at more than 3 times the price).

Recently I've been reading ongoing discussions about how happy people are with the Nifty, and since I had my daughter's gear over the weekend I figured I'd set up a test! I knew this lens is tack sharp at f/2.8, so I set up a test of four lenses at f/2.8: the Nifty, my f/1.4, the Canon 50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro, and the Canon EF 24-70 f/2.8L, a great lens of the "L" variety.

Shooting details: I took two shots with each lens with a Canon 5D at ISO 100, using a cable release and mirror-lockup to minimize any vibrations, and I chose what (to me) appeared to be the sharper of the pair. I imported into Adobe Lightroom where I upped the exposure by about 1 stop to get more detail apparent and applied a tungsten White Balance preset and kept Lightroom's default sharpening/noise reduction settings (low amounts) for "capture sharpening". All shots have the exact same settings.

So, here they are: full shot then a 100% crop. The first set is the Nifty, the second is the Macro, the third is the 1.4, and the fourth is the 24-70 (at about 50mm).

Conclusion? I honestly would not be able to pick one out and say "this one is the best" in terms of sharpness. In terms of color, the 24-70 seems the most faithful, but only at this setting; tweaking the Post Processing settings would line everything up. So, hooray! Four great lenses! The Nifty does the job!