Compared with fixed focus lens, the biggest advantage of zoom lens is its convenience. You only need to twist the zoom ring to enlarge or reduce the picture, instead of running around like a fixed-focus lens, and you will have to change the lens because of various restrictions.
It doesn't mean that either of the two is necessarily better. Each lens has its advantages and disadvantages, and which lens to use depends entirely on our needs.
However, in daily shooting practice, frequent use of fixed-focus lenses may help to improve our shooting level. Today we will briefly talk about some advantages of fixed-focus lens.
1, constitute
Perhaps the zoom lens has more advantages in composition, and we can easily enlarge or reduce the picture by adjusting the focal length. But this also brings a problem. Zooming may make us lazy. There is also a very important factor. The screen size can be adjusted, but the screen angle cannot be adjusted, so you still have to run two more steps to change the angle.
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The advantage of often using a fixed-focus lens is that you can know more about a focal segment in your mind and know what angle and distance this picture is best, without having to take a picture in advance and change it if it is not good. Before we lift the camera, we can quickly observe the scene with our eyes and form a picture of the current scene in our minds. If we often take pictures with a zoom lens, it may be hard to imagine this.
2. light
Usually, a fixed-focus lens is easier to make a large aperture than a zoom lens, which means that we can shoot in low light without reducing the shutter speed or improving the sensitivity.
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Except for some high-end constant aperture zoom lenses, the aperture of most entry-level zoom lenses changes with the change of focal length. Take the most common C-frame lens 18-55mm as an example. The maximum aperture at the end of 18mm is f/3.5, and the maximum aperture at the end of 55mm is only f/5.6, so it is very difficult to shoot indoors or in other low light environments. And a most common and cost-effective 50mmf/ 1.8 lens can provide us with more shooting opportunities, even if the lighting conditions are not so ideal, it can work well.
3. Depth of field
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Large aperture will naturally bring shallow depth of field. When shooting portraits or still life, many photographers like to use shallow depth of field to highlight the subject. Although aperture is not the only factor that affects the depth of field, it is undeniable that most fixed-focus lenses have a good ability to create a shallow depth of field, which brings us a better-looking lens while shooting a blurred background.
4. Weight
Because the design of zoom lens is more complicated and there are more internal lenses, the weight of zoom lens will far exceed that of fixed-focus lens with the same focal length, just like a Canon standard 50mmf/ 1.8 is only 159g, while a Canon 24-70mmf/2.8 weighs about 800g, even if 28mm and 85mm are added.
Many people may not need so many focal lengths, and their main purpose is clear, shooting people or taking pictures of scenery. For those who often run around with their cameras, it may be more convenient to have a clear shooting theme in advance and choose a suitable fixed-focus lens.
5. Image quality
Of course, the most important thing for a lens is to look at the imaging quality. We know that zoom lenses have existed for hundreds of years, but in the film era of manual focusing, zoom lenses never seem to be favored by photographers, and fixed focus is always the standard configuration. It was only in the digital age that cameras became popular. In order to be more friendly to more beginners, automatic zoom lenses began to develop. The most famous is the C frame sleeve 18-55 mm.
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Although in the digital age, zoom lens has been improved from design to quality, relatively speaking, under the same focal length, fixed-focus lens will still have certain advantages. Because the fixed-focus lens only needs to focus on optimizing a certain focal segment, the zoom lens needs to be responsible for the overall quality, and will not deliberately optimize a certain focal segment, resulting in average quality, and an average will obviously be worse than a certain performance.
However, it should be noted that although the extreme performance of zoom lens at a certain focal length may not be as good as that of fixed-focus lens, for most of us, this performance should still be acceptable, unless some data control equipment companies will enlarge photos all day. In fact, for many people, even 18-55mm ferrule is enough.