Some questions about lenses

skeletonman · Sep 22, 2007

Hi All, Its me again. Hope to get some clarification on this forum on some questions. I know they are many kinds of lens. Sometimes I will tend to get lose when there are too many mentioned here and there.
So I hope some body could enlighten me on the following below.

Wide Zoom
Standard Zoom
Telephoto Zoom
Single Focal Length

What are the differences? And what are the use of it? I know this sounds stopid. Hope someone could enlighten me here. Would appreciate any replies.

Thanks

DeepSpring · Sep 22, 2007

Wide zoom is a zoom that is around maybe 10mm-24mm
Standard zoom used to be about 28mm-90mm on film cameras but with the crop cameras a lot of them are closer so 17mm-50mm
Telephoto zoom is going to be longer. Some basics are 70mm-300mm and 70mm-200mm but it goes all the way up past 500mm
Single focal length is a lens that doesn't zoom, prime. These are much faster then zooms and generally have much better image quality.

The uses all depends onw hat you need. You're not going to shoot architecture with a 100mm-400mm and you wouldn't shoot a soccer game with a 10mm. If you are shooting an event where you need to be ready for a lot of situations you wouldn't want a prime (usually) because it is hard to change focal lengths quickly. However for portraits primes are great because the low aperature allows you to get great DOF plus you have a higher image quality because the lenses are optimized for that one length.

Helen B · Sep 22, 2007

For your Olympus E510 the examples could be:

Ultra wide zoom: 7-14 mm (roughly equivalent to the angle of view of a 14-28 mm on the 35 mm format)

Wide zoom: 11-22 mm (roughly equiv to 22-44 mm on 35 mm)

Standard zoom: 14-54 mm (roughly equiv to 28-108 on 35 mm)

(Note: A 50 mm lens is considered to be a normal lens on the 35 mm format of 24 mm x 36 mm. Explaining why is another story.)

Telephoto zoom: 35-100 mm (roughly equiv to 70-200 on 35 mm)

Super telephoto zoom: 70-300 mm (roughly equiv to 140-600 mm on 35 mm)

In general the smaller the format the easier it is to make faster lenses, or zooms with a greater range. For the small 16 mm motion picture format you can get f/1.1 zoom lenses with a range of 2.75, and f/1.6 zoom lenses with a 6x range, for example.