Yongnuo YN 50 mm f/1.8 review - Introduction

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Yongnuo YN 50 mm f/1.8

26 January 2015

Arkadiusz Olech

1. Introduction

The Chinese Yongnuo company debuted on our marked with their flashes, deceptively similar to the Canon products. During three years Yongnuo were launching only flashes and releases. However the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015 saw a real crop of Yongnuo optical instruments - they launched the 1.8/50, the 2/35 and the1.4/50 lenses and the 2x teleconverter. All of these devices featured EF mounts and looked like copies of the well-known Canon products.

As Lenstip.com doesn’t support fakes or theft of intellectual property protected by international copyright laws, we sent a letter to Canon before testing any Yongnuo product with a request to clarify their stance. Canon ignored our letter – we haven’t got any reply - so we assumed they don’t have any legal claims concerning Yongnuo products and we can test them with a clear conscience.

As the first we chose the Yongnuo 1.8/50 to undergo the testing routine, employing our standard procedures. In order to gather as much information as possible concerning the differences between the Yongnuo and the Canon we decided to enlarge our measurements by precise assessment of its focal length, aperture, transmission and an ‘autopsy’ of both instruments to see whether they differ inside. Happy reading!

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We would like to thank the FoxFoto company, the Polish distributor of the Yongnuo products, for lending us the lens and Mr. Marcin Szczurowski for helping us with the testing.

You are also invited to get acquainted with our test procedure, described in the article "How do we test lenses?" If you feel it’s still not enough, please go to our FAQ section where you can find some further explanation.