Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 USM

Fun little lens I'm just a zoom type of guy. I tried a bunch of primes and came to the conclusion that I must be too lazy to get the best out of them. This particular lens, the 28 mm, was always sharp and weighed very little so it was easy to lug around. This unit apparently is better in low light than the 24 mm pancake. That was never an issue for me. Given the choice, I'd take the 24 mm pancake. Smaller, less expensive, and always sharp as a tack. With that disclaimer in mind, the 28 mm performed flawlessly. I couldn't have asked for better photo quality or easier use. It's also not particularly expensive. If you like using primes and would like to play with a wide angle at a reasonable price, you should have some fun with this.

Good general purpose, fast wide angle lens with peripheral distortion. For low light photography requiring a wide angle lens, this is great. Canon lenses are solid. However, at the periphery, there is both geometric and chromatic aberration. For general purpose use, it is not noticeable, however, for night sky photographs, you readily see the distortion in the periphery.

Great versatile lens When used properly, this lens is excellent. Wide open, it's usably sharp in the center where slower lenses would be useless due to motion blur and camera shake. Corner sharpness isn't great wide open when shooting flat subjects, but the only time you'd do that is if you were shooting the night sky. Landscapes look great when stopped down. Real life images of people and scenes look good when you have different things in different focal planes and your desired subject isolated. I think this lens might employ intelligent field curvature (IFC) since near-field objects seem to be in better focus at the edges than the edges in a flat scene.