What is kit lens? Kit lens is a lens that is usually bundled with your dSLR camera. The quality of the kit lens usually depends on the camera. For example, when you buy an entry level dSLR such as Canon Rebel / 4xx series or Nikon D40, D60 or D5000, you will get entry level kit lens. This kit lens has many limitation. On the other hand, when you buy high-end dSLR camera such as Canon 5D, it is bundled with higher end kit lens like Canon 24-105mm f4 L IS USM lens.
In this post, I would like to discuss primarily entry level kit lens. The typical kit lens has focal length around 18mm to 55mm or equivalent to 27mm-88mm in full frame camera. Usually, the kit lens has variable maximum aperture depending on its focal length. Generally it is from f/3.5 to f/5.6. Most of the kit lenses are light weight, and made by plastic. The quality of kit lens is relatively poorer than higher-end lenses.
The differences between kit lens and high-end lens
So how to maximize the potential of your kit lens so that you can produce image quality closer to the high-end lenses? First of all, we need to understand kit lens limitation comparing with high-end lens.
They are:
- Build quality of kit lens is low. The casing is usually made by plastic.
- Auto focus speed is slower especially to track moving object.
- Maximum aperture is quite small and vary depend on its focal length. For example: f/3.5 – 5.6. On the other hand, higher quality lens usually has constant and bigger maximum aperture, such as f/4, f/2.8, f/1.4, etc.
- Bokeh or background blur is not creamy and the out of focus object is rendered as hexagonal instead of perfect round.
- Produce lower contrast image
- Soft result in the edge of image.
- The edge is not sharp.
- Chromatic abberation, vignetting and flare is relatively high.
For those reasons, many serious amateur or professional photographers are willing to buy high-end lenses despite the price might be five to ten times the kit lens.If you have kit lens, don’t worry. I have several tips to maximize your kit lens’ potential
- First of all, I suggest kit lens users to take photos with 1-2 tops higher than the maximum aperture that the lens allow if possible. For example, if the lens has maximum aperture of f/3.5 then, use f/4 or f/5.6 for sharper image, and shoot at f/8-f/11 in the tele zoom range (50-55mm) You will get crisper and sharper image. This principle also usually work well with medium grade lens.
- Try to avoid (except if you really want the effect) using extreme focal length especially in wide (18mm) atau tele end (55mm). It is better to use in between such as 24-40mm.
- To handle vignetting, or corner softness, when composing a photo, give a little bit area in the edge, so you can crop it out in post processing.
- To limit the appearance of lens flare, don’t point your camera to the strong light source such as sun directly. Using lens hood will help to limit strong light coming from the sides, top and bottom of the lens. Sometimes, filter could reflect light and cause undesirable lens flare. So becareful when you are using filter.
- Because of the casing is made by plastic, you need to handle it with care. It is not weatherproof or waterproof.
- To handle low contrast image is easier because we can do post processing in image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom.
Those are several tips that I hope will help kit lens users to get the most of the lens.
Thank you for reading.
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