Digital Camera Lenses

Digital camera lenses are an essential for all digital SLR & SLT cameras.  Digital camera lenses can be as expensive as the cameras themselves and the qualityis as important if not more important than the quality of the camera body.

Un like the camera body as you get more in to photography you will want to acquire a selection of different lenses.

Digital camera lenses come in variety of different focal lengths, zoom and no zoom with a large range of different f-stop ranges.

Selecting the correct lense for the job on hand can be hard enough and then you will probably find the specification you want is available from a number of vendors including the original equipment manufacture (OEM) of the camera body itself.

Additionally you may find general lense vendors such a Tamaron, Cosina, Zeis and others all have lenses of similar specifications available.

Digital camera lenses that have the ability to open their apertures pretty wide are considered faster lenses because you can adjust the ISO setting pretty low even in a low light situation. When your aperture is open wide though the depth of field that you'll capture in a picture is narrower.

Digital camera lenses are made by the company that made your camera or can be made by a third party manufacturer. These companies specialize in making lenses for a variety of cameras. Different brands of lenses aren't interchangeably. You can't put a Nikon lens on a Pentax camera. Each brand of camera has a specific type of mount for its lenses.

For digital camera lenses we often use the so-called "equivalent" focal length (EFL), denoting the focal length (mm) of a 35-mm film camera lens which has the same angle of view. So, for example, the Olympus C-5060WZ and C-7070WZ of cameras use a 5.7-22.9 mm zoom lens termed as 27-110 mm EFL. This means that the lens gives the same range of angles as a 27-110 mm lens on a 35-mm film camera.

Many digital camera lenses now come with the option of autofocus (AF switch on the side of your lens) or manual focus (MF switch on the side of your lens). For ninety percent of the time, photographers can set the lens on AF and let the camera focus itself. However, there are times when your lens won't focus easily. For example, on a windy day when you're trying to focus on a flower, or if you were photographing a moving insect, you could find your lens will erratically move and not stabalise on the object long enough for you to take the shot. It's times like this, where it's more efficient to set your camera lens to manual focus (MF).

One great thing about digital camera lenses is that there is an extremely large second hand market, so you have a good choice of new and old digital camera lenses. In some case old film camera lenses will work with a new digital camera, one such example is old Minolta AF lense will work with the new Sony alpha range of cameras, although due to reduced sensor sizes in some Digital Cameras, the focual length of the lense becomes longer.  For example a 50mm lense from a Minolta AF fil camera with a full senor might become a 75mm lense when put on a Sony A100.

But understanding which lenses fit and work well with each model of digital camera will help you purchase the best buys.

This site has a ton of information and reviews on digital camera lenses and also a wide selection of digital cameras lenses for sale.