Originally posted by stevebrot My understanding has been that a 50mm lenses has about the same magnification as the human eye.
This can be true, but it of course depends on the magnification of your viewfinder. Also, I'm not sure if this is an inherent feature of all possible 50mm lenses, or if it is somehow specific to the size and distance of the film/sensor/focus screen from the lens.
But in any case, it *has* also been claimed that 50mm reflects the field of view of human vision. For that matter, it's also been claimed that it reflects the "perspective" of human vision, but we don't need to go there again :-) I'm just making some observations about field of view.