Originally posted by fuent104 I almost just started a new thread about this, but decided not to.
Would anyone like to take a moment to lament the fact that there is no low-cost wide angle prime for aps-c? Something that performs as well as any of thousands of widely available 28mm primes do on full frame?
I have been looking for months, and I just can't find anything that is well-regarded for a low(ish) price. I'd be fine with spending $250 or so on a decent used wide angle (18mm-20mm). My preference would be a fully manual lens, with an aperture around f2.8. The amount of time I have put into this is ridiculous.
Maybe Samyang will make one some time soon.
Honestly, it is really frustrating. I don't care for zooms as much as primes, and I don't want to have to resort to getting one. It is starting to look like I'm going to have to do that, though. Especially since I remember paying very little for my 28mm primes, which have done a fantastic job. In my opinion, the cost of wide lenses for aps-c might as well be figured into the cost of a photographic system for people who prefer them. That effectively decreases the cost of an aps-c system vs. a full frame system for me.
High quality lenses and especially wide angles were never cheap: I just looked at the Pentax K 15/3.5 or the FA 24/2.0 in my cupboard to confirm this (besides 16/2.8 or 20/2.8)
In film days, there was an inflation of brands which sold OEM versions of the most important standard lenses (28mm, 35mm, 135mm). Most were useable, but few offered really high quality. Just that we all did not look at our slides or negs with a 16x loupe, as we do today on a monitor. I bet, if you look at your old film stuff with high enough magnification, you will also detect colour fringing etc. with all the cheaper lenses.
Also, you should simply take into consideration, that on APS-C the focal length of wide angles needs to be much shorter, than for 35mm format. Keeping the quality up and shortening the fl at the same time equates to higher cost. And lastly, the high pixel count of current (and future) APS-C cameras affords very high resolution lenses, in fact much higher, than film needed, to actually use the sensor's capabilities.
Ben