Originally posted by dragonfly This is baloney. A 50mm lens is just as useful as any other lens.
Well, you can use any lens and find *some* picture to take in any setting, but the point is, the advice one commonly hears to get a 50mm lens comes from film cameras where 50mm was a "normal" focal length and thus arguably *more* useful than other focal lengths. That is simply not true with APS-C. It's a 35mm lens that fills that role. So if one's *reason* for wanting the 50 is that someone said it was especially useful on film, one needs to adjust for the different format size.
If, on the other hand, one's reason for wanting a 50 is to get a cheap short telephoto (as opposed to normal) lens, such as for portraits where you don't mind standing kind of close to your subject (or framing very loosely), then go for it - but I'd say that the 50/1.7's are much better than the 50/2's, for not much more money.