When budgeting for your next video, just how important is that fancy lens?

When you shoot a video with a cinematographer (also known as a “DP,” short for director of photography), one of the first conversations you’ll have is about equipment. In particular, the DP might ask which type of lens you want to use. Some don’t even ask. They just suggest something expensive with a German-sounding name.

Does paying for a fancy lens give your video a better result? More often than not, it does not. Mostly, it gives your DP incredible amount of street cred with other DPs. That’s what I have believed for a long time, and that’s the key point of a new video from RocketJump Film School.

In this video, RocketJump shows identical footage to a couple of professional DPs (and one random dude) to see if they can tell a difference between three different lenses, ranging from a $15,000 Zeiss ultra prime to a $150 Canon. They were only able to match the footage to the lens accurately about half the time – thus proving the perceptual differences between the 3 lens types was virtually indistinguishable. Now of course there are other differences in lenses that they didn’t take into account, such as build quality, materials, features, etc. But the point of their test was to focus only on perceived image quality in normal scenarios.

Even as a video professional who has never bought into the lens hype (at OSD, 90% of our videos are shot on a 28-135mm Canon lens), it kind of blew my mind how little difference there really was between the lenses. I’ll be honest: I couldn’t tell a difference. If you think you can, you can take the test yourself. It’s linked at the end of the video.

So the take-away from this really is to be wary of photographers who throw around impressive sounding equipment names. No matter what lens kit your photographer is using, as long as they know what it can and can’t do, you don’t necessarily need to shell out thousands of dollars for a good image. Save your money and use it somewhere else where it will really show up on screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0XQd9zYMc0

- Brink 

Dan Brinkruff is the director of video production for OSD. You can check out his work on the OSD Vimeo channel.