Are primes brighter and sharper than wide open zooms

"Chris Brown" wrote in message
news
In article ,
Nostrobino wrote:

Well, not necessarily, though of course the more people who misuse the
term,
the harder it will be to correct it.

Most people do not want to use wrong terminology since it makes them look
ignorant. In the case of "prime" being used to mean FFL, this has only
spread because readers who have not seen the term before, and then see it
used by people they assume are knowledgeable, naturally adopt it
themselves.

I know this may give you apoplexy, but my nice shiny EOS 5D which I bought
yesterday includes, in the box, an accessories catalogue from Canon, which
amongst other things features a complete list of their current EF lens
range. They split it up into the following categories (from memory):

Zoom
Macro
Tilt and Shift
and, yes, Prime, which lists all of their fixed-focal length lenses (apart
from the Macros and T&S).

So at least one manufacturer is using the term to mean fixed-focal length.

That is *NOT* how Canon categorizes them on their web site:

http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/con...categoryid=111

There, as you can see, they separate EOS lenses into these categories:

Ultra-Wide Zoom
Standard Zoom
Telephoto Zoom
Wide-Angle
Standard & Medium Telephoto
Telephoto
Super Telephoto
Macro
Tilt-Shift

And no mention of "prime" in any way, shape, manner or form.

But there is no question that the misuse has crept into what *should* be
responsible and even authoritative areas. In the past couple of years I have
seen "prime" misused (maybe two or three times) by caption writers in Pop
Photo, though the mistake was not repeated in the actual editorial content.
There have been a few other examples too.

The cases so far have been few and relatively isolated. There's no reason
the disease cannot be eradicated. We stamped out smallpox, didn't we?

N.