Can a 20-Year-Old Canon Prime Still Beat Its RF Replacement?

Plenty of photographers hang on to Canon's old EF f/1.2 primes because they swear those lenses render people in a way modern glass can't touch. That belief gets tested directly on a portrait shoot, with EF classics adapted to a current RF body and shot side by side against their RF replacements.

James Reader sets up a blind test early on, asking you to guess which portrait came from the EF 50mm f/1.2, the RF 50mm f/1.2, and the budget RF 50mm f/1.8. The differences he pulls out are real but subtle. The EF lens produces a softer, lower-contrast image, while the RF 50mm f/1.2 gives punchier files with much stronger subject separation and, surprisingly, smoother bokeh despite being sharper. Reader's most interesting finding is that the budget RF prime shares more of the EF lens's gentle, low-contrast character than the flagship RF does, which flips the usual assumption that cheaper glass means worse rendering.

The 85mm comparison is where Reader gets the most invested, pitting the 2006-era EF 85mm f/1.2L II against the RF 85mm f/1.4 VCM. The EF lens delivers a dreamy look with highlights that bloom and a warmth in skin tones that he clearly prefers straight out of camera. The RF is sharper, resolves more texture across the frame, and tracks eyes beautifully, though some scenes came out closer than he expected. He also flags the tradeoffs that come with older glass: more chromatic aberration in high-contrast light, peeling coatings on a lens this age, and autofocus that occasionally front-focuses on eyelashes rather than the eye. On his Canon EOS R6 Mark III, both EF primes tracked moving subjects far better than their age would suggest.

There's a broader principle buried in these results worth pulling out. Resolution and skin texture are linked, and portrait photographers have quietly relied on that connection for decades. A lens that resolves every pore hands you more retouching work, while a gentler-rendering optic does some of that softening in-camera before you ever open a file. This is the same logic behind pro-mist and black-mist filters, which sell in large numbers precisely because shooters want to knock the clinical edge off modern lenses. Understanding that lets you treat lens choice as a creative decision rather than a spec-sheet race. If you shoot weddings or editorial work with heavy retouching, the sharper RF glass saves time on cleanup and separation. If you want a flattering, low-processing look for beauty or lifestyle portraits, an older, softer prime can be the right tool. Neither answer is universal, which is exactly why Reader keeps two very different lenses in his bag.

His conclusions land in a place that's genuinely useful if you're weighing an upgrade. He'd steer most people off the EF 50mm f/1.2 toward the smaller, cheaper, sharper RF 50mm f/1.8 for a similar character, or the RF 50mm f/1.2 if you shoot fifties professionally and want everything at once. The EF 85mm f/1.2L II is the exception he can't quite let go of, calling it a different flavor rather than an inferior lens and admitting he'd buy one to shoot alongside an RF 85mm even now.

Watch the full breakdown above to see the blind-test reveals and decide for yourself whether the old EF magic is real or just nostalgia.