Expensive 3rd party primes – are they worth it?

With the likes of Zeiss producing more lenses that fit onto my Canon EF mount camera, I’m often asked about the merits of such lenses for ‘taking better photos’

I use a Canon EF 24-70 2.8L for a lot of our commercial work with a 1Ds3, and no clients have ever complained about lack of definition in images.

When it comes to large prints, I’ve found that poor sharpening and preparation of images makes for huge variation in print quality, massively swamping relatively small lens differences.

But surely a better lens makes a difference? Well, I’ve heard of people using expensive Zeiss glass, who just print everything at default settings with no colour management or specialist processing.