Our discussion forums are a great resource for people looking to learn about photography, and it's therefore not surprising that certain topics are raised time after time. In many cases they are answered quickly and correctly, but certain topics are still subject to a great deal of confusion. One of these is the deceptively simple question of what the word 'standard' means in relation to lenses. It appears that there are certain misconceptions associated with this topic which reappear time after time, so in a bid to put the record straight, here's my attempt at an (almost) definitive answer.

There's something that's been troubling me a bit recently, and I want to get it off my chest. It's an irritation about the photographic equipment available today, and its fitness for the purpose for which it's most likely to be used. It has germinated over the course of testing an array of 50mm prime lenses, developed further with the recent arrival at the dpreview offices of an array of new fast primes, and finally crystallized with the relative lack of interesting new products and ideas at PMA. And it's this; most manufacturers seem be be thinking very conservatively, treating digital as though nothing's changed from the days of 35mm film, and simply aren't making the right lenses for photographers today.

Hot on the heels of publishing a new lens review (the Tamron 18-270mm F3.5-6.3 VC), I thought our readers might be interested in getting an insight into the overall review process and the amount of work involved. While some of our more naive forum posters appear to labour under the misapprehension that our reviews are just a few days work conducted entirely in the studio, the reality is that the process is a lot more complicated than that. In fact the experience gained from going out and actually using the product is also very important, and informs the final conclusion just as much as all of that studio work. So in a nutshell, here is what the review process actually involves.

The responses to my list of upcoming lens reviews were certainly interesting, and proved (as if we didn't already know) that you can't please all the people all the time. Indeed with requests flooding in (OK, trickling) for reviews of everything from ultrawides to superteles, via F2.8 standard zooms and fast portrait primes, it seems that in this particular field we can only please a few people at any one time. We've also had a few comments on the 50mm lens review series (some encouragingly along the lines of 'why bother?') so I thought I'd expand a bit on our reasons for testing these lenses.

The level of interest in our Canon 18-200mm review has persuaded us that we should test a few more superzooms in comparison  (the great strength of the widget is that we don't need to have the lenses in-house simultaneously for side-by-side shooting). So expect to see some leading 18-2x0 mm zooms interspersed with our still-ongoing series of 50mm primes. Lenses on the shortlist for reviews in the near future include the following:

50mm Lenses:

• Pentax 50mm F1.4 (on K20D)
• Sony/Minolta 50mm F1.4 (on FF and APS-C)
• Canon 50mm F1.8 II
• Nikon 50mm F1.8

Superzooms:

• Sigma 18-200mm OS
• Tamron 18-270mm VC
• Sony/Pentax/Tamron 18-250mm

(The Panasonic/Leica 14-150mm would be an obvious comparison for Four Thirds users, but its limited availability and high price will necessarily affect the final decision on whether we review it.)

At some point we still hope to test the Sony 70-200mm F2.8G on both FF and APS-C, to see if it can justify its stratospheric price-tag in comparison to the competition from Tamron and Sigma.