The Lenses We Would Have If We Could Have No Other Lenses [POLL RESULTS]

A few weeks back I asked a loaded question: If You Could Only Have One Lens, What Would It Be? I knew from the start that it’d be tough question for most, as it was for me. Picking one lens when many of us shoot varied subject matter would present special problems.

I was, however, encouraged by the responses, especially the explanations. It was evident that a lot of DSLR owners would keep their current lens, especially those with the Nikon 18-200mm VR. And while a zoom seemed like the obvious choice for all around use, nearly one third of those responding chose a fixed focal length lens (and half of those were a 50mm of one type or another). After scouring through the results I especially appreciated Chris’ answer, “My contact lenses; without them I can’t see anything…”

Here now are the numbers from a purely human count of the responses. If someone picked two lenses, I threw out the answer. If the answer was unclear, I threw it out. All in all there were 334 tallies for 82 different lenses. This is not a scientific poll, if that wasn’t stated clearly before.

The other 57 lenses with two or less votes are not shown here. All in all they garnered less than 22% of the total mentions and they covered most of the 35m DLSR lenses available. If you care to peruse the rest of the mentions, the original post is here. And before someone calls me on it, I grouped the Leica 50mm Noctiluxes for easy of posting. That’s one hefty price for a nice lens!