Prime lenses VS Zoom lenses

[lance]

Prime (fixed) lenses VS Zoom lenses


Advantage of Zoom lenses
(1) Convenience in travelling.
Photographer can carry just one zoom lens instead two or more lenses within those focal lengths.
Save bag space and weigh less.
(2) Convenience in shooting
Zoom lens saves you the hassle of swapping the lenses. Changing the lens too often will wear out the lens mount and camera mount. May also introduce dusts into the camera during lens swap. Zoo)m lenses offers you stepless variations in focal lengths (e.g. between 29mm - 34mm, there are no such focal lengths available in these range if you use only prime lenses)
(3) Economy in costs
Usually, one zoom lens cost less than two or three prime lenses needed to cover the same range of focal length.
There are exceptions... some zoom lenses with constant apertures cost a lot more than three prime lenses within the same range.


Advantage of Prime (fixed) lenses
(1) Better optical quality
Since each prime lens is designed to work best optically in its specific focal length. Zoom lenses are designed to work over a range of focal lengths and its optical quality is compromised for its versality.
(Like a multi-purpose printer that does scanning as well as faxing, do you expect it to print faster than a laser printer or better in quality compared to a dedicated photo printer?)
(2) Wider apertures
Prime lenses often come with bigger max. apertures such as f2, f1.8, f1.4 or even f1.0.
Zoom lenses, the better ones, have only f2.8 for their widest apertures
(3) Compactness in size
Because prime lenses are much smaller than zoom lenses, a camera mounted with a prime lens is lighter and easier to handle than one mounted with a big zoom lens.

[Maxim]

the old school way of learning how to see with a camera is to

buy a camera and buy a prime lens to get used to the viewpoint of that lens.

so that, without the lens, you would have a vision of how things would look like on the say 20mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 70mm, etc, prime lens that you are accustomed to using.

so in short, it helps to improve composition, because the zoom is removed.

benefit, u learn to crop and compose possibly better with one prime lens.