The best macro lenses in 2024: get closer to your subjects than ever before!

best macro lenses
(Image credit: Canon)

Photographers can use the best macro lenses to uncover all sorts of miniature natural wonders. Macro lenses are built with a specific optical construction that enables the dramatic magnification of small subjects. If you've ever seen an image of a small plant or insect that fills the frame with its subject, showing incredible levels of detail that aren't visible to the naked eye, it was almost certainly taken with a macro lens.

While lots of lenses with decent close-up capabilities are referred to as macro lenses, there is actually stricter criteria to qualify as one. For a lens to be considered a "true" macro lens, it needs to have at least a 1:1 reproduction ratio, meaning that the subject on the sensor plane is the same as or greater than its size in real life. This is the key to getting those spectacular, frame-filling images of minuscule subjects. 

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Matthew Richards

Matthew Richards is a photographer and journalist who has spent years using and reviewing all manner of photo gear. He is Digital Camera World's principal lens reviewer – and has tested more primes and zooms than most people have had hot dinners! 


His expertise with equipment doesn’t end there, though. He is also an encyclopedia  when it comes to all manner of cameras, camera holsters and bags, flashguns, tripods and heads, printers, papers and inks, and just about anything imaging-related. 


In an earlier life he was a broadcast engineer at the BBC, as well as a former editor of PC Guide.