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by Elliotte Rusty Harold.
Original Post: Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 IS USM
Feed Title: Mokka mit Schlag
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Feed Description: Ranting and Raving
I’m still looking for a good, general purpose lens with an emphasis on nature shots so I rented a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 DO IS USM for 10 days. That was too long. Within 20 minutes, it was obvious this was not a good lens. It’s incredibly blurry at all lengths from 70-300mm and all subject distances. It’s decidedly inferior to the cheaper Tamron 28-300, which, while not satisfying me, does well on at least some subjects. If the Canon works on anything, I didn’t find it. Besides general lack of sharpness, it also had very poor close focus and was too long at the short end to do decent portraits. If this lens is good for anything, I didn’t notice it.
The results are vaguely plausible if you reduce the size of the image, whihc tends to sharpen things up:
However, viewing it at 1:1 the image just doesn’t come close to acceptable:
In practice, the subjects I shoot are usually quite small and quite far away, often smaller than one of these turtles. I can’t afford to lose the pixels.
The one thing I didn’t try was mounting the camera on a tripod, but I need a lens that works at least acceptably when handheld with image stabilization on. I should perhaps also give it a run in bright sunlight. Today was rather cloudy, but not to the point that it should have had a really significant effect, and I shot at ISOs from 250 to 800 without any noticeable variation in image quality.
I may try the the twice as expensive Canon EF 70-300mm DO f/4.5-5.6 IS USM model next. That’s supposed to be much sharper.
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