Which 70-300 lens

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I have just borrowed and had to give back an Canon 75-300 usm is do, this is a bit out of my budget but what can i replace it with, do i go for the 75-300 ef III or the 75-300 usm is it worth it?
 
I have a Sigma 70-300mm D 1:4-5.6 APO DG and it is a great lens for not much wonger!
 
Why look further than the Canon 70-300 IS? Better than the DO and half the cost. It's got the lot - great lens :)
 
If you want 70-300 and IS, then it's the Canon 70-300 IS USM. The DO is better, but probably not double the price better.

If that's still too expensive, then consider the Canon 55-250 if you need IS, or the Sigma or Tamron 70-300 if you don't.

I'm hoping to have a 70-300 IS USM in my grubby mitts tomorrow (which now means today).
 
The Canon 70-300 IS USM is on my wish list once the funds are available.
 
Get the Canon 70-300 IS, its an absolute gem and a total bargain. You'll pay bucket loads more for anything significantly better.
 
but i am reading alot about it being soft at 300mm, does anyone else make a IS lens
 
Well its a variable aperture zoom, so expect a drop in performance as you go longer...

If you want to avoid this, you need constant aperture glass... which is expensive stuff.

To be honest, I never found it a real world problem. Its good and sharp enough. Its definitely superior to any of the third party lenses, plus it has IS.

The more expensive better alternative would be the Canon 70-200 IS - either the f4 or the f2.8. But you are talking about twice as much for the f4 and getting on for four times as much for the f2.8. Plus the f2.8 IS is heavy... Not that you can knock it for it because thats the nature of the beast, but just a warning if you are old and frail...

Oh and its only 200mm at the long end... peach of a lens though!
 
The 70-300 IS is a good lens and the 55-250 IS also gets good reviews, so possibly finance may play a part (about £180 difference between them).

Good luck with your search :thumbs:
 
andyred said:
The 70-300 IS is a good lens and the 55-250 IS also gets good reviews, so possibly finance may play a part (about £180 difference between them).

Good luck with your search :thumbs:
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:plusone:

the main reason fof the price difference is the 55-250 is EF-S, the 70-300 is EF.

If you arnt planning on going FF in the near future, the 55-250 is great value, im considering one for times when i dont want to lug the 70-200 f/2.8

Just remember the 55-250 has a plastic mount ( not as strong as the metal ones ), the lens does however weigh naff all.
 
The Canon 75-300 USM MK3 for the price isnt as that bad

Although if you require 'IS' then purchase the Canon 70-300IS USM

If you require or think you might be interested in macro buy the Sigma 70-300 APO DG Macro
 
I'd just like to add a vote for the Sigma 70-300 APO DG - Absolutely superb colour rendition and super sharp - There are plenty of good reviews around :)

The AF can be slightly slow but I used one at an airshow a few years ago with no problems at all :D
 
The EFS 55-200 is also non-USM too... so if you plan on shooting anything with movement in it, I'd avoid

(waits for someone to post a photo trying to prove me wrong)
 
what about a push-pull 70-210 F4 - ancient, cheap as chips and great optics
 
desantnik said:
Get the Canon 70-300 IS, its an absolute gem and a total bargain. You'll pay bucket loads more for anything significantly better.
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Its what i have, its a great value for money lens that produces top quality images.
 
As previously mentioned, I was expecting to get my mitts on a 70-300 IS USM today, and I did. As expected, I was very far from disappointed. Contrived test - picking out cracks in roof tiles from about 30m away - passed with distinction. :)
 
did you go for the 70-300 is usm, DO or not DO

what was the best price you got
 
I could be selling my Canon 70-300 IS USM soon, my 40D is in the for sale section at the min as my equipment is just not getting used.
 
The 70-300 IS USM is a top notch lens!!
 
harddrive said:
did you go for the 70-300 is usm, DO or not DO

what was the best price you got
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Not DO (as said, DO is better but not £600-ish better and if you're thinking of going for DO you might as well stretch a bit further and get L glass).

As for price, I got it in the For Sale section here so it wouldn't be fair to make a comparison. If Subaru_WRC sells up, you'd do well not to hang around - they don't tend to stay unsold very long. :)
 
I would not have said that the 70-300 DO was better than the 'regular' 70-300 IS. I used to own the DO and while I had no complaints optically, I would put the regular lens a fraction ahead.

The great benefit of the DO lens is that it is very compact. For storage it is very short indeed, but it is also heavy, extends a long way when zoomed, and has annoying zoom creep (lens extends when hanging from you neck). That's why I sold it. The disproportionately high price is due to the unique optical construction, which results in low CA and compact size, not necessarily brilliant sharpness.

I replaced it with a 100-400L, specifically for wildlife, but now I have a gap in my lens range which I intend to plug with a 55-250 IS. I don't use this range much, or I would be going for the 70-300 IS without hesitation, but the shorter EF-S lens is a beautiful little thing, very light, nicely made, doesn't zoom creep, focuses close, has great IS, is sharper than it has any right to be in its 'class' and costs £220 :)
 
HoppyUK said:
I would not have said that the 70-300 DO was better than the 'regular' 70-300 IS. I used to own the DO and while I had no complaints optically, I would put the regular lens a fraction ahead.

The great benefit of the DO lens is that it is very compact. ...
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This was my understanding, also. Unlike you, I haven't owned the DO, but I try to keep myself informed & I was surprised by the comments that DO was better than the normal IS (which is also a more recent model).

Stroller.
 
Strolls said:
This was my understanding, also. Unlike you, I haven't owned the DO, but I try to keep myself informed & I was surprised by the comments that DO was better than the normal IS (which is also a more recent model).

Stroller.
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I heard the opposite Strolls, and it seems quite fashionable to knock the innovative DO, mainly on grounds of high cost, I guess. Canon's own lens sharpness graphs show that the DO is not spectacularly good. Not that I had any major complaints there but I only ever used it on crop format and I bought it for different reasons, which didn't work out for me, so I sold it. Here are the Canon MTF graphs.
http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=150&modelid=9996

And here is a sharpness test for the regular 70-300 IS, which looks pretty good to me. Considering the spec and this level of sharpness, it's got to be the first choice, and it isn't far off the 70-200L (graphs also on this Canon USA site).
http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=150&modelid=11922

And last but perhaps not least, here is the modest EF-S 55-250 IS. Clearly designed for crop format as sharpness falls off after 10mm from the frame centre, but that's right at the edge of the picture and it's pretty good all the way there. If corner to corner sharpness is important, maybe this lens isn't for you. But for me, most of the time, and for most things, central sharpness is very good and I'll happily trade the extreme edges for all the other benefits this (cheap) little lens brings :)
http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=150&modelid=15700
 
Strolls said:
I'm confused. I'm not up to reading MTF charts right now, but I was agreeing with you in my last post. Or I thought I was. :thinking:
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I think we are agreeing Strolls :) The 'opposite' bit was that you had heard the DO was better, even though I think you were sceptical of this. I just never heard anybody ever say it was better, rather the opposite, and quite a few people then went on to prove it by pointing it into the sun and saying, look, it's got some flare and if you look very carefully you can see the DO rings. Well, it's not hard to devise a test that will show weakness in any lens, and my other point was that when I used it on a crop camera I got some very impressive results. I sold it purely for practical reasons.

MTF is Modulation Transfer Function - that is, how efficiently the image target (modulation in lines per mm) is transferred to the sensor. It looks complicated, but it is basically very simple. MTF is a true test of sharpness which is a combination of 'resolution' (the fineness of detail) and 'contrast' (how clearly those details are shown). In optics, when resolution goes up, contrast goes down, and those are the two key characteristics that are measured. Perhaps surprisingly, contrast is generally more important in that if you look at a low resolution but high contrast image, it will look sharper than one with much higher resolution, but lower contrast.

Basically, you decide the level of resolution that suits your purpose, and then go for the lens with the highest percentage contrast at that figure. In a simple MTF graph (such as those published by Canon, Nikon and Sigma) they take 10 lines per mm as basic resolution which is fine for small prints and on-screen images (don't confuse lpmm here with dpi or ppi) and then 30 lines per mm which is much more demanding. That will give you a very crisp A4 print.

With crop format digital, it would be handy to take that figure up to 50 lines per mm to compensate for the greater degreee of enlargement you need with crop cameras, but fortunately a lens that does well at 30 lpmm will generally show very similar characteristics at 50 lpmm, but at a correspondingly reduced contrast level.

If you want a crude-ish short cut to reading MTF, a really good lens will usually show its class with a high % MTF at the lowest f/number, at the edges of the frame (roughly 10mm out for crop, or 15mm out for full frame) at 30 lpmm resolution. 90% (or 0.9) is obviously excellent, 80% is very good, 70% is good, and 60% is acceptable. When MTF dips below 50%, it's getting mushy. This is quite a tough test, as you're looking at the edges where it could be argued critical sharpness doesn't matter so much, but this is what sorts the men from the boys and any lens that does well in this area is going to be extremely good indeed in the centre. This is really where primes tend to score, with really strong edge sharpness compared to zooms while there's not much in it at the centre.

Not all graphs present MTF in the same way, some tests are conducted differently, and some are not worth the time of day. But those Canon tests are pure MTF of the lens alone (no camera involved). Well actually, I believe they are computer simulations generated from the lens design only, so they represent a 100% perfect example of that lens, but a good production sample should be able to replicate it.

Sorry, got a bit carried away there :lol:
 
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