Dazecoop – Blog of David Cooper – Photography, Videography, Drifting & modifying cars

Following from my post about the Jessops price matching scheme, here’s the post I promised about my new lens. The Canon 70-200mm f4 L.

I won’t go for a full blown review (although I may get carried away), but just to let you all know that this review is compared to my previous telephoto lens, the Canon 75-300mm f4-5.6 MkIII USM.

First up, the construction and design of the lens. Its L glass, so as you’d expect, its great. Its quite light, nice to hold and feels professional. The zoom and focus rings are nicely dampered and smooth and the front does not rotate, so using a polarizing filter is easy. Another nice things (also found on my other L – the 17-40L) is that you can hold the focus ring while in Auto Focus mode and it doesn’t mess anything up. The focus ring only functions when in Manual Focus mode, nothing else moves on the exterior of the lens, meaning you can hold it anywhere which makes life easier.

The focus speed itself is great. Its very slightly slower than my 17-40L, but at least twice, if not three times faster than my 75-300. Its very accurate too, and has only missed once which was probably my fault anyway. Focusing distance is quite short at 1.2 meters which makes portraits very easy and nice. It has a switch on the side which you can use to switch focusing distances. The first is 1.2 meters to Infinity, which is slower focusing overall, but means you can focus very closely. The second is 3 meters to Infinity, which makes for a faster focusing overall, but doesn’t focus as closely. A neat feature I think.

Sharpness and image quality itself is outstanding, as you’d expect. I’ve yet to fault this in anyway. There is no visible vignetting at all at all focal lengths, and neither is there Purple Fringing, or infact, anything wrong at all. Sharpness at f4 is superb as well, I think even maybe better than my 17-40L, but only very slightly. In real life situations, its near impossible to tell the difference of sharpness as aperture decreases.

Nothing else to tell apart from that I don’t think. I’ve read a few reviews which comment about the design of the lens hood, which apparently looks terrible. I’d disagree with that, it functions well and is quite sturdy and doesn’t look too bad at all. Without the lens hood, the lens looks a bit "lost" in a way. With it attached, it really comes to life and looks the part. Very professional looking, I think.

The aperture is not exactly fast-fast at f4, but it does for most situations, and I’m not one to be afraid to get my flash out anyway. The f2.8 version of this lens would be very nice, but I’ve read its very heavy, and its also nearly 3 times more expensive! Depth of Field with this lens is very easy to achieve, as you can see from the shot below which was taken at f4, 1/200th and 200mm with a bounce flash.

So much for a full-blown review? I’d highly recommend this lens. Its very light and easy to carry around, fits just nicely on my 400d with the battery grip (photo coming soon!) Well happy!