Showing posts with label 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM. Show all posts
Mark III is in Da House
I've just started unboxing this lot:
- Canon EOS 5D Mark III
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS II USM
- Canon E2 Hand Strap
- SanDisk Extreme Pro 16GB UDMA7 CF card
- Lowepro Urban Photo Sling 250
Battery is charging and I've begun chewing my way through the 401 page manual that comes with the camera.
Camera felt nicely heavy so I put it on the kitchen scale - and then did the same with my Nikon D70s with the 70-300mm lens attached. The Mark III body alone is just 200gr shy of the complete Nikon setup.
Time to attach the hand strap and the neck strap and get the sling bag set up as I want it.
I've lost my patience
This shop isn't the only one that have been changing their delivery dates - other shops have had identical patterns in their promised delivery dates.
Until recently where some shops started listing the body as "in store" while other stores still have it backordered.
On the 18th they changed the promised date from July 20 to July 30 and this morning they changed it once again - this time it's August 8th.
And today it pushed me over the edge.
It's not that I don't care about the $200 difference, but it has gotten to a point where I care more about getting my camera than saving some money.
So today I'm setting out to find a shop that have both the Canon 5D Mark III and the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS II USM available.
Will I end up paying more for my gear than originally planned? - sure, but there's a point where wanting the camera trumps wanting the discount - and I'm at that point now.
Very cheap Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS II USM
(Too) cheap Canon zoom lens
Too good to be true - and it didn't last more than a few minutes.I have a price agent monitoring when this 70-200mm lens drops below a certain threshold.
And this morning I got an email that the price had dropped below my threshold.
So I went to check it out, and was very surprised to see the lens for the extremely low (and obviously wrong) price of DKK 77 - the equivalent of $13.
It only lasted for a few minutes before they corrected their price.
The price at this store is now back to DKK 19462 - or $3285.
This price is roughly $985 higher than the current prices at both Amazon and Adorama - it absolutely sucks that the prices of camera gear is so high in Denmark.
Deciding on a lens for my Canon 5D Mark III
Deciding on a lens for my new Canon 5D Mark III was no easy task - and yet in the end it seemed there was only one obvious choice.
The lens I was looking for needed to have these 3 traits:
- Image stabilization
- Fast
- Zoomable
Image stabilization
It's rare that there is room for a tripod where I shoot and I would be scared of somebody knocking it over when passing me, so it needed to be an IS lens.
I've never shot with a IS lens before, but the idea of being able to stop down multiple f-stops made this one a must-have.
Fast
Half the year I shoot indoors in poorly and unevenly lit riding arenas, so I knew a slow lens wouldn't cut it. Despite the camera itself having excellent low light performance I knew I wasn't going rely on high ISO capabilities saving pictures shot with a slow lens, so I opted for a f/2.8 lens
Zoom
I could have gone for a prime lens, but shooting horses at competitions means that they will sometimes pass a few meters in front of me only to ride to the far end of a 60m arena - so I couldn't live without a zoom lens.
The options
I had been using a Nikkor 70-300mm 4.0/5.6G zoom on my aging Nikon D70s. So, since I was going from a cropped sensor to a full-frame camera I initially looked at something that would go beyond 300mm to make up for the angle of view loss I would get from going full-frame.
So I went looking for a 400mm lens.
Looking for speed (f/2.8) and image stabilization (IS) I had the option of a neat looking Canon EF 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM Image Stabilizer Super Telephoto Lens. There were two downsides though - a) it wasn't a zoom lens and b) the price didn't have a very high WAF (Wife Approval Factor) - even the grey market version didn't make the price sufficiently less painfull.
Zoom lenses that could reach 400mm would be either the Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L USM AutoFocus Image Stabilized Telephoto Zoom Lens or the Sigma 120-400mm f/4.5-5.6 DG APO OS (Optical Stabilizer) HSM AutoFocus Telephoto Zoom Lens.
Both these zoom lenses were affordable, but fully zoomed they were both f/5.6 aperture lenses so they were not an option either.
Looking at the 300mm range was the same - either I could get speed and image stabilization (from the Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS II USM Image Stabilizer AutoFocus Telephoto Lens) - or I could get zoom and IS (from the Canon EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM AutoFocus Wide Angle Telephoto Zoom Lens)
The 28-300mm does btw look like a very versatile lens - IS, great range and semi-fast when zoomed out.
Initially I didn't really want to look in the 200mm range because I felt I wasn't going to be able to capture the horses properly (as in roughly filling the picture) at the far end of the arena since I would go from 300mm to 200mm and from cropped sensor to full-frame.
I went through plenty of pages explaining the different differences between cropped and full-frame, the difference in image quality, the difference in effective focal lenght and the difference in angle of view - and everytime I read another page I was more confused than before.
I ended up using ther Focal Lenght Comparison Tools from Tamron and Nikon (the one from Canon was utterly useless for my purposes)
I went through plenty of pages explaining the different differences between cropped and full-frame, the difference in image quality, the difference in effective focal lenght and the difference in angle of view - and everytime I read another page I was more confused than before.
I ended up using ther Focal Lenght Comparison Tools from Tamron and Nikon (the one from Canon was utterly useless for my purposes)
Playing with these tools I was able to visually compare the difference between 300mm on a cropped sensor and 200mm on a full-frame sensor - and there really is a big difference.
I would have needed somewhere around 475mm zoom on my Mark III to get the equivalent framing or angle of view as I get from 300mm on my D70s.
Or another way to look at it - zooming fully in (300mm) on my D70s I get an angle of view of 5.2 while I would get 12.2 with 200mm on my Canon.
Sadly I couldn't find any tool that would allow me to compare the image quality and pixel count from a picture taken on a 22.3 MP full-frame sensor at 200mm when it's cropped to match the same subject taken with a 6.0 MP cropped sensor at 300mm.
In the end I figured (or hoped) that the improved quality from the lens together with the higher pixel count and the better image quality from the sensor itself would make up for the lack of zoom.
While researching the lens it also dawned on me that the downside of not being able to get the same narrow angle of view when fully zoomed in is at the same time an upside when fully zoomed out since both lenses start at 70mm - which on my new full-frame sensor means that I can capture horses closer to the barrier than before (with the angle of view going from 21.8 degree to 34.1 degree).
Could I have gone for the IS instead of the IS II? - sure, but the reviews of the IS II (especially when compared to the 'old' IS) were so great that I convinced myself so much that I was also able to convince my wife that the pictures would get significantly sharper - even at low light - and who is she to resist better pictures of her horses :-)
I would have needed somewhere around 475mm zoom on my Mark III to get the equivalent framing or angle of view as I get from 300mm on my D70s.
Or another way to look at it - zooming fully in (300mm) on my D70s I get an angle of view of 5.2 while I would get 12.2 with 200mm on my Canon.
Sadly I couldn't find any tool that would allow me to compare the image quality and pixel count from a picture taken on a 22.3 MP full-frame sensor at 200mm when it's cropped to match the same subject taken with a 6.0 MP cropped sensor at 300mm.
In the end I figured (or hoped) that the improved quality from the lens together with the higher pixel count and the better image quality from the sensor itself would make up for the lack of zoom.
The decision
And so I decided on the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM AutoFocus Telephoto Zoom Lens.While researching the lens it also dawned on me that the downside of not being able to get the same narrow angle of view when fully zoomed in is at the same time an upside when fully zoomed out since both lenses start at 70mm - which on my new full-frame sensor means that I can capture horses closer to the barrier than before (with the angle of view going from 21.8 degree to 34.1 degree).
Could I have gone for the IS instead of the IS II? - sure, but the reviews of the IS II (especially when compared to the 'old' IS) were so great that I convinced myself so much that I was also able to convince my wife that the pictures would get significantly sharper - even at low light - and who is she to resist better pictures of her horses :-)
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| Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM |
