Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsGreat lens for the price, but not great for action in anything but noonday sun due to aperture.
Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2023
Pros:
-Relatively inexpensive telephoto with a good range of focal lengths
-very, very light, and reasonably small
-great image quality if you can get enough light
-great stabilization to stop MY movement/wiggle at slow shutter speeds.
Cons:
- f/8 aperture at 400mm is just too small to get fast shutter speeds in anything but bright sun
- overall small aperture seems to reduce accuracy and speed of AF on tricky subjects
- the great IS won't stop the subject's motion (not really the lenses fault, just not how IS works), so f/8 and the resulting shutter speeds cause issues when shooting sports/action
I have very mixed feelings about this lens. On one hand, it is great for the price, the Image Stabilization is awesome, and it is much smaller and lighter than other similar lenses, like the much, much more expensive EF 100-400 F4-5.6.
The downside is the small aperture, narrowing to f/8 at the full 400mm, and you really need to stop down one or two notches from there if you want maximum sharpness. As such, you end up running pretty high ISOs if you want to keep the shutter speed high to stop action, and the noise resulting from the higher ISOs starts to rob sharpness.
This issue isn't too bad on a sunny, cloudless day--but be prepared to drop shutter speed and crank up the ISO in less than perfect conditions. Forget shooting anything moving indoors, or in the morning/evening.
I found this out when I was trying to photograph the action at a local airshow--it was a somewhat cloudy day, and I just couldn't get enough light to run anything but wide-open, with ISO 1000+ to get even 1/500 shutter--resulting in blurry AND noisy pictures unless everything came out just right. On top of that, it seemed like it was missing focus a lot, probably due to the small aperture. My camera focuses just fine on fast movement with other lenses.
Don't get me wrong, this lens is awesome for landscape, portrait, anything where you can get everything to hold still, and you can even shoot action on a very bright, sunny day. But if you want laser-sharp photos of things moving fast in anything but perfect light, be prepared to pony up the cash for an EF adapter and an L-series lens, or use a faster, shorter lens and hope you have enough resolution to crop in.
I'm not sure what niche this lens is supposed to fill. For a beginner who is trying to save some money, the RF 24-240 is a better all-rounder, or the Tamron 18-400 if you want a one-lens-for-everything. For the enthusiast or semi-pro, the 24-240 is still better at the low end of the range, and anyone seriously trying to shoot telephoto in imperfect light would be much better served by one of the large-aperture 70-200 L-series lenses or the EF 100-400.
Ultimately, I sold this lens and spent about twice as much on a used EF 100-400mm F4-5.6 L IS II, which is superior in every way, besides weight and size.
