Maximum Zoom Possible?
 

I am hoping to discover what would be the maximum possible zoom for my Canon 20d.

Here is the criteria:

1. Must still allow autofocus ability.

2. Must still offer an advantage over slightly lower zoom on an image stabilizing lens.

I am currently using the Sigma 80-400mm f/4-5.6 optical stabilizing lens. With the magnifying effect of the reduced sensor on the Canon 20d, this lens acts as a 128-640mm f/4-5.6 optical stabilizing lens. I am unable to use a teleconvertor here without losing autofocus ability.

There is a lens out there that interests me...a Sigma 120-300mm f/2.8 lens. The problem is that it is not optical stabilizing. However, I would be able to use a 2x teleconvertor on this lens and make it a 240-600mm lens. By the time the magnifying effect is thrown in, it makes this lens act as a 388-960mm f/4-5.6 lens but without optical stabilizing.

At the end of the day, would I be better off with the Sigma 80-400mm f/4-5.6 lens (that acts as a 128mm-640mm lens and has optical stabilization)? Or am I better off upgrading to the 120-300mm f/2.8 lens? When used without the teleconvertor it should also act as a great lens for low light conditions.

Any other lenses out there to consider?

I still have not seen a camera that I would consider buying to replace my Canon 20d's. With its 5 frames per second, the Canon 20d is great for my boxing photography and with the 1.6x conversion factor, it is great for helping me achieve a higher zoom for my wildlife photos.

Thanks for any feedback.

I can't comment on the technical aspects, but with a 960mm lens, you may be able to see South Luangwa from Pasadena!

I read that Julian was just at the wildlife photography show at the Museum of Natural History, and you may be able to get the catalogue and it may show cameras and lenses. I'm sure those photographers push the envelope on lens length.

Yes the camera and lens details are provided on many of the images in the exhibition (I went a few months back)...

I don't know if they are also provided in the annual finalists/ winners book or not...

Thit Cho,

I am considering a postponement to visiting Botswana later this year to instead do the following itinerary. This itinerary, in my opinion, really cries out for the best zoom possible, with all of the walking safaris and the strong birding at these locations:

Joburg (1), Shiwa N'Gandu (The Africa House)(2), Buffalo Camp/Mwaleshi/Kutandala, N. Luangwa (6), Sausage Tree Camp/Chiawa, Lower Zambezi (4), Vundu Camp, Mana Pools (3), Somalisa Camp, Hwange (3), Joburg (1)

This would be for late September/early October of this year. I am just dying to visit North Luangwa and spend time on the Zambezi River from both sides of the river. I would then probably dedicate an entire trip to Botswana in May 2007.

Does it have to be a zoom? You can use a zoom on one 20D and a 600mm on the other. With the 600mm IS f/4.0 you can add a 1.4x and still have auto focus and be at 1344mm f/5.6.

Or a 500 IS f/4.0 with a 1.4 is 1120mm f/5.6.

Or a 400 IS f/2.8 with a 2x is 1280mm at f/5.6.

I use the 300 IS f/2.8 with a 1.4x (672mm) or a 2.0x (960mm) nearly the whole time on safari. (With the 70-200 IS f/2.8 and a converter on the other camera.)

I would love to see the Africa House and I also want to go to Sausage Tree Camp. Are you getting a discount and do you need a traveling companion!!

Rocco, that's a great trip, and you can't go wrong with either the Zim/Zam trip or the Botswana trip. For a walking safari, you may want to bring a monopod, and I agree, a nice, long lens would be great for the walking safari, but bear in mind, they can be heavy. I know that I wouldn't want to carry my 400mm lens for long.

I have approximately two months before my next safari (leave June 28). But I have two international trips before that (just squeezed in a London/Paris business trip for early May, and I'll be visiting St. Petersburg, Russia for a long Memorial Day weekend -- both are on Air France so should be Silver SkyTeam by end of May, with good chance for Gold this year with my Alitalia trip to Dubai in November).

Michael

Roccco-

Consider a Canon 100-400 lens. By itself, it provides no more than what you currently have with your Sigma - but, it's a Canon :)

I am using the lense with the Tamron 1.4X extender. It does autofocus! You can do the math.

I bought this setup in preparation for my trip to Tanzania (now 33 days away). My testing with birds in Florida has been sucessful - but it is hard to handle.

Here's my 2 cents. Speaking from only little experience with really big telephotos.
Sundowner - when you use anything longer than 400mm don't you find a tripod or sand bag necessary? Using such cramps my style :-)
Theorizing about making 300mms into 420, 600, 840mm etc is just that, theory. What I'm interested in is the resultant image quality. As a learning experience with real life usfullnes, I'd try this. Take that 300mm (or 400mm better yet) handheld and take 10 shots. Mount the 300mm on a decent tripod and take 10 shots. Put a 1.4x or 2.0x teleconvertor (TC) on the 300mm and on tripod and take 10 shots. Load all three sets into Photoshop. Then, see how awful the the 300mm handheld shots are compared to the 300 tripod shots. Take a 300mm shot (no TC) and CROP it so that it LOOKS like the same image size from the 300mm plus TC. It looks the same, border to border, but pixel count will be smaller. But to be fair, as if we were printing both images, we need to increase the image size to the same pixel count/size as the TC image. So now we equalize the pixel count in Photoshop using bicubic resampling. Now compare the 300mm resized and resampled with the 300mm using teleconvertor. And let me know what you get. I'm predicting that the 300mm image quality without the TC and resampled in Photoshop is just as good, maybe better, than the 300mm with TC. You could do this in a couple of hours and it would bring reality to these super telephoto questions.
I'd try this but I don't yet have a telephoto lens for my new Nikon D200. I'll be getting the Nikon 18-200 VR zoom lens. Anyway, my master plan for upcoming (September) safari is to use the 200mm which on D200 is equvalent to 300mm. Then crop and resize images as desired. The D200 has 10 mega pixels to work with in this way.
regards - tom

Tom, every person is different and will get different results with the same camera/lens setup. All of my pictures have been taken without a tripod and I'm pleased with how they turned out. The majority were taken with either the 1.4x or 2.0x.
http://www.pbase.com/cjw/album_of_ph...5&page=all

I'm sure I would have more keepers with a tripod but it's not always practical. I have printed 13" x 19" (that's as large as my printer prints) and haven't had to resample them.

I think I could handhold the 400 f/4 but I doubt if I could handhold the 500 f/4 or the 600 or even the 400 f/2.8. And you could very well be right about cropping and resampling. I haven't tried it. There are so many different ways to do things and get results that are acceptable to you. Good luck with your new lens! One of the guys on my last trip had that lens. He was having some problems with his large lens and ended up using that lens for most of the trip.

I know I didn't put any smiley's anywhere but I wasn't really serious in my post. I was just pushing Rocco's buttons. :-d

Rocco, here's a zoom to think about - the Sigma 300-800. :-"

Thanks for all the feedback.


Sundowner,

Oh sure, the Sigma 300-800mm lens is only $5,500 and weighs only 607.5 ounces! (13 pounds)

By comparison, the Sigma 120-300 f/2.8 weighs only 94.5 ounces (just under six pounds) and my current Sigma 80-400mm f/4-5.6 weighs 61.5 ounces (just under four pounds).

I do think it would be difficult to hand shoot with anything more than five pounds.

I do like the flexibility of a zoom lens. While I was in Lower Zambezi last year, there was one other guest in my vehicle and I believe he had a fixed 400mm f/2.8 and he was totally handicapped by not having a zoom lens instead, watching in envy as I shot with my Sigma 80-400mm lens.

So far it looks like I should just be satisfied with what I have. Reading reviews on sites like www.fredmiranda.com tells me that there is very little improvement between a Sigma 80-400mm and a Canon 100-400mm IS L.

Weight and size are definitely huge factors for me and I often take those into account AS MUCH as lens quality/ focal length. For me, there's no point having the sharpest lens with the fastest aperture if I simply can't handle it easily - or even lift it at all as is the case with a friend's new Canon L glass telephoto! I'm not kidding - I just can't lift the camera up for more than a few seconds before my arms tire.

Admittedly I've not got much arm strength but I know that's not going to change much in the future!

So you have to work out your own ideal triangle of compromise - how heavy can you easily lift and work with (by work with I mean achieve decent results hand held if that's how you prefer to work), how large can you easily lift and work with - trade both these off against how long a focal length you'd like. And of course, price plays into quality of glass itself.

OK... maximum reach eh? You forgot to mention "affordable". :-)

Well... I assume you're no millionaire so... let's look for affordable solutions, shall we?

Some rules first; if you do not want to jeopardize image quality, I'd stick to Canon stuff. Not that the other brands are necessarlily bad, but when it comes to using them with TC's... images tend to deteriorate fast (loss of sharpness, detail at the edges, ...). Also, your AF will be considerably slower.

OK, suppose you want to use the 2x convertor. That would mean you'd need a lens starting at F2.8 minimum. Well... the F2.8 lens withthe highest reach AND IS ...is the 300mm L IS. 4400€ or about the same in $ i guess.

Too expensive? (Or; not into primes?) Then let's look for something else.

You've got the F2.8 70-200mm IS L too. A true gem, giving you 640mm stabilized reach.

Other than these 2, I wouldn't consider any lens with the 2x TC. But you could go for the 1,4x TC. Then you've got some more options; all lenses that start at F4 or less. You can find them here: http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/con...categoryid=150 .
Alas, most of them are not "L" type (I'd sacrifice zoom reach for glass quality any day of the year). There's actually only one; the F4 70-200mm L (non IS, boohoo).

Of course, you could also go for lenses that do not use a TC but have a great zoom reach by default. You got the 100-400mm IS L and the 28-300mm IS L, for example.

And then there's my setup. Rather onorthodox, but I like the results I get. Copy-paste from a previous thread:

---

Here's what I do...

As you know, TC's are only made for zoom lenses that start at 100mm, and that - on the wide end - start at F2.8 (for a 2x TC) or F4 (for a 1.4x TC). Right?

Well... except for one lens. The 35-350 L! The 1,4X works flawlesly on that one, as it starts at F3.5 at 35mm (which is less than F4, so you keep AF).

So; an 100-400L + TC is out of the question if you want to keep AF. But 35-350 L + 1,4 TC is very close to that combo ...but with a working AF!

350mm x1,4 x1,6 gives you 784mm effective zoom reach, with AF. The only thing missing is IS. Luckily, there's plenty of light in Africa.

The 35-350 L is a lens that's no longer produced, and that has now been replaced with the 2000$+ 28-300 IS L. Some people are selling their copy at this moment, and prices tend to be rather low (less than 1000€). So it's a great bargain IMHO.

In other words; I think I got the cheapest "L" setup with the maximum AF reach. ;-)

One thing you should also know; this lens is often judged as "one of the weaker lenses in the L line-up" (more than often by people who never used it). This is because they compare it to a prime lens, or to a lens with about 3x zoom range. This however, is a very unfair comparison. It should be compared to other "superzoom" (10x) lenses (like the Sigma 50-500 aka "Bigma"), and then the 35-350 L really stands out; MTF charts are better, AF is very fast compared to the others who are kinda slow, and it needs less light (lower F values).

If you buy one 2nd hand, just make sure you do not get a copy with a flawed interior coating (early lenses of this type have a coating problem on one of the glass parts inside). The flaw can be seen through the rear glass. Just search for "35-350" in the dpreview Canon lens forum, and you'll find out all you need to know.

One other advantage for a superzoom: less need to change lenses. With all the dust in Africa, this is something worth thinking about.

---

And one more final advise to you; don't focus purely on zoom reach. Pics taken at max zoom rarely are the best. There's a haze of UV light, dust, moving warm air, etc... that obscures the details of subjects. And ni zoom reach can bring back those details.

This is all very good to know - thanks for those recos, PP, I'm going to make a note of them.