Pros: Good price, effective 3-stop reduction possible, Canon reliability.
Cons: Focus often hunts, some softness, especially at 300mm end.
The Bottom Line: First lens for this range? This is great value. Not perfect but at around £350 and not £1,350 you are getting plenty of lens for your money.
hopetest's Full Review: Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens
When buying a new SLR and building your lens collection from scratch, most people will look for a utility lens that covers thew range around the 28-90mm area and the short to long telephoto around the 70-300mm length. After that they might go for prime lenses of a length that suits a specific need like portraiture or a macro lens or whatever.
The 75-300mm focal length of this lens is therefore an extremely popular range to cover and is available in three forms: the non-USM version without the near silent focusing motor, the USM version with ultrasonic motor which is fast and quiet when focusing and the IS version which has an Image Stabiliser built in, using a gyroscopic system which reduces significantly the level of tremour caused by the hands holding the camera. This can enable the taking of sharp photos 3 stops lower than the same lens without IS.
In using this lens, I was able to take telephoto shots around the 200mm mark as slow as 1/15th second and at the 300mm mark down to 1/30th second which is particularly helpful given that the maximum aperture at the telephoto end is F5.6 and so low light can become a problem.
When comparing the cost of this lens with its non-IS version, don't be surprised to see that the IS makes the lens more than double the price. The technology you are buying built in is by no means insignificant so you would expect to pay a premium for it. The question is, is it worth it? The answer is most definitely yes.
I started with the non-IS version and whilst I did get some very acceptable photos, generally found it a little on the soft side and using the 300mm end was difficult to get the level of sharpness I was after. The IS made a big difference and I was a lot happier with the shots I was getting. Is it pin sharp? No, it isn't. i would be lying if I said it was. At the end of the day, the optics on this lens are the same as on the non-IS and indeed the non-USM version. If we want to talk crude statistics, we would therefore have to say you are paying about £350 for a lens which optically is worth about £160. The rest is the image stabilisation but that does not help the optical dynamics of the lens.
The softness that I felt was there before, after taking account of the level caused by hand tremours, is still there and there is some chromatic aberration, albeit only a relatively small amount and certainly acceptable for a lens of this price. This lens definitely needs good quality light even with the IS, and by that I mean the clarity of light rather than the level. If you are not sure what I mean, think about a beautiful summer's early evening after a gorgeous day and the sun dropping in the sky creating that beautiful golden light that makes everything look so much more beautiful. The level of light drops but the clarity of the light is sharper than at any time of the day and this lens works well with that.
On an ordinary day with average light, you will find this lens a touch lacking in sharpness but a good all round lens for the range it covers. Sharpness is not everything in a photograph, there are many other aspects that go together to produce a good picture and what this lens lacks in sharpness it makes up for in being very user friendly and comfortable to use. The addition of the IS makes this a lens you can rely on to give you decent pictures. Without it I would not particularly recommend this lens but with it I feel it is good value for money.
Build quality is good but not exceptional and autofcous is almost silent. However you need to be very careful if you need a special shot that you only get one chance with. This lens does tend to have hunt problems at times. You can be very close to being in focus, half-press the shutter release and the lens goes off hunting throughout its range, usually either not then finding sharpness or taking so long to do so that the opportunity is gone. The lack of a range limiting switch means the lens has to go throughout its long range where a limiter would keep it restricted to a smaller range and thus make it faster.
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