Tom_W
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 p.6 #16 · A Canon RF 300-600mm f/4-5.6L IS USM on the Horizon | |
rscheffler wrote:
This was exactly my thinking in my earlier post. Lots of Canon shooters apparently are envious of the Nikon PF primes and a higher priced, higher specced zoom in this range with fast AF, great IS and excellent optics, will naturally compete with these PF primes more than the lower cost, lower IQ zooms like the 200-600 and 180-600. This is where the 200-800 is supposed to compete.
The tradeoff will be that the Canon will be a zoom rather than a prime, which means it will likely be a bit larger and heavier. The apparent birder argument appears to be that when one is typically reach limited, a zoom provides no benefit. But I think from Canon's perspective, a zoom with prime-level quality provides a marketing benefit and a potentially broader user base.
It's not a lens that interests me for field and arena sports, but it would be interesting for motorsports where one can be reach limited at some trackside locations, but not others. The slowness is less of a concern because ideal shutter speeds are relatively slow to allow some wheel motion and the resulting size and weight reduction compared to something like a 600/4 or 800/5.6 is welcome when one is hiking considerable distances around a track. Longer than 600 can also be problematic due to the immense amount of heat radiated by tracks on sunny days, making long shots with 800 or 1200 only realistic first thing in the morning, or on bad weather days....Show more →
As something of a birder (sort of), I have to say that reach is the biggest factor. Aperture is also quite important, but that competes with size since it's generally a walkabout hobby for most of us. Yeah, you can bring a monopod or tripod, but those can get in the way in warbler season when there are a plethora of birders competing for every square foot of standing space.
A high quality 300-600 f/5.6 would be a step above the competition in many ways - obviously, the zoom feature is still quite useful even if you're at 600 80% of the time, but 600 at f/5.6 is 2/3 of a stop faster than the 100-500 at f/7.1 and 500 mm. So a little bit more reach and 2/3 of a stop more aperture, which may not matter out in the sun but in a darker wooded area, especially if you're using an R7 to gain "pixels per duck", every stop of light is a help in the battle of shutter speed vs. noise.
Right now, I've been using my 100-500 on the R7, but I've recently picked up a 200-800 and will be using it on my R5. I give up a little aperture, the image framing is kind of a wash (800 on full frame vs 500 on the crop give similar "reach"), but I benefit from more pixels on the subject with the R5 as well as an improvement in high ISO noise when I'm shooting up there in the stratosphere. Holding steady at 800 mm will be a challenge, though I was able to use IS and leaning against the back of an Applebee's building across from my hotel a few weeks ago to get a few steady shots of the eclipse. Limited myself to around 500 mm or so due to the slow shutter speed just making 800 a bit too shaky.
I will note that today's AI-based noise reduction functions, at least the one in LR that I've used, is incredibly good at cleaning up images. But it is a little more time consuming so I limit it to images that I really want to keep. I certainly wouldn't normally batch-process 100 images with that unless I was heading out for lunch while the computer churned through them. (slight exaggeration there.)
If a 300-600 f/5.6L were around initially, I'd have never gotten the 100-500 and probably would not have jumped on the 200-800 either. 300-600 with a 1.4X teleconverter would be pretty much all I would need for my purposes. Of course, as my dad and others used to say, "what has NEED got to do with it?". 
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