I have had a couple of Canon 100mm F/2.8 lenses and one 180mm F/3.5 lens. These are touted as good Telephoto lenses; however while all three lenses were sharp in close, they were all noticeably less sharp at infinity focus for distance objects when compared to the 70-200mm zooms.
Anyone have conflicting experience or know of a good macro that truly does stand up to the 70-200mm zooms at infinity focus for distance subjects?
I've shot the 180 f/3.5 on a 40D with macro work (obviously) and as a tele prime. All of my shots have been tack sharp (well, not *all*, but that's user error). PM me if you want to see some shots (I'm in the middle of moving and everything is packed).
Well, no, you've got an out of focus tree in the background!
Still, once you reach a distance of 50 times the focal length or so, there shouldn't be too much difference between the optical performance in that range and at true optical infinity.
I have had a couple of Canon 100mm F/2.8 lenses and one 180mm F/3.5 lens. These are touted as good Telephoto lenses; however while all three lenses were sharp in close, they were all noticeably less sharp at infinity focus for distance objects when compared to the 70-200mm zooms.
Anyone have conflicting experience or know of a good macro that truly does stand up to the 70-200mm zooms at infinity focus for distance subjects?
I can't comment about zooms since I don't own any. But I do own a 100 f2.8 USM macro and 100 f2. I did infinity testing to determine if the macro was worse in resolution at infinity vs a good prime. From f4 and more closed, there was no difference at 100% pixels between the 100 f2 and the macro.
Since I assume the 100f2 is better in resolution to the zoom, I would think that either 100 prime would out-resolve the zoom.
I have an EF 50 2.5 CM I've shot with since the early 1990s. I mainly used it for general photography and it is sharp from close focus to infinity. The only lens I even owned that was softer at infinity than other distances was my EF 50 1.4 USM. On the other hand, my EF-s 17-55 2.8 is softer at close focus than at other distances.
Thank you all for your comments - anyone else? perhaps have direct pics to share, I am noticing a few people echoing my concerns about sharpness at a distance around the web, but they are spotty.
MTF resolution tests (at infinity) published at the old photodo site, includes five macro lenses in the top fifteen. Test results for a total of 398 35mm SLR lenses were reported at this site. Here's the top-fifteen list, with the photodo averaged MTF score at the start of each line (it's a logarithmic scale with a theoretical maximum score of 5):
Those macros are in pretty good company for resolution at infinity focus. I'm confident that they're considerably better than the non-macros for closeup work.
The Canon EF 50/2.5 Macro is in the top-thirty, with photodo MTF p=4.4; the Canon EF 180/3.5L is in the top-100, with p=3.9; and the Canon EF 100/2.8 macros weren't tested.
