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 p.6 #18 · A Canon RF 300-600mm f/4-5.6L IS USM on the Horizon | |
Tom_W wrote:
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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Agreed the 300-600 f/4-f/5.6 makes the most sense, but are you willing to pay $8-11K for it, assuming L quality? I just don't see this lens being less than 8K even if Canon got super aggressive with pricing. So IMO they are in a weird spot with this lens because if it's an f/4 constant it will be $14k+ which is more than double of what Sigma's version is. An f/5.6 version is likely what it could be, but at $8k-11K that's still out of reach for most people and the complaining will continue that it's more expensive than the faster Sigma f/4, and that there's still a huge hole in between the slow/cheap 200-800 and this lens.
That's why I was suggesting a super sharp L quality f/6.3 version that bests Sony 200-600 and Nikon 180-600 in all ways, bests the Nikon PF 600 @ 600mm, and takes a 1.4x very well to give you a razor sharp fast focusing 700mm f/8 and 840mm f/9 when needed. Still an expensive lens, but more palatable than an 8k+ lens, and easier to handle than an f/5.6 version.
I guess it's possible Canon releases the expensive 300-600 constant f/4 or f/5.6 version now, and has another lens in the works to compete with the Sony 200-600, 400-800, and Nikon 180-600 and PF primes.
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