EB-1 wrote:
arbitrage wrote
Steve Spencer wrote
scott f wrote
Steve Spencer wrote
Lethimcook wrote
This might be a silly thought but don't built in TCs on zooms just make the lens a variable aperture zoom?
I for one agree with the approach of the 300GM without TCs. It's lightweight, and anyone that wants a TC can buy the appropriate one, and then shift said TCs onto the lens they want to use at the moment. It's modular. Rather than pay for a built-in TC 3-4 times you just pay once, and deal with the quirks of putting them on or off lenses. Part of the value of built-in TCs is that they are tuned to the lens and therefore lead to better performance. Sometimes that is quite noticeable. Canon builds TC into the 400 f/2.8 and 600 f/4 RF lenses and the built-in TCs produce better results than the ir regular modular TC. I think that is the primary reason to build in a TC. Modularity is good, but so is better performance and if you are going to spend over ten thousand for a lens, spending a couple thousand more for optimal TC performance seems like something a lot of people willing to spend that kind of money would want.
With regard to just making a zoom lens a variable aperture lens instead, I don't think it is that easy. I think adding a TC and making a variable aperture lens are very different designs and no variable aperture zoom that I know of has performance at 1.4X less than the max aperture at 1.4X less than the max focal length. So, for example, if the 100-400 f/4.5 was a 140-560 lens, I have never seen a variable aperture zoom that would be f/4.5 at 400, so you would be sacrificing versatility at 400, and at least some of the focal length range below that, to make it a variable aperture zoom instead of a fixed aperture zoom that also takes a TC. That certainly seems logical, but I don't think it's always true. I seem to recall Nikon users saying the 180-400 with built in converter wasn't as sharp as it was using an external 1.4x. If that were true, then that would be a fail from Nikon for that lens. They ought to be able with a dedicated tuned TC get better performance than a generic TC that has to work with many different lenses and if they can't, then they should just introduce the lens without a buit-in TC, IMO. Maybe there was a construction issue with that lens and they had trouble making it to specifications and when the TC was engaged in at least some copies it didn't operate as it was designed. I've seen people report that not just with the 180-400 but with the 400/600 primes. Usually it is very close but sometimes an external ends up being slightly better than the internal.
Same with Canon. My 200-400TC was slightly better with my external 1.4 vs the internal. But I'm sure there were others that had the opposite experience.
People always claim the internal ones should be so much better but user experience has proven that to be false for both Canon and Nikon. The 1.4x III was a little better than the internal TC of the 200-400/4. I no longer have access to optical engineers to explain if it is a true limitation or depends on the particular combination. Maybe a lens designer here can chime in.
EBH
I'm not a lens designer and I can't quantify how much difference it makes, but a principal difference between external and internal TCs is that external TCs extend the total length of the optical path whereas the internal ones do not. So you clearly can't use the same design. This might be an advantage for the external one, as shallower angles are easier to compensate. A probably bigger advantage for internal TCs is that they are (usually) not the last glass in the optical path, which opens design flexibility that does not exist for external TCs.