I bought it on a refurb sale 2 years ago for $390 which was a steal. Honestly though, I rarely use it. I take it when traveling due to the light weight size. Tried it for soccer, but my main lens for that is 300 2.8. It did fine but the photos were more like “snapshots” with a busy background. Birding and air shows are why I keep it around.
CarlosJG wrote:
I know that perfectly well. But I'd rather rely on personal experiences than on reviews that are often paid for and biased.
Rely on whomever you wish. However, many of us know there are some competent reviewers online that are not paid by the companies they are reviewing gear for, nor are they biased. They also have used the gear more extensively and longer for some FM members.
e.g. An online reviewer points out all these shortcomings of the RF 100-400 compared to other lenses:
- no focus-limiter
- AF not as fast
- poor bokeh
- not as well weather-sealed
- not as good lens coatings
Did you get all that feedback from any FM'er?
Whether those are important to some or not is of no interest to me. However it points out that it can be short-sighted to ignore what some competent and unbiased reviewers post online.
But see you're assuming that everyone has the same opinions, and of your list, I'd actually disagree with at least two of them.
1) AF speed: The 100-400 is one of the very few non-L lenses that has a Nano-USM focus motor instead of an STM motor. It focuses quite quickly. No one is expecting VCM level performance on a budget lens like this, but I never encountered a situation with that lens where I was concerned about AF speed in any way. It's a pretty quick focuser. Of course, the slow aperture will slow down AF in dim light (something I note in my own review).
2) Poor bokeh. I honestly have no idea what you're talking about here, and I strongly disagree with that assessment, especially for a lens in this price class. I was very, very pleased with the rendering of out of focus backgrounds with this lens. Are there lenses with better bokeh? Yeah. But in no way would I call the bokeh from this lens 'poor' in any respect.
Even here, where the subject is at a great distance, but there is still some out of focus in the foreground and background, there's nothing really objectionable - the leaves and branches are quite neutral with regards to bokeh (of course there's high contrast due to the back-lit stuff combined with bright specular highlights, but again, the quality is quite smooth, even if absolute blur amount is minimal).
CarlosJG wrote:
Judging by the following comment someone made to you, I'm afraid I'm not the one who needs to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
