Patent: RF mount constant aperture superzoom lenses, including an RF 28-280mm f/2.8

Mar 26, 2014
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RF 24-105 is a >4x zoom with not a bad IQ.

It's not that good either, e.g. 3.2% pincushion distortion at the wide end and >2 stops of vignetting at both ends @f/4.

Don't get me wrong, I used the EF 24-105mm f/4L mkI on a 5Dmk2 for years. Does wonders for my family, who refuse to have photos shared with them unless down sampled to 5MP, but not really good.

Not one, but three. One may lose an unique shot while switching cameras.

Not switching lenses or cameras is very convenient.
 
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SteveC

R5
CR Pro
Sep 3, 2019
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Are there any super zooms or >3x zoom lenses that cross go from wide to tele that have good IQ?

If any of those patents turn into lenses, I expect all of them to have sacrifice IQ for convenience.

OK, here's a video:


At 6:30 you can see how bad it is.

I'm pretty sure that's worse than my Tamrons, all of which are over 10x zoom--and which, to be sure, aren't full frames.
 
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It's not that good either, e.g. 3.2% pincushion distortion at the wide end and >2 stops of vignetting at both ends @f/4.

Don't get me wrong, I used the EF 24-105mm f/4L mkI on a 5Dmk2 for years. Does wonders for my family, who refuse to have photos shared with them unless down sampled to 5MP, but not really good.



Not switching lenses or cameras is very convenient.
I guess it's all subjective. The quality of my 24-105 v1 on my 6D has never been a limiting factor for me and I suspect the RF version on my R won't be either.

I will say that I had a copy of the Canon 18-200 when I was on crop, and I was never impressed with it.
 
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Apr 25, 2011
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It's not that good either, e.g. 3.2% pincushion distortion at the wide end and >2 stops of vignetting at both ends @f/4.
And what do you call "that good"?

Not switching lenses or cameras is very convenient.
Not when you are forced to operate a 28-280/2.8 lens instead. I'd rather switch cameras than try to frame wide angle shots with this monster.
 
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Mar 25, 2011
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Patents generally never reach production, and I don't expect a huge lens like this would make it . Reading some of the posts, some people seem to think that the patent means Canon is going to manufacture that particular example from the patent. Its not going to happem. At least, that's my prediction.
 
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Rivermist

Mirrorless or bust.
Apr 27, 2019
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I like a bit of vignetting too. With straight up black I was referring to the 24-240mm which has an image circle that doesn't cover the entire sensor at the wide end. If you look at the image height of the patents, you'll see they also don't have a FF image circle at the wide end. Canon simply applies a profile which crops the image to effectively reduce the sensor size to something that is covered by the smaller wide angle image circle. I just don't feel good about that approach. But that's just my opinion, nothing that should matter to you. I'm not saying it is a bad move by Canon to investigate these new options!
I too was skeptical, but as I was preparing for a trip where I needed equipment to be compact and ready to shoot in most situations, and for that the RP and RF 24-105L (that I love) lack the telephoto reach, so I would have to add the 70-200 4LIS or 70-300 DO to my bag and do lens changes (or schlep the 5DIII). When I saw the promotion RP + 24-240 for $1,500, I saw an opportunity to give this new approach to high range zooms a try. One RP will have that lens, the other one the EF 16-35 L 4.0 IS with adapter for the select pictures requiring very wide angle and/or high quality in the 24-35 range.
Some thoughts about the 24-240 and the use of processing to correct and upsample images: 10 years ago I was shooting weddings, portrait and travel around the world with my 5D Mk1 (12 megapixels) and loving my pictures. If the 24-35 range of the 24-240 zoom is effectively re-sampling a reduced image circle of 18 or 20 mp this is still a very acceptable resolution for my picture galleries and books. Making use of RAW in the 24-35 range is not going to be easy due to all the corrections needed, but this may be irrelevant. I find with mirrorless that I have so few poor exposure situations JPEG out of the camera is not as crazy as it would be with my prior DLSRs, where I often had to correct 1-2 EV in challenging lighting situations, making RAW indispensable.
 
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Optics Patent

Former Nikon (Changes to R5 upon delivery)
Nov 6, 2019
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I have mixed feelings about the "stretching" method. On the one hand, if you rarely use the wide end and just want to grab the occasional snapshot with it, then maybe it's acceptable. But it is a lossy method. How much is lost, I don't know. Simple distortion correction does eat up a little resolution too, but it's an acceptable amount of loss.

By my estimation about 9% might be lost linearly. Or about 17% of pixels. Virtually undetectable cropping that confers the effect of an undistorting lens of the promised focal length with correct composition in the viewfinder.
 
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