First off: QUIT TEASING US IT'S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN!
Unless we get a CR3 with pictures of a press release showing a 400f5.6IS, or maybe ten different CR2 references, I will not believe it.
fabioduarte said:
I doubt there will be an upgrade until Nikon launches its own 400mm f/5.6.
Ha! And that's even less likely that Canon making a second one.
The deal is that the 400f5.6, as-is, nearly performs as well as all the V1 Big Whites. That seriously devalues a lot of hardware. They made V2 Big Whites to rectify that, but from an amature's perspective the main thing missing is still just IS, the competition for IQ is still close enough.
Even without adding IS, look at the 100-400MkII VS the 400f5.6 when both have a 2XTC, the zoom still sucks. Make that prime lens perform any better and you're encroaching on the Big White market again...
Which would actually make this:
StudentOfLight said:
Any chance of this being an EF-S 400/5.6 IS?
Make sense.
An EF-S 400f5.6 being completely incompatible with 90% of their high end bodies (and all TC's) means it would have almost no affect on Big White sales, but would give us crop shooting amatures a break.
(Note, size and weight of lenses doesn't change with sensor size, they just get to be sloppy with corner performance is all, which I would still prefer that they not do so we can have a nice even frame and 0 vignetting on crop. Given the unusual amount of distortion at 400mm I almost think the 100-400MkII actually was designed with crop in mind as much or more than full frame).
We know Canon loves artificially limiting their products for a given market, this makes the most sense to me, the next most likely event would be them adding IS without making any changes to the lens design (taking a page out of the Nikon playbook).
In any case, I just got some pretty decent shots of a moose at 1/350sec handheld (as slow as you would want to go for anything moving, and yes gopher shooting practice helps), which makes me wonder if IS isn't just an excuse to be lazy more than anything. Then considering the new 400DO, I'm betting that we've got everything we're going to get.
I'll have the 100-400MkII by the end of the year if only because of the excellent Maximum Magnification, IS will be nice for the flowers (low movement landscape shots), and it does perform better at f5.6 than the old prime (which is best at f8) so it is an upgrade when used bare.
That lens was basically made with me in mind and I would be a fool to pass it up.