Canon RF 2x Extender - anyone used one?

Bdbtoys

R5
CR Pro
Jul 16, 2020
467
331
I checked out the IS. My criteria are off scale compared with the usual as I count shots as being perfect only when no shake is detected at the pixel level when hand held at 20m from a high resolution target. At this distance, shake is magnified and at closer distances, shake becomes less and less observable. At 1000m, from 1/800 to 1/1600s, 70% were absolutely shake free, and 30% pretty minimal. At 1/500s, 50% perfect, 33% nearly there and 17% bad. At 1/250s, 30% perfect, 30% nearly there and 40% bad. At 1/125s, 17% perfect, 17% nearly there and 66% bad.
These figures are pretty good. In general, I try to keep shutter speeds faster than 1/500s for optimal sharpness. From experience, a setting of 1/1250s, iso 1000 at 1000mm f/14 would be fine for me on a bright day.

I believe my AF/IS issues from that day watching the jets was more user error than anything else. I found that I had inadvertently had the IS switch in mode 1 when I started to take panning shots (so +1 on user error). The other was that I was missing focus occasionally probably because of IS, but also because I was struggling to keep still (handheld).

Of the shots I did like, I was impressed. For example, zoom in on the 1 plane shot and look at the face of the pilot.
 
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In my experiment, I was more concerned about the time required to AF on a subject compared to the bare RF 100-500mm. The bare lens was fast and snappy. But with the 2.x, on the other hand, it was quite sluggish, specially on scene with less contrast. Needless to say that when it could AF, the result was always good.
 
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Bdbtoys

R5
CR Pro
Jul 16, 2020
467
331
In my experiment, I was more concerned about the time required to AF on a subject compared to the bare RF 100-500mm. The bare lens was fast and snappy. But with the 2.x, on the other hand, it was quite sluggish, specially on scene with less contrast. Needless to say that when it could AF, the result was always good.
My biggest issue is that it sometimes overshot focus (blowing the image out). Then good luck getting it to refocus on anything since you can't recompose on the object (plane/bird in sky example).

However, those misses weren't so bad after dealing with it for a bit. And I would not trade it for anything else atm (that I can afford).
 
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My biggest issue is that it sometimes overshot focus (blowing the image out). Then good luck getting it to refocus on anything since you can't recompose on the object (plane/bird in sky example).

However, those misses weren't so bad after dealing with it for a bit. And I would not trade it for anything else atm (that I can afford).
Yes, that also happened to me a few times when there was little contrast in the scene, e.g. a grey seagull against cloudy sky.
 
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