Luds34 said:
Is that true? That the 70-200 f/2.8 IS II is not parfocal? I guess I just sort of took for granted that a number of the higher end lenses were parfocal. I do own the f/2.8 non-IS. I also believe my other zooms are parfocal.
I mostly shoot primes but I should keep this in mind for when I shoot zooms. I'd hate to be focusing, then at the last second tweaking the zoom a bit for better composition, not realizing I'm adding a slight softness to the shot.
I admit I haven't tested other Canon 70-200/2.8L lenses other than mine, but it's consistent with reports I've heard. I tested it by shooting wide open on my then-Canon 5Dii at 70, 100, 135, and 200 marks wide open at closest focus and 10m distance. Subject was my living room. I focused at the 200mm position and pixel-peeped the results in center and corner. Sure seemed parfocal at 20mpx! Zoom while recording video always looked splendid at 1080P (2 megapixel FTW).
The reason I think concerns still photo history. At the dawn of the computerized lens design age http://blog.camera-wiki.org/2012/03/13/vivitar-historical-research-part-1/ when manual focus was the only game in town, the incumbent major brands Canon, Leica, Pentax, Nikon,,, made carefully-engineered zooms that were all parfocal. (Caveat: I was too young to hold a camera back then, and I'm not an optical engineer this info fits my research.) In that era, pros would zoom all the way in, focus the split image, then zoom out to compose. Challengers Vivitar, Sigma, Tamron, etc discovered by relaxing the requirements allowing varifocal and variable-aperture lenses, they could produce lighter and sharper lenses than the incumbents.
Fast forward to autofocus days, it no longer was a requirement for a lens to be parfocal since people relied demanded fast and accurate autofocus first, so little by little, they stopped making compromises required to achieve the "true zoom" (parfocal).
Most zooms from the past are slow, dim, heavy, and flawed. Pro zooms for their day produce ok images -- I'd say comparable to consumer zooms of today in IQ, but with a very different color rendition, less crisp.