scottsdaleriots said:
^ yeah i saw your post
sorry i meant the lens hood not the cap. But really, the lens cap doesnt 'lock' properly?
peederj said:
I bought this lens as a stopgap while I waited for the 5D3. _When_ it shoots nice pictures, it's almost L quality, with great color and sharpness. But it's only now and then that it shoots nice pictures. I get a lot of back focusing, and the manual focus ring has such a fine travel you need remarkable haptic skills to pull good focus in video. But then again the video I shot on it a couple weeks ago just became video of the day on a popular site, so its problems aren't gonna prevent success. The OS is good (and not great) for stills but is not good for video, I far prefer the 24-105L's IS which is more the opposite.
This lens is for crop cameras so its life is limited (it fits on ff but I haven't seen what that does...vignettes madly?). As for lens caps falling off, I have a UV protector on it and have no problem with that.
If you could rate this lens outta 10 (1 = terrible, 10 = best, L quality), what would you rate it and why? Its the first time i've heard of back focussing issues. Have you found a way to fix it, or is it an issue to live with? I was intending to shoot videos with this lens. Hmm...I thought this might be a good alternative to the 50mm lens (canon and sigma) or to the 24, 35 primes. The 24-105 isnt fast enough i dont think since it's f/4.
Would you say it's 50/50 with getting good, in focus shots? _When_ it takes good shots? Or worse, something like 30/70 (30 being good and 70 being OOF unsharp pics).
I wrote cap didn't I. ???
Sorry I meant
hood.
The cap is fine it should be hard to screw up a cap anyhow.
I would not compare this to a L series lens mainly because canon does not offer L that are compareable. I have heard the canon 17-50 to be L worthy if it had the appropriate seals and slightly tuffer construction.
I feel this lens is optically very high quality and perhaps surpasses the Canon version in this area.
The build quality also is extremely fine, good, no slop, no lens play and the zoom feels just right very smooth with perfect amount of resistance.
It sucks that my 60 d cannot do fine tune autofocus as the 7D allows so I was a little more concerned.
My autofocus seems to be fine I keep trying to find some fault with it but I have not had any issues thus far. Based on past reviews I felt the autofocus could be an issue but lately reviews from new owners show 4 the most part the autofocus accuracy is good.
It would be nice if the manual focus ring had more fine control but in truth it has been entirely adequate based on my usage. I would say the canon definitely gives you more manual focus control because of the wider range of movement in the ring. This is perhaps the main differentiating point - canon will give you easier manual focus control. I do not shoot much video of course so I can not really say how crucial this would be. When I shoot my stills manually it's proven to be adequate.
I'm getting just as many keepers infocus as I do with any of my other Canon lenses. I don't know how much your shooting style affects your percentage of keepers but most of mine are good say over 90 percent (using center point mainly) of course that depends on the exact situation & environment that you're shooting in.
I would think of it this way - buy it knowing that you might have to have a calibrated. Once it's been calibrated or you get a good copy matched your body right off the bat, then at this point you have saved yourself 400 to 500 dollars.
So that just leaves fine control using manual in question. For me it's adequate.