The 24-105 and/or the 24-70 II ...

[Sporgon]

In theory you might say keep the IS lens for when you need it, but in practice you'll probably never have it with you when you need it.

Yes ... with overlapping focal lengths, invariably the 24-105 is left at home (who needs to carry additional weight?) .

That said, I've had more than one occasion where the light was fading and I ended up cursing "why didn't I bring a tripod!" but I don't remember complaining that I didn't have my 24-105!

BTW, I carry a tripod more often than not, being the old-school type shooter

Again, for me, it comes down to theory and practice. I suppose the answer is to always carry a small lightweight tripod and a net to put something handy in to weight it down. At Building Panoramics we have a carbon fibre Gitzo and an old studio Manfrotto. The Gitzo always needs anchoring with something, normally a camera bag as without this it is just too light to be stable, a demonstration of which is in the attached photo of my partner in BP. ( Don't ask why the camera is pointing up - we'd had quite a few whiskies in the hotel the night before).

If I were to be seduced into buying the 24-70 II I think that despite my best intentions many of my pictures would be fractionally better in 'IQ', but equally many would be much worse due to camera shake and my failed resolution in always having a tripod with me ;D

So you could say Canon made the 24-70 f4 IS for me...........

 

[Ruined]

Yeah, I like the 24-70 f/4 IS because it offers approx the sharpness and image quality of the 24-70 II, but also gives you IS and a lower pricetag. Still, I think it is overpriced currently. Hopefully price will go down when it pops up in more 5DIII kits.

 

[Pi]

Yeah, but if you mount them on the respective body/sensor types they were primarily designed for, the 24-70 offers better performance:

But then you are talking about format differences, not only lens differences. Your point how IS might or might not affect IQ looks very weak when you start messing up with formats.

 

[Loswr]

In my limited usage of Canon's products, I've come to notice that Canon is loathe to release an update that doesn't make sense to them despite their customers clamoring for it. See the people wanting more MP, more DR, an update to the 100-400L, 135L, 800L, etc.

With Canon, it's water off a duck's back. It will only be released if it makes economical sense to Canon, not because folks like you and me want it.

If Canon consistently failed to deliver what their customers were clamoring for, they would have been out of business already. Canon certainly does listen to their customers, for example, the key complaint about the 5DII was the AF system, and the 5DIII got the 1-series AF. I think your mistake is assuming that "folks like you and me" represent the majority of Canon's customer base...we don't. "We" (on this and other Internet forums) are clamoring for more MP and DR, meanwhile Canon is selling more cameras than their competitors that offer more MP and DR, at all levels of the lineup. Despite "our" clamoring for an updated 100-400, the current one is a very popular lens.

 

[Loswr]

Yeah, I like the 24-70 f/4 IS because it offers approx the sharpness and image quality of the 24-70 II, but also gives you IS and a lower pricetag.

That makes sense, as long as you can live with half as much light and reduced capability for subject isolation.

 

[Sporgon]

Despite "our" clamoring for an updated 100-400, the current one is a very popular lens.

I believe some statistics were published here on CR that showed in Canada the 100-400L currently outsells the 70-300L by a ratio of 3:1, something that I find astonishing when one considers the quality of the latter.

 

[Ruined]

Yeah, but if you mount them on the respective body/sensor types they were primarily designed for, the 24-70 offers better performance:

But then you are talking about format differences, not only lens differences. Your point how IS might or might not affect IQ looks very weak when you start messing up with formats.

I am not sure why you would make a cross format comparison to begin with. You are essentially taking the center of the 24-70 and blowing it up compared to a lens that was designed for the crop factor from the start.

My point was, for each respective format there are a series of Canon zooms that both have IS and are sharp across the focal spectrum, many of which are f/2.8 - with the exception of 24-70 f/2.8 which is not available (yet). I am sure the 24-70 f/2.8 IS does exist in testing, though, as the patent was filed for it a long time ago.

 

[Pi]

I am not sure why you would make a cross format comparison to begin with.

You wanted to say: I am not sure why you I would make a cross format comparison to begin with, right?

 

[Ruined]

I am not sure why you would make a cross format comparison to begin with.

You wanted to say: I am not sure why you I would make a cross format comparison to begin with, right?

Point taken.

 

[J.R.]

In my limited usage of Canon's products, I've come to notice that Canon is loathe to release an update that doesn't make sense to them despite their customers clamoring for it. See the people wanting more MP, more DR, an update to the 100-400L, 135L, 800L, etc.

With Canon, it's water off a duck's back. It will only be released if it makes economical sense to Canon, not because folks like you and me want it.

If Canon consistently failed to deliver what their customers were clamoring for, they would have been out of business already.

That exactly is my point. Like any other efficiently run business, Canon releases updates to its products only if it makes commercial sense, not because an upcoming feature is fancied by people. For the sake of the current post, they didn't release an IS version of the 24-70 2.8 despite the fact that people wanted it.

Canon has access to more marketing research and data than what we at this forum can think of, so basically whatever is ranted here by most people doesn't affect Canon or its bottom line. I've seen some posters here who claim to be going the whole hog on the mirrorless offerings of Sony. They probably don't realise that what Sony was able to come up with in a year, Canon will be able to come up with someone similar if not better in an extremely short period of time if there was a big enough market for it.

While I don't like the crippled products Canon sometimes pushes out, I'm glad that they don't listen to each and every demand made by people or else they would become the new Sony.

 

[Sporgon]

Canon has access to more marketing research and data than what we at this forum can think of,

Exactly. There will be valid reasons why the 24-70 II is not ~IS. Likewise there will be a reason for no update to the 100-400L. Possibly required retail price required to offer significant improvement.

 

[Loswr]

Try it for yourself; take a hand held shot with 50mm focal length of something with lots of fine detail that's far away from the camera. Take the same shot five times at 1/250 and then see if they are all as sharp as each other.

Ok, I get your suggestion a try, or rather something lose to your suggestion. I shot a sign with lettering of different sizes from a distance of ~60 yards, with a lens set to 70mm and a shutter speed of 1/320 s. I was at f/4…that means a DoF deep enough to safely ignore focus (everything from halfway to the sign to infinity was within the DoF). I took five shots handheld. There was, indeed, a small variation in the sharpness of the shots, with three of them very slightly sharper than the other two.

But that's not the whole story. The lens I used was the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II, and for the above tests the IS was turned off. I then turned the IS on, and took five more handheld shots. In that series, there was also a slight variation in the sharpness of the shots, and the sharpest of the IS shots was no sharper than the non-IS shots.

I then mounted the lens on a tripod, and took five more shots. This time, there was no variation in the shots, and all of them were similar to the sharpest of the handheld sets with or without IS.

From that, I would suggest that when shooting at 1 / >4x the shutter speed, IS makes no difference, but using a tripod is likely to get you consistently sharp images.

 

[Sporgon]

Try it for yourself; take a hand held shot with 50mm focal length of something with lots of fine detail that's far away from the camera. Take the same shot five times at 1/250 and then see if they are all as sharp as each other.

Ok, I get your suggestion a try, or rather something lose to your suggestion. I shot a sign with lettering of different sizes from a distance of ~60 yards, with a lens set to 70mm and a shutter speed of 1/320 s. I was at f/4…that means a DoF deep enough to safely ignore focus (everything from halfway to the sign to infinity was within the DoF). I took five shots handheld. There was, indeed, a small variation in the sharpness of the shots, with three of them very slightly sharper than the other two.

But that's not the whole story. The lens I used was the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II, and for the above tests the IS was turned off. I then turned the IS on, and took five more handheld shots. In that series, there was also a slight variation in the sharpness of the shots, and the sharpest of the IS shots was no sharper than the non-IS shots.

I then mounted the lens on a tripod, and took five more shots. This time, there was no variation in the shots, and all of them were similar to the sharpest of the handheld sets with or without IS.

From that, I would suggest that when shooting at 1 / >4x the shutter speed, IS makes no difference, but using a tripod is likely to get you consistently sharp images.

The results you found when shooting from a good, rigid tripod don't surprise me. IS is good but it doesn't beat an actual stable platform for critical work, and that difference in quality can be seen in a print, even if it's not overly big.

You didn't say if your softer ones without IS were worse than the IS softer ones. I've often felt IS isn't infallible, and the IS on your 70-200 II is as good as it gets at the present time. It's an interesting test because in the 'old days' we were led to believe that you didn't get any shake if you were shooting with shutter speed over twice the focal length of the lens. Often you don't - but occasionally you do, and that could be an important shot. Given that we are not frame limited on digital it is probably a good idea to take multiple shots when in a critical situation without a tripod.

In fact this conversation is making me think I really ought to get a small light weight 'walk about' tripod - and a sack for some rocks of course.

 

[Loswr]

The softer non-IS shots were equivalent to the softer IS shots. I used good technique, stable handholding, allowing time for the IS to reach full stabilization (many people think it's instantaneous, and just mash down the shutter), etc. Also, the camera was in single shot mode.

I think the 1/FL (and 1/2xFL) predate modern pixel densities. D800/a7R users need even faster shutter speeds.

I notice in practice that when shooting with lower speeds (I often use a min shutter of 1/125 s with the 24-70), a burst helps. I almost always 'double tap' my shots - the speed of the 1D X makes that hard not to do - and if they're not identical, the second shot of the pair is the sharper one.

Agree on the small/light tripod - that's why I had one with me, the RRS TQC-14 is quite portable.