Canon 70-300 DO Lens: Good Concept, Shame about the Contradiction
Sunday 11 May 2008 Filed in: Reviews
A recent
review of the Canon 70-300 DO lens in
Popular Photography has prompted me to
report my own experience with this much-maligned
lens.
A portable telephoto is pretty much an oxymoron: an inevitable compromise between two contradictory concepts. For moving about, typically smaller and lighter are better. For image quality in a 300 mm lens, usually larger is better, with more glass correlating with better light gathering ability.
Enter Canon’s DO lenses. The DO stands for diffractive optics, and these are the first lenses from any manufacturer (and at this stage there are only two: the 400 f4 DO IS USM and the 70-300 f4.5-5.6 DO IS USM) to employ a grate in the lens elements that bends the incoming light to a greater extent than normal refractive lens elements, thereby allowing the lens to be smaller and largely free of the chromatic aberrations that plague digital photography (usually seen as purple fringing along high contrast edges).
First introduced in 2004, the Canon 70-300 DO IS USM lens (with a street price of around $1200 USD) promised to deliver the Holy Grail in the world of the portable telephoto zoom: a small, compact lens that could produce stellar image quality. Not only that, Canon threw in the very latest image stabilization technology (supposedly making you at least three stops steadier than you would otherwise be handheld), meaning that you could leave the tripod at home. It all seemed far too good to be true – and, in essence, it was. Read More...
A portable telephoto is pretty much an oxymoron: an inevitable compromise between two contradictory concepts. For moving about, typically smaller and lighter are better. For image quality in a 300 mm lens, usually larger is better, with more glass correlating with better light gathering ability.
Enter Canon’s DO lenses. The DO stands for diffractive optics, and these are the first lenses from any manufacturer (and at this stage there are only two: the 400 f4 DO IS USM and the 70-300 f4.5-5.6 DO IS USM) to employ a grate in the lens elements that bends the incoming light to a greater extent than normal refractive lens elements, thereby allowing the lens to be smaller and largely free of the chromatic aberrations that plague digital photography (usually seen as purple fringing along high contrast edges).
First introduced in 2004, the Canon 70-300 DO IS USM lens (with a street price of around $1200 USD) promised to deliver the Holy Grail in the world of the portable telephoto zoom: a small, compact lens that could produce stellar image quality. Not only that, Canon threw in the very latest image stabilization technology (supposedly making you at least three stops steadier than you would otherwise be handheld), meaning that you could leave the tripod at home. It all seemed far too good to be true – and, in essence, it was. Read More...