Zoom lens suggestion

Stonedhouse wrote:

Iron Mike wrote:

The canon 70-200 f/4 L IS was the first L lens I purchased, way back in the day when I was still using a rebel camera. The build quality and image quality were great, the lens is nicely compact and not too heavy, and has been workhorse for me in the ~10 years I have owned it. I still use it regularly for everything from portraiture with strobes, to landscape (specially when backpacking/ backcountry camping).

The non-IS that you are considering is every bit as good as the one I have, except for the lack of stabilization. If you think you can get away without the IS (keep a high enough shutter speed at 200mm), you won't be disappointed in the quality of the lens.

Mike

Thanks Mike,

For some reason I was initially struggling to find a stabilised version but now I have it looks to be double the price of the non IS (£639 vs £1,300) - unless I'm missing something. Shame as I think he will need the stabilisation especially as the camera body doesn't, and he's fairly new to this and also hoping to shot in more challenging light. If the IS had only been a couple of hundred more then we might have pushed for that but thats a bit out of reach.

Yes, the price difference is pretty big for "just " the image stabilization, although I don't know what was involved in re-engineering the lens to allow for the IS. That being said, I paid about $1250 CAD I think ( a long time ago), which is about what I would expect to pay for a high quality L series lens such as this. The non-IS version is a relative bargain in the canon L-series lens world.

You can also expect these lenses to last a long time and hold a good resale value (much better than the camera body they are attached to, the rebel XS I had at the time is relatively worthless these days by comparison). I don't know if canon EF lenses will continue to hold their worth into the future now that Canon has switched over to RF mount, but they are all backwards compatible if you ever decide to go canon mirrorless in the future.

Honestly, I have't found IS to be as necessary as it first seems to be for my use cases:

action/sports: the shutter speed needs to be high enough to stop the subject motion

portraits: I am almost always using strobes/speedlights which effectively freeze the subject

landscape: I usually have the camera on a tripod, with the IS turned off

If you think the IS will be valuable for your work, it might be worth looking into one of the other options with IS. I had the EF-S 55-250 IS (original) for a while, and it was good value for the money, but the 70-200 was definitely an upgrade.

Mike