RF 100-500 and 2.0x quality?

ThrillaMozilla wrote:

ppage wrote:

Simon d'Enremont, an excellent bird photographer, did a very interesting video about extenders. He uses an R5 but talks about extenders on crop cameras as well as full frame. It's worth a look; some of the technical issues he discusses, especially the points he makes about resolution, might interest you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmfcTK0F5HA&ab_channel=Simond%27Entremont

Argh.

This is a mixture of random examples, notions that won't do you any harm, and a lot of confusion. Some of his advice is good; some is not. He has a lot of experience getting good photos with very expensive, very high-quality equipment. That doesn't mean that he has anything more than cursory understanding of technical matters.

There are some useful examples, starting around 7:21. Even so, results for the EF-S 100-400 II seem odd. He gets rather mediocre results, but miraculous improvement in sharpness, stopping down from f/5.6 (presumably -- he doesn't say) to f/7. For whatever it's worth, The Digital Picture tests do not show either the lack of sharpness or the improvement that he reports.

He makes a number of embarrassing and sometimes serious errors. He conflates zoom lenses with digital zooming. He says crop sensors magnify and teleconverters crop (actually, it's the opposite). At 7:42 he probably has the f stops mislabeled. He says a teleconverter is a magnifying glass. He is obsessed with avoiding high-ISO shots. When he tells you that teleconverters lose light, he fails to understand the critical difference between exposure of the subject and total light from the subject.

Use with caution, and do not rely on the video for any technical understanding.

Canon (or Nikon/Sony) camera engineers must be the best photographers in the world. No one knows camera and lens better than them technically.

Actually it's not. Even photography depends on technology more than other form of arts, it’s still an art.

I'm an engineering guy, but I know some people, without engineering background,  step into next-level photography very fast. They take better photos than me in most case, even I know the data sheets of the camera better.

I think they are very sensitive to the color, light, composition and action.