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EOS R5 RF 600mm f11 hand held. The opera house is 1200meters from the camera. |
If an interchangeable lens camera system is to succeed it must offer excellent bodies and excellent lenses which appeal to a spectrum of users from professionals to enthusiast amateurs.
Many of his latter group which includes myself want to photograph birds, other wildlife and sports but are put off by the size, mass and price of professional super-telephoto lenses.
For these photographers the recently released RF 600mm f11 and 800mm f11 lenses look as though they could be a dream come true.
Imagine a light, compact, relatively inexpensive high quality super-tele lens. Is such a thing possible on a full frame camera ??
There have been from time to time inexpensive mirror super-teles from third party suppliers, but all of them have offered poor optical quality and poor usability.
There are several superzooms from mainstream and third party makers but these are either very expensive or offer mediocre image quality and all are big and heavy.
Canon’s lens designers have tackled this challenge in a way which I have never seen before, using several innovative features and leveraging the ability of Canon dual pixel AF to focus properly at apertures as small as f22.
The RF 600mm f11 is dramatically smaller, lighter and less expensive than any of the approximately equivalent “big white” super-teles from Canon.
Lens | Price* AUD retail | Length mm | Mass grams |
RF 600mm f11 | 1379 | 200 | 930 |
EF 500mm f4 | 13500 | 383 | 3180 |
RF 600mm f4 | 19500 | 448 | 3050 |
* Price in AU dollars, in Sydney, retail, GST paid.
This desirable reduction in size, mass and price does come with a few downsides of course, as we shall see.
However on balance I rate the RF 600mm f11 a very attractive offering for enthusiast outdoor sport/wildlife/bird photography.
600mm or 800mm ?
The two lenses share the same design elements with a collapsing barrel. I chose the 600mm as it is smaller, lighter, less expensive and arguably more versatile, being long enough for many birds and sports yet just wide enough that it can be used for interesting compressed landscape compositions. The 600 can also focus closer (to 4.5meters) than the 800 (6 meters) which in practice is an issue to consider. When photographing suburban birds which are often tolerant of human proximity I quite often find myself having to back up to get my subject in focus.
However for wading birds, surfing and similar requirements where the camera cannot get close to the subject I think the 800mm would be preferable.
Just be aware that with either of these lenses you will often be looking at a lot of atmospheric distortion when photographing distant subjects.
Description
Some reviewers seem to be a bit blasé about the RF 600mm f11 but I find the design and execution very interesting and appealing.
If you would like to find out what’s inside the lens you might find this teardown by LensRentals interesting.
https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2020/08/taking-apart-the-canon-rf-600mm-f11-is-stm/
By the way, my copy of the lens has a bit of something-which-should-not-be-there either behind or in the between-elements-no-gap. After watching the teardown process there is no way I will give the lens to anyone who might try to remove the bit of dust or whatever it is. The lens tests just fine as I will describe below.
You can also read about Canon diffractive optics here
The lens gains it’s small size, light weight and low cost by utilising several technologies.
These include
* The ability of the EOS R cameras to focus just fine at f11-22 using Canon dual pixel AF. This allowed the designers to use f11 which in turn allowed for a dramatic size reduction when compared to the EF f4 models.
* Fixed f11 aperture. There is no aperture diaphragm.
* All (except the mount) engineering polycarbonate construction.
* Collapsing design with an inner and an outer barrel and locking mechanism.
* Front gapless dual layer diffractive optical element.
* Very effective in-lens stabiliser, operating together with the in body stabiliser of the EOS R5 and R6 bodies.
The lens is dark grey in color with several finishes as you go from the faux-leather front section to the silver front control ring, the ribbed focus collar, the control panel and at the rear the lock/unlock knurled ring.
The filter is a standard front located screw-in 82mm type. I have one fitted as I use the lens around the seaside quite frequently and a photo session invariably leads to a significant amount of water and salt spray on the front element. I feel much happier cleaning a protective filter than an expensive compound diffractive front element.
Canon makes but annoyingly does not supply the ET-88B lens hood (you have to buy it separately). I have one on order (delayed, like most Canon items) and intend to fit it routinely to
a) reduce the amount of airborne stuff getting on the front element and
b) reducing the risk of veiling flare with the sun in front of the lens.
On the left side of the barrel are three slider switches,
* Focus limiter 12m/full (4.5m)
* AF/MF
*Stabiliser On/off.
Construction of the lens is 10 elements in 7 groups the front 2 elements being the gapless diffractive optical group. All the lens elements appear to be in the front barrel housing.
Focus frame
With most EF or RF lenses the Canon R5 camera can use all or almost all the frame for focussing. But with the 60mm f11 (and 800mm f11) focus is limited to a square area in the center of the frame. This is displayed in the viewfinder and the active AF area cannot be moved outside the limiting area.
I have found this sometimes problematic for instance if I am on a perched bird the eye of which is outside the focus frame. I end up focussing on the wing. You might think that at f11 the eye would be in focus but at close distance the depth of field at f11 is shallow enough that the eye can be visibly out of sharp focus even when the wing is tack sharp.
Weather sealing is not included although the lens appears to be well constructed.
The Tripod mount is fixed, presumably to keep cost and mass down. This is fine for shots in landscape orientation but the camera has to be flipped over for portrait orientation.
The image stabiliser offers a simple On/Off toggle without the extra settings available on the big whites. Not to worry the stabiliser is very effective. I found myself getting sharp photos hand held with a shutter speed of 1/10 second. That is amazing on a 600mm lens. In addition the stabiliser markedly steadies the viewfinder image when hand holding.
Autofocus speed and accuracy are very good with still or moving subjects. I had very few misses in several thousand frames.
The lens is compatible with Canon RF teleconverters. The 1.4x converter which costs almost as much as the primary lens gives an effective 840mm f16.
I tested sharpness using a set test chart and many real world subjects of different kinds near and far from the camera.
Overall I have found the lens delivers excellent sharpness and clarity with good contrast. I was a bit surprised by this as Canon’s published MTF charts show the RF 100-500mm L to be better. I don’t have the RF 100-500 but if it really is better (at 500mm) than the 600mm it must be a fantastic lens.
Distortion is minimal and insignificant for this lens’ use cases.
There is a little color fringing at high contrast edges and sometimes in out of focus areas, but it is minimal even when I stress test the lens with difficult subjects such as foliage against a hot sky. Any fringing is readily removed in Adobe Camera Raw.
Some veiling Flare can be induced when the lens is pointed directly at the sun but this has not been much of an issue in my tests. I will test a lens hood anyway.
Summary
The RF 600mm f11 has proven to be a pleasant surprise. It does everything the glossy brochure says it should.
It really is a category creator, with no other camera or lens maker offering anything quite like it at the present time.
Even better it is optically and mechanically excellent and capable of delivering very impressive results.
I rate it highly recommended.
Are there any downsides ?
Yes but I have been surprised at just how few these have proven to be.
Apart from the restricted focus area already described, the main one is that in low light for instance in a rainforest or dusk/dawn or indoors, handholding at f11 requires either very slow shutter speeds or very high ISO sensitivity settings or both.
Either can adversely affect image quality.
So the lens is best used in reasonably bright light.
Professional sports photographers are unlikely to be attracted to the 600mm f11 but they are not the target user group for the lens.
Outdoor enthusiast photographers could find themselves enjoying this lens very much and in the process making excellent pictures.