subject: What About The Canon 70-200mm Lens [print this page] You could actually consider or call the Canon 70-200mm f2.8 to be a legend lens in photography. It was the first professional grade tele-zoom lens in the year 1955 with an extremely fast ultrasonic AF drive.
This is actually a designated-L grade or luxury grade lens that promises both high quality and optical performance in all the photographs you take. This is why it was, and is still a very popular lens used for taking sports related photographs and in press photography.
However this doesnt imply that this great lens is only used in sports and by the press. The optical design of the lens consists of 18 elements that are divided into 14 groups, including 4 UD elements.
The minimum focus distance required for taking photos using this lens is 1.5 meters, which in turn results in a maximum magnification of objects at 1:6 at 200mm. While the size of the filter is 77mm; the lens has 8 aperture blades. So if you take a look at the performance of the lens through a mainstream APS-CDSLR, you find that its field-of-view is equivalent to 116-320mm on full format cameras.
However as expected of this class of lens, the Canon 70-200mm f2.8 is not exactly lightweight, nor is it very small. The presence of its included, petal-type hood drastically increases the length of the lens. Despite all this, the lens is rather cool looking and comes with a detachable tripod mount, that helps handle the hefty weight of the camera during tripod-based photography.
An interesting feature about the lens worth mentioning is that it does not extend while zooming. Moreover, because of the inner focusing system of the camera, the front element does not rotate much. This means that there is no need of actually using a polarizer, unless you attach the hood to the lens.
The lens is so strongly built that there is no wobbling, which in turn promises smooth controls. In addition to all this, the lens has a ring-type USM drive, which is the reason the AF speed of the lens is so fast.
If used with the Canon EF 1.4x (II) or EF 2.x (II) converter, you however find a slight reduction in the speed. This is attributed as a side effect of the smaller max. aperture. This is why it should be noted that Canon advises using the central AF sensor while using this lens with tele-converters as the flanking sensors can at times cause focus errors. However the reason for this is still a bit mysterious.
