#CanonExtender 1.4 x and 2x review #canonreview #canonlensextenders a hands on review and comparison for the canon extenders to determine if they really replace another lens Canon extenders provided by RENTaCAM sydney www.rentacam.com.au
I also have 70-200, and both extenders (although 2.0x is vII, 1.4x is vIII). Interestingly enough, I found exactly the same as you did. However, I hired a 300mm f2.8 and with that, the 2.0x was very usable, still a deterioration, but much less than with the 70-200!
I do lots of nature photography and currently I'm using the 1.4 on a Canon 800 mm prime good results since I like lot of detail in my pix. With that said let me express that using an extender is not necessarily plug & play depending on your lens and camera settings (Full disclosure I'm shooting a Canon 1DX MII). I've had the 1.4 extender for a few years and wasn't happy with it so I would only use it in very bright light to make up for the loss of F-stops and sometimes I wouldn't use it for long period of times because I didn't want to lose my detail. To make a long story short recently I've been getting great shots with good to very good detail. What happened? I change the way I shoot. I was used to shooting with a "go-to" set of parameters for Tv, Av and ISO. i.e. I normally used to keep Tv and ISO at 1200 or higher because I do a lot of wildlife action shots. My lens is prime at 5.6 f so that was constant. I experimented with Stabilization on and a tripod. To my surprise even with cloudy skies I could shoot with Tv @ 100 and ISO@800 (or higher). I had virtually no noise and lots of detail. I haven't done this with the 2x yet but am thinking about it. BTW on shorter focal length lenses like a 200 mm and 400 mm the extender is more forgiving.
The canon 2.0 and 1.4 are amazing on the big "L" prime lenses! I do bird photography and use it on my 5d mark 3 with my 300 2.8l lens... my friends also use them with prime 400, 500 and 600 mm lens. The photos taken with the extenders are tack sharp.
Thanks for this review. Perhaps it would be better if you use the same settings specially in aperture and shutter speed so we can see the real quality of the images. And more importantly, should have the same lighting on your subject when comparing. Some photographs on the hat were hit by the sunlight, some are not. Thanks
I did my own very accurate test with the 70-200mm II Canon lens on my 5DMIII, but instead I focused on a white building with a tower on a mountain top, about a mile away. This was a very different test than what you did, although we used the same teleconverters. Using the 2xIII teleconverter, at 200mm, I was able to get basically the same exact sharpness as without the teleconverter, while focusing on the same very distant object. Actually, I was expecting to get better sharpness with the aid of the teleconverter, but it didn't happen. Simply using the 70-200mm without the teleconverter provided just as good a picture, after using software to zoom in to see the detail. Where the teleconverter really helps is that it allows you to zoom in closer on the back of the camera screen, to review your photos after taking them. Without the teleconverter, the camera doesn't allow enough zoom to see as much detail, while at the photo-taking site, on the fly, which can be very important, because you sometimes really need to know if you got the shot clear enough. After doing all the testing, I know that I just have to trust my shot, even though I can't verify it when not using the teleconverter.
how can you expect to get better sharpness with a teleconverter? you're basically adding more elements and more glass which would never increase the sharpness, only decrease it or in your case maintain it.
At some point you run out of pixels to show enough detail. 2x digital zoom means 4 times less resolution, which is generally still good depending on the resolution of the camera. However, you can use the extender for 2x and crop another 2x digitally. To do the same without the extender, you would have to apply a 4x digital zoom, which means reducing the resolution by 16.
When using the extender with the 70-200 f/2.8L II can you put the extender on the lens when it is at 70mm without fearing about the rear element coming in contact with the extender glass?
Both extenders are usable with the non stabilized Canon FE 70-200 f/4L which is the cheapest and most popular Canon L lens. Just check the extender manual. It can be found easily in Google. With the 2.0X extender the maximum aperture decreased to f/8 which is not very restricting for daylight landscape photography. Of course the bokeh isn't easy at all. It is the most affordable way to have a full frame lens with a range from 70mm to 400mm with the quality of a Canon L lens.
I have canon 70-200mm and I bought recently canon extender 1.4x II. I had really high hopes and was so disappointed with loss of quality. I had some non canon extender before and it was really bad, I was hoping canon ones will be excellent. I thought of buying extender 2x but than I came across your video. Thank you for explaining the difference. I will keep my 1.4x than. Won't be wasting more money for 2x
Important info: only the older, type series II Canon teleconverters were working with the older manual lenses. Even if you have either a chipped or a chipless M42 adapters, the newer series III teleconverters were not working with them and you will get a Error 01 code. The LiveView will working, you could make a video, but the photo shooting is impossible.
+Academy of Photography I think the re-test on the same needs to be done. I am using 1.4x III regularly with my 100-400 mm and I have not found in softness though
A more valid test is to shot the same object with the same settings (e.g. 200 mm, f/5.6, 1/200 sec.) twice with and without the teleconverter, then crop the photo you took without the teleconverter so you get the identical framing twice, and then compare the two resulting pictures at 100 %. I did that with a Canon 60D, a 70-200 4.0 IS lens and a 1.4x teleconverter. The picture quality was very(!) slightly worse on the picture I took with the teleconverter. But it was surely not better than the cropped one! - So my conclusion was: I had wasted the money that I spent on the teleconverter, and I will not anymore take it with me! (It might be useful for a sports photographer who hasn't got time to crop his pictures, though).
@The Life of Tony Not sure I understand the question. It depends on how close the subject/birds are. Are you shooting birds on a bird feeder or are you shooting birds in flight (BIF)? Also, it depends on what size sensor you are using. A crop DSLR will provide less detail and available crop than a full frame DSLR, or a medium format DSLR. Obviously the more you spend on equipment, camera and lens the best your outcome will be.
i had the 1.4 x II and sold it he was quite good in sharpness but tested the 2.0 x II and it was to soft now i have both 1.4x mark III and 2.0 x mark III and the image quality from 1,4 mark II to Mark III is just minor but in 2.0 x II to 2.0 x III is a huge step love both my extenders and get great shot with my 300mm f2.8 is L with them in use
No definitive comparison or determination can ever be made between your equipment and mine, even if we own the same camera bodies and lenses.... Have you had your lens calibrated? Have you had it calibrated to YOUR camera body? Do you use it handle-held or tripod-mounted? If hand-held, are you steady? More so, or less so, than me? Was the weather windy or still when you were shooting? If you used a tripod, how sturdy and steady is the tripod? Did you use mirror lock-up before shooting? Did you have the Image Stabilizer on? What shutter speed were you shooting at? (Image blur can occur even on a tripod at slow shutter speeds like 1/5s.) Have you compared your copy of the lens to mine? Who's is better, given that variations exist from lens to lens? Do you sharpen in Post-Production processing? What magnification do you view your images at? How much work has your lens done? Is it a newbie or a beater? Is it time for a routine calibration and overall check (2yrs max)? Did you use a lens hood to cut down on stray light? Were you using filters? Are the filters optical, with good plano-parallelism? Did you shoot at a 'sweet spot' mid-range aperture such as f/8? And on it goes.... but do your tests in the field, while shooting, not while wearing a white lab coat... leave that to the manufacturers and their repair centers.
+jcaceres1 SO you do not damage your lens. The extenders can damage certain lenses when the back element is set far back. After the first time do it anyway you want.
I bought a 2x iii and a 1.4 iii. I will say that there is a substantial difference between the Canon ii series and the iii series. The 2x is still sh!t though.
Did you shoot the test images of the hat at the same shutter speed? The shot with the two extender looks like there's some motion blur. I think you were shooting hand-held, so keeping the same shutter speed could account for some of the decreased IQ.
+Miles Stephenson I agree with you. Due to that the pics became soft. I am using 1.4x III regularly with my 100-400 mm and I have not found in softness though. +Academy of Photography I think the re-test on the same needs to be done
A test I want to see is to shoot one picture with the extender and one picture without the extender. Then just scale up the picture without the extender until it is the same size as the one with the extender. Then compare the sharpness. You can do this with the first pictures you took of the signs. According to Tony Northrup, you will get more sharpness with extender if you are using a full frame camera. But with a crop sensor the quality is the same, so an extender is useless.
This in not true in my experience. And of course it depends on the lens used. I use a 400mm f2.8 IS with both 1.4X and 2.0X extenders. With FF and crop I get more detail with the extender. I do have to stop down to f5.6 with the 1.4X and f8.0 with the 2.0 to get the most detail. For something like surfing this is very effective. With both my 7D and now 7DII there is more detail with extender. Yu can look at tests a the digital image (dot com and other sites and see this confirmed.
Brad Rex Thanks man. After thinking about it, you are right. It depends on the lens and how much sharpness it can maintain in the centre of the frame. Cheers mate!!
Samtagri No problem. I look at a tele convert this way. You are set up to shoot the humming bird, car race, lunar eclipse, whatever. You have a 300mm f2.8, a 2X converter and the ideal shot would be at 857mm. (you can't get closer) The 2X converter is most likely going to give you better results than shooting without it. Shoot that photo! A magical Genie appears and offers you a $13,000 600mm f4 IS. You switch to that and get better photos than the 300mm and converter. Shoot that photo! But there are no magic genies. So a converter can be a very useful tool.
As we get new cameras with smaller pixels the extenders hav become less useful. Cropping often yields a picture as good or better, especially in sports where the drop in max apature is not worth the loss.
Crop bodies only affect the field of view. *Not* the focal length..... This just gets repeated and repeated and... everyone ends up believing it. But fact is, the field of view is all that's affected. Croppers don't make your lenses longer. They just take a pair of scissors to the image that the FF lens is projecting into its light box. That can't lengthen the optics. The X1.4 extender loses you one full stop of max aperture and the X2 loses you two full stops. Canon publishes a list of its lenses that are compatible with these. NO APS-C lenses are compatible with these devices. Certainly no short macro lenses, not even the very common walkabout EF 24-105 F4 IS USM lens. All of the L tele primes and zooms that I've used are compatible. But the X2 model always produces a noticeably softer image - even the MkIII version. Some lenses are soft to begin with, Canon QC isn't as tight with these pro lenses as it should be. So if you have a soft copy of whatever lens you're using, all aspects of its performance are subject to magnification. Including its "softness". If you use any of the X2 devices and have to crop an image significantly then image quality is going to be a major downside. As illustrated above in the clip. Not nearly so much with the X1.4. Naturally, the longer the lens you use with these, the more you gain in multiplied length. But like most low cost shortcuts you have to be prepared to sacrifice something. That said, I have shots using an old EF300 F4L IS USM with a mk1 X1.4 extender that are close to the sharpness of images taken with no extender. But not all. Other factors govern sharpness - such as the lack of IS in some less expensive lenses - and the longer the lens the more it is subject to camera shake. Using an extender also multiplies hand tremors - it all adds up to degrade images. These also slow down the speed of autofocus - might not matter for still subjects but for birds in flight that's a significant sacrifice. And if you reduce your max aperture too far in this way you might find - especially with the X2 devices - that your autofocus just won't work. Plenty of L tele lenses are F4. Put a X2 on that, it becomes a max aperture F8 lens - very dodgy AF performance there - plenty of bodies will fail to autofocus at all never mind doing it fast.
The 1.4 I,o does not loose image quality in my own experience, you have to be pixel peeping to notice anything, but the 2x defiantly looses quality and is a lot softer, I would only use the 1.4 on mine and I find it gives me enough extra ready on my canon 60d to keep me from buying say the 300mm lens
