This is going to be a very short review since I didn’t exactly enjoy using this lens much. This was the first zoom lens I ever purchased and I was satisfied with it in the beginning. But as time passed and I started using it in longer focal lengths, I started disliking it more and more.
After I purchased the wonderful EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 lens and shot with it for sometimes, I started hating on this lens and sold it at half the price. It’s very cheap and many beginners buy it to get a feel of the long focal length. But once they realize it’s limitation, people don’t want to keep using it for long.
My Experience
This was my first zoom lens. So I have tried shooting everything distant that came to my mind. From flowers and butterflies to setting suns and full moons – I have tried different things. And I will be honest, I did have some good shots time to time.
I used this lens on my Viltrox Speed booster so I did get some extra light. The aperture could be opened up to f/2.8 if I wanted to. This meant I had decent light and good portrait opportunities in lower focal lengths.
This is one of my most favorite sunset photos of all time. I took this photo with this lens from my balcony. The electric wire dividing the sun, the evening colors, distant trees. I like this photo.
This is a very clean moon shot from this lens. I did close the aperture a bit to get sharper results. This is one of the major drawback of this lens. It’s not very sharp. Specially in the widest aperture and the longest focal length, the image quality struggles quite a bit.
When I took an interest in bird photography and nature photography, the lens started showing me more and more issue. There were serious chromatic aberration. I noticed a lot of purple fringing in photos. And the sharpness kept declining outside the center area.
Another major issue was lack of stabilization. I didn’t always carry a tripod and handheld shots were tricky. I tried to shoot at very fast shutter speed (1 / focal length) to try and compensate. Sometimes it worked well, sometimes it didn’t. And even when it did, the faster shutter speed would make the scene dark. It was not a very good experience.
But at the end of the day, I was more unhappy with the photo quality than the lack of IS. I knew it didn’t have stabilization. I also got it cheap. That was okay. But the poor image quality was bothering me. This squirrel shot was one of my favorites. But it had so much purple fringing, I got tired of fixing those in post-processing and just made it B&W.
The rest of the photo samples of this setup is given bellow.
Verdicts
This is one of the cheapest telephoto lens from Canon. I bought it for the price. But ended up not liking the lens very much. I think this lens is good for beginners to take a feel of that longer focal length. If you like shooting distant objects, upgrade to a better lens. If you don’t, you didn’t waste much money.
But if you’re certain about buying a telephoto lens, I would not recommend this one. There are better telephoto lenses. Spend more money and get a quality lens. You will be better served by them than this one.
If you’re on a crop sensor camera like me, or if you’re also using the Canon EOS M50, I would highly recommend getting the EF-S 55-250mm lens as a budget option. Or the Canon 100-400L lens if you need more reach and want to invest more money for it.