Full Frame RF 200-800....early days but I'm very impressed!

Dave Williams · May 8, 2024

I only received my lens early this week and it literally hasn't been out of the house yet but I have to say I'm impressed with the limited shots I have taken out of the bathroom window ( doubles as a hide on occasions!). The lens feels solid, it's not that heavy if you have handled big telephotos such as the 500 and 600f4 but you might think differently if you haven't. . The tripod foot makes an excellent carry handle and whether I buy a Swiss Arca plate remains to be seen. I'm hoping not to have it on a tripod to be honest but we'll see.
The lens is quite long when fully extended so that presents a unique problem for me and my bathroom window as the angle I need to shoot at means I have to hold the camera, view through the opened flip screen and rely on the R5's eye detect to find the focus point I want. I am not in complete control!
That said the IQ seems very good from the few shots I have taken of our garden visitors. The bokeh might not be comparable with an f4 lens but neither is the cost of the lens.
I think I'm going to be very happy with my new toy!

Tim Mayo · May 9, 2024

Congratulations on the new lens Dave! Beautiful shot too. It's been a while since I've shot a fox. We have fox cubs on our family farm right now, it's just finding the time to get over there to shoot them.

Jake Shoots Birds · May 9, 2024

I've had a month with mine, but not a lot of opportunities. Things are finally turning green and birds are migrating in here, so there will be more time to evaluate in the coming weeks.

That said, initial impressions are good but mixed. For what it is and what it costs I don't know that I could have expected more. Unlike the 100-500mm where I have no issue shooting wide open at 500mm, I am finding an uptick in sharpness moving from f9 to f10 at 800mm. No ideal, but I'd rather deal with noise than softness. And using a combination of DxO PureRaw and Topaz DeNoise AI both of those things are generally "fixable".

Shooting birds in flight I'm finding I have to use at least 1/2000 sec, which when combined with f10 can jack the ISO quickly, and that even then I'm getting some softness in 2 of 3 shots. I'm shooting with the R5 and hoping that an improved focus system on the Mkii fixes that. I've played with it on the R7, but honestly it's almost too much lens for that camera in all but 15% of cases. On that camera I'm also seeing temperature distortion when shooting smaller subjects on or near the ground - something that was expected.

No regrets as it is a good cut above the f11 primes on the sharpness scale, easily handheld except maybe for BIF with a cropped sensor, and then it's a focal length thing. Very happy. Only wish it had arrived 2 months earlier when I was shooting a ton of stuff.

Dave Williams · May 9, 2024

Jake Shoots Birds said:
I've had a month with mine, but not a lot of opportunities. Things are finally turning green and birds are migrating in here, so there will be more time to evaluate in the coming weeks.

That said, initial impressions are good but mixed. For what it is and what it costs I don't know that I could have expected more. Unlike the 100-500mm where I have no issue shooting wide open at 500mm, I am finding an uptick in sharpness moving from f9 to f10 at 800mm. No ideal, but I'd rather deal with noise than softness. And using a combination of DxO PureRaw and Topaz DeNoise AI both of those things are generally "fixable".

Shooting birds in flight I'm finding I have to use at least 1/2000 sec, which when combined with f10 can jack the ISO quickly, and that even then I'm getting some softness in 2 of 3 shots. I'm shooting with the R5 and hoping that an improved focus system on the Mkii fixes that. I've played with it on the R7, but honestly it's almost too much lens for that camera in all but 15% of cases. On that camera I'm also seeing temperature distortion when shooting smaller subjects on or near the ground - something that was expected.

No regrets as it is a good cut above the f11 primes on the sharpness scale, easily handheld except maybe for BIF with a cropped sensor, and then it's a focal length thing. Very happy. Only wish it had arrived 2 months earlier when I was shooting a ton of stuff.

I tend to agree with everything you have said from my initial foray this morning. The R5 + 100-500 struggles with BIF when the background is varied, it was hopeless with the 200-800. It briefly gained soft focus when the bird passed a clear stretch of rock face but soon lost it again. I was just playing today but my intention is to keep the R5 on the 100-500 and stick the R7 on the 200-800 where the subject is small and I need more reach to make it bigger in the frame.

_G7A6410 copy-topaz-denoise-sharpen.jpeg

Dave Williams · May 22, 2024

I had a play with the 200-800 and the R7 last evening. I haven't really given either piece of kit too much testing although I did use the R7 quite extensively on a recent trip only to discover most images were soft. I bought the R7 as a back-up in desperation and have never fallen in love with it because I don't like the difference in the layout and the ways the buttons and dials operate compared to my R5 . I decided I'd give it another go and went through all my settings and discovered a couple of things I'd got wrong and hence the soft images.
So it was back to the garden Foxes which made a decent subject and didn't require much effort to set up only instead of leaning the camera out of the bathroom window without full control of the buttons and dials I used my pop up hide and tripod mounted the R7 on the 200-800 .
I discovered a couple of should be obvious things I hadn't noticed before. Unlike the 100-500 the 200-800 doesn't have a control ring which I don't need with the R5's layout but would be useful for the R7 which has one less dial.
The Foxes were just 25m away at most and to be honest, the 200-800 plus a 1.6 crop body is more than needed. 1280mm effective reach and a limited FOV can be a problem but I wasn't too bothered about composition, more interested in IQ.
The light was pretty good but I'd deliberately left it slightly later for softer sunlight. I had been advised that IQ is sharper at f10 over f9 at the long end and although I haven't done too much testing it certainly looked good to me but compromises on ISO and shutter speed are needed and I wasn't too keen on pushing the R7 beyond 1600 ISO but the few I took at 3200 look OK to me , especially when run through Topaz or Adobe so maybe next time I'll up it a bit?

Dave Williams · Jun 2, 2024

Out of curiosity I decided to try the 200-800 with a 1.4TC yesterday, attached to an R5.
The original image, they were sat high up in a tree perhaps 75m away, is a straight conversion to jpeg

The 100%crop has been processed with adjustment to light and Topaz de-noise. I used a tripod for added stability. Not too shabby considering!

Full Frame RF 200-800....early days but I'm very impressed!

Dave Williams

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Jake Shoots Birds

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Dave Williams

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