Let's have a quick look at the
Canon 100-300mm f/5.6 L, an old telephoto zoom lens from 1987. It's notable for being one of the
very first EOS lenses. Canon's lens museum says that it was released a few
months after the system made its debut, in March 1987, but it appears in all
the early adverts and brochures, so presumably it was good to go from day one.
Nowadays it's intriguing because it's one of only two quasi-L
lenses, but more of that later.
Canon's EOS autofocus system was beaten to the market by the Minolta
Maxxum and the Nikon F-501. Both of those systems had an autofocus motor
inside the camera, driving the lens with a little screw that poked through
the lens mount. Canon put the motor inside the lenses, which turned out to
be the right idea in the long run.
This from the brochure for the EOS 650, the very first EOS camera. The
brochure is dated 1986, a year before the 650 went on sale. Notice how the
two 100-300mm lenses are "available soon". Some of these lenses were
remarkably long-lived - the 15mm fisheye and 28mm f/2.8 remained on sale
until the early 2010s.
The early EOS telephoto zooms all had a common physical design, with a
push-pull zoom control, a trombone-style focus system, and a removable rubber
ring that covered the lens hood connector. The general design language of the
zooms only lasted a couple of years, although a handful of the primes remained
on sale into the 2010s. A similar thing happened in Nikon-land; the early
Nikon AF lenses had a common design (slightly naff-looking shiny black
plastic) that was abandoned sharpish.
As far as I can tell the 100-300mm f/5.6
L remained on sale until 1992 or so. I don't
have access to any sales figures but I have the impression it was quite
popular; looking at Google Books' stash of late-80s, early-90s photo magazines
for artistic nudes research purposes it pops up a lot in
"images from our readers" photo-essays. It was the late-80s equivalent of the
typical modern-day 100-400mm wildlife-and-everything lens.
You can learn a lot about things by studying serial numbers, but not in this
case. Mine was made in November 1988 and has the serial number 1009070. The
only other serial number I can find on the internet is
this example
from Mir.com, which was made in January 1991 and is number 1612872, which is
quite a jump. But perhaps the serial number range included the regular
non-L 100-300mm f/5.6 as well. Maybe Canon
did sell over half a million of them. I have no idea.
The 100-300mm f/5.6 L didn't have a direct
replacement. I've always thought of 100-300mm zoom lenses as a 1980s thing - a
stepping-stone on the way to modern 70-300mm or 100-400mm lenses - and in
general 300mm is an odd focal length, too long for indoors but not long enough
for air shows or safaris etc. On the other hand I had a lot of fun with the
Canon 300mm f/4 IS, a few years back, so what do I know?
The 100-300mm f/5.6 L is an oddity. It has
the same body, electronics, aperture and focusing mechanism as the regular
100-300mm f/5.6, but with a slightly different optical design that includes an
exotic glass element and a fluoride element. Canon's website boasts that this
cuts down on optical aberrations. Having used the lens quite a lot I can
confirm that this is true. The 100-300mm has a remarkably low level of
chromatic aberration and purple fringing. The colours are nice as well.
The practice of selling L and non-L
versions of the same lens was shared with the contemporary 50-250mm f/3.5-4.5
L and nothing else ever. Since 1987 almost
all of Canon's L-class lenses have metal
bodies, frequently with weather sealing. In contrast the 100-300mm f/5.6
L feels cheap, although in its defence
mine still works fine despite being thirty-four years old. The buzzy autofocus
motor is presumably no more buzzy than it was all that time ago. The one good
thing about sharing parts with the regular 100-300mm f/5.6 is that it...
shares parts with the 100-300mm f/5.6. I'm going to stop making the letter L
red. I don't want to do it any more.
It's actually slightly more impressive in the flesh. The push-pull mechanism
glides smoothly and even at full extension it doesn't wobble. It creeps
slightly if I point it downwards, but there's enough tension to keep it locked
at around 110mm or so.
Here's what it looks like:
It focuses down to just under a metre, with macro magnification of around 1:4.
Focusing closely at f/5.6 is about the only time that bokeh becomes apparent,
which is a shame because the bokeh is nice:
On a practical level the black body is a lot less eye-catching than Canon's
white-bodied telephoto lenses, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Sliding
from 100mm to 300mm is lighting-fast.
What's it like optically? Vignetting wide open at 300mm is surprisingly mild,
which is disappointing in a way because vignetting can be used to make the sky
darker without the need for a graduated ND filter. Given the small front
element (the filter thread is just 55mm) I expected massive vignetting, but
no. Here's a boring shot of a harbour at 300mm f/5.6:
Here's a crop from the middle, at 300mm f/5.6 and then f/8, both shot at ISO
400. They're similar, but there's a little bit of a glow at f/5.6 which
reduces the contrast:
Why ISO 400? The 100-300mm predates image stabilisation by almost a decade,
which means that despite the bright sunshine I ended up shooting at ISO 400 a
lot just to make sure that the image wasn't blurry. I'm worried about motion
blur because it's a killer. You can fix almost everything else. Not motion blur.
The extreme corners at 300mm are okay for a zoom, but even at f/8 they never
get sharp:
I have a hunch that on an APS-C camera the image quality would be more
consistent. It would be a 160-480mm in that case. I don't like the idea of
taking photographs at 480mm without image stabilisation. The viewfinder
would jump around like mad.
Notice how despite the softness there's only a tiny, tiny bit of chromatic
aberration. Also notice how the colours and contrast are perfectly fine,
although that's an easy fix nowadays. Of course, back in 1987 Photoshop
didn't exist, and part of the 100-300mm's raison d'etre is that it
produces images that didn't have to be fed through a CA / vignetting /
distortion correction plug-in to look presentable. If you were shooting
slide film in the late 1980s (with a steady hand, or using a tripod) you
would probably have appreciated the lens more than I did in 2022.
Here's the back of Michael Palin's
Erebus, at 200mm, with f/5.6
at the top and f/8 at the bottom, with the 100-300mm f/5.6
L:
There's a bit of chromatic aberration, but not much, and the whole frame is
very consistent. Here's the same chunk'o'book, photographed with the
70-200mm f/2.8L, at f/2.8, f/5.6, and f/8
respectively:
As you can see the 100-300mm f/5.6 is slightly, fractionally worse wide open
than the 70-200mm f/2.8 stopped down to f/5.6, but it would be unnoticeable
in real life. My particular 70-200mm f/2.8 has always been less sharp on the
left side of the image, which is apparently a fairly common issue with
complicated lenses that have image stabilisation. The simpler 100-300mm
f/5.6 is actually sharper across the frame at f/8, although on the flip-side
you'd need the aforementioned steady hand to take advantage of this.
Distortion is very low as well; I didn't notice any. This was shot at 250mm,
and there's a tiny amount of pincushion distortion, but it's negligible
really:
I've never seen a Boeing 727 in real life before. It's the one in the
middle. These three planes are lined up at the former international airport
in Athens. They're in a sorry state. Boeing made almost two thousand 727s,
but they were mostly bought for the domestic US market, so they never had
much of a presence in Europe. They had three rear-mounted engines, with one
in the tail. Famously they had a built in staircase that swung down from the
tail, and at least two hijackers used the staircase to parachute out of the
aircraft with a bag of money.
The 727 was largely replaced by stretched versions of the Boeing 737 (left).
The early 737s - this is a 737-200, from the 1960s - were shorter and
carried fewer passengers than the 727, but over time Boeing stretched the
airframe to a point where modern 737s can carry more passengers over a
greater range with much less noise than the 727, so the 727 died off. A few
are still flown as cargo aircraft. The rear-mounted engines, clean wings,
and T-tail give it a graceful appearance, and it's a shame it couldn't have
been re-engined. But trijets are inherently awkward to service and operate
so it was doomed, alas.
That's enough about airliners. On the positive side the 100-300mm f/5.6 L's
image quality in the middle is surprisingly good, and it's handy if you're
shooting film, because its only vice is corner softness. CA, vignetting, and
distortion are all well-controlled and the colours are nice. Will its little
plastic gears hold up? I have no idea, but mine still works three decades
after it was made.
On the downside the manual focus system is typically awful, as is common
with all of Canon's early lenses. The manual focus ring is scratchy and
undampened. The full-focus-range / 2m-infinity / manual switch is stiff. You
have to pull off a rubber ring in order to use the lens hood (the ET-62,
fact fans). Canon sold the hood separately.
Anything else? It's not compatible with Canon's teleconverters. The tunnel
at the lens mount end is too narrow. The tunnel is lined with felt material
that sucks up dust, and it seems to work, because my lens had very little
dust in it.
The front element rotates when you focus, which makes using a polarising
filter a pain. The fact that it's an f/5.6 lens also makes using polarising
filters a pain. And of course 100-300mm f/5.6 is a boring specification. Do
you want a 100mm f/5.6 lens? No, I don't either. On the other hand, if
you're shooting with an APS-C camera on a tripod - the lens is light enough
that it doesn't feel unsafe when the camera is mounted on a tripod - it is
perhaps the cheapest way to get decent image quality in the 300mm range.
And that's the 100-300mm f/5.6 L.
