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 first came out, 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.
EOS was beaten to the market by the popular Minolta Maxxum and Nikon's 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, or at least the dominant idea.
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". 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 removeable 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. I suppose 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 - but otherwise its performance is
so-so by modern standards.
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 a bit 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. 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, 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 took 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.
NB 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.
