Canon 300mm f/4 IS + EF 1.4x Mk II Extender

Let's have a look at the Canon Extender EF 1.4x II. It's a teleconverter that multiplies the focal length of a lens by 1.4. It turns a 300mm lens into a 420mm, a 70-200mm zoom into a 98-280mm, a 100-400mm into a 140-560mm, and if you attach it to Daniel Radcliffe he becomes Elijah Wood.

I was curious to see what it was like with my Canon 300mm f/4 IS. A 1.4x teleconverter turns the 300mm f/4 into a 420mm f/5.6, which is essentially the same as the Canon 400mm f/5.6, but with image stabilisation and a closer minimum focus distance. Are the results any good? Yes, surprisingly so, although I can't compare the image quality directly with a 400mm f/5.6 because I don't have one.

It's Brad Pitt, again, shot with a 300mm f/4 IS + 1.4x MkII at the 2019 Venice Film Festival. I'd like to say that this image took masses of planning, but it was a massive fluke. A huge chain of coincidences put me within a few dozen feet of Brad Pitt, with a telephoto lens in my hand.

These people were much closer to Brad Pitt, and didn't need teleconverters.

Teleconverters are controversial. There has always been something grubby about them. They're a lot cheaper than going up a focal length, and you can choose not to carry around the extra weight and bulk of a longer lens, but on the negative side they exaggerate a lens' optical deficiencies and add some of their own, and furthermore they take away some of the light.

A 1.4x teleconverter turns an f/4 lens into an f/5.6 lens and a 2x teleconverter turns the same lens into an f/8, which is awkward because some camera bodies have trouble focusing with dim lenses. If it's a bright sunny crisp clear beautiful lovely day and the birds are singing a pretty song and there's music in the air the loss of light isn't a huge problem, but what if you live in England?

What happens is that people buy the cheapest telephoto lens they can afford because they feel they need a telephoto lens, and then they decide to try out birdwatching or something, but the lens isn't long enough, so they buy the cheapest 2x teleconverter they can afford, and the end results look awful, so teleconverters get a bum rap.

You and I are not like them, we are better. I'm fortunate to have such good readers. For this post I used a moderately long teleconverter with a very good lens in optimal conditions, and the results were good, as I will demonstrate in just a few short paragraphs.

The MSC Musica. It has a giant video screen so that you can watch television while floating in the pool.

This is not Brad Pitt.

So far Canon has released three 1.4x extenders for the EOS range, alongside a parallel range of 2.0x models. The original came out in 1988; the Mark II version came out in 2001 and added weather sealing; the Mark III was released in 2010, and had a different optical layout and improved anti-smear coatings.

Each mark is apparently optically and electronically better than the last, although from the tests I have seen on the internet the difference is very small. The Mark II version stands out on the used market because it's not much more expensive than the Mark I, and it's the oldest model with a weather seal. The seal only makes a difference if the lens itself has rubber gaskets - the 300mm f/4 doesn't - but I have other lenses.

A 1.4x MkII attached to a 300mm f/4 IS.

Of note Canon's teleconverters only work with certain lenses. Consider the following image:

On the left is the 1.4x, on the right a Canon 100mm f/2, which would become a 140mm f/2.8 with a 1.4x teleconverter. As you can see the 100mm f/2's rear element is too close to the mount for the lens to physically connect with the teleconverter, and the pin arrangement is slightly different.

In contrast the 300mm f/4 has more than enough space for the 1.4x to fit, and it has the right number of pins:

There are complexities. Third-party teleconverters from Kenko and Sigma etc have a different physical design that will attach to the 100mm f/2, although I have no idea how well the autofocus works. Canon's extenders generally work with all of the longer L-series zooms and primes, but there are a handful of exceptions, notably the Canon 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L, which has an inner lens tube that hits Canon's extenders when zoomed out wider than 50mm or so. Canon's Mark II 1.4x and 2.0x extenders can be stacked on top of each other, but I surmise that the results would not be pretty.

In theory the 1.4x reduces the camera's autofocus speed, but in practice with my 300mm f/4 the speed went from being very fast to being merely fast, so I didn't notice any difference. The image stabilisation continued to work.

What's it like? Is it sharp in the middle? Yes, or at least sharp enough. Contemplate the following images:

I have no idea who these people are. Perhaps they're famous in Italy. At the top is the whole frame at 420mm f/5.6 shot with a Canon 5D MkII, at bottom is a 100% crop, without any sharpening.

Here's St Mark's Square, also at 420mm f/5.6, ISO 100, with image stabilisation, off the top of my head 1/180th or so:

The lack of contrast probably has more to do with the dim light and distance than the teleconverter. The top-left corner has some CA, but with Photoshop it could probably be massaged into something decent, and it has to be said that unless you're doing astrophotography the corner will be out of the plane of focus most of the time:

The centre is fine, although again it might benefit from some sharpening, noise reduction, and a contrast boost:

The combination of 420mm and f/5.6 doesn't lend itself to blurring out the background, unless the subject is very close:

I mention that teleconverters exaggerate a lens' deficiencies. The 300mm f/4 IS tends to have purple-red colour fringing on high-contrast edges, and it's exaggerated with the teleconverter:

Incidentally in the background there's a car ferry. Venice's main island doesn't have cars, but the Lido that shields Venice from the sea is large enough to have roads and buses. If the residents of the Lido want to visit the rest of the Italy by car they have to take a ferry across the lagoon. Venice is massively awkward and weird and yet people go there, so it's a paradox.

Again, I have no idea who these people are.

Also incidentally telephoto and super-telephoto lenses are good for panoramas. You have to take lots of images to get any kind of coverage, but on the positive side the combination of consistent across-the-frame image quality, low vignetting when stopped down, low distortion, and flat perspective lend themselves to stitching images together. Just for the sake of heck I tried to capture an ocean liner off in the distance with three shots side-by-side:

You can see one of the joins in the left side of the main dome. I could have fixed it, but I didn't. Why? Nothing has a reason. It's all arbitrary.

Imagine being a waterbus driver in Venice. It requires a certain amount of skill, a certain amount of brute force, you can wear sunglasses, the scenery is nice, albeit that you probably aren't paid enough to live in Venice, so you have to get up at 05:00 every day and commute, and eventually all of the waterbuses will be automated, at which point you'll become an unemployed fat drunk, and then you'll die in an overcrowded slum far away from Venice.

But the same is true of everyone. We are a race of microscopic bugs that grow and thrive in a small puddle of water, but the puddle is slowly evaporating, and one day all of the puddles will be gone. The best we can hope for is to die before the end. What about f/6.3 or f/8 or the other apertures? I shot a few images stopped-down but the results were almost indistinguishable from wide open, and I couldn't be sure if the differences were because of the teleconverter or a shaky lens or slight differences in focus. Ultimately I conclude that with a 300mm f/4 IS the Canon 1.4x MkII extender is essentially transparent, e.g. it degrades the corners slightly but otherwise makes the image no worse, and you can shoot wide open without wasting your time.

Polish SR-1 MRE

A couple of months ago I had a look at a Lithuanian MRE. It was okay! This month I'm going to have a look at an MRE from Poland, a country that famously cannot into space. Is it okay? It's okay!

A long time ago Poland and Lithuania were united as a dual monarchy/duchy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but in the 1700s the commonwealth was torn apart by internal political instability, and eventually it was split into bits by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Poland and Lithuania now exist as separate entities, but it's only a matter of time before they unite again. There is ample evidence of this in the two countries' MREs. They both contain the same SU-1 rusks, and even the spoons are similar:

Polish on the right, Lithuanian on the left. They're not the exact same design, but the Polish spoon will stack over the Lithuanian spoon. What more proof do you need? When I was young I never dreamed that one day I would post pictures of plastic spoons on the internet, but here we are.

There's the small matter of Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave on the coast between Poland and Lithuania, but that's just a detail. Enough of politics, let's decant the contents of the MRE onto a table:

Sufficient! I'm trying not to copy Steve1989. He reviewed a Polish MRE back in 2016:

He had a look at meal number four. Mine's meal number one. They're very similar. The main meal in all of the Polish MREs is essentially beef / pork / chicken with beans / stew, and the other bits are more or less identical. Mine expired in December 2018, but it tasted fine, with one caveat.

One thing it doesn't have is coffee, or any kind of proper hot drink. Perhaps Polish soldiers are given a separate coffee ration. I don't know.

The main meal is Fasolą po bretońsku, or Fasolka po Bretonsku as the internet seems to call it. I'm not familiar with Polish accents. The meal consists of beans and kielbasa sausage plus bacon, boczek, with tomato sauce. It's really good but I'll get to that later.

The meal also has a small tin of honey, a 100g tin of luncheon meat, no less than two packets of SU-1 rusks - affectionately known as panzercrackers, because they're rock-hard - a fruit tea drink, some sweets, and a fruit bar.

The accessory packet has salt, pepper, gum, toilet paper, a refreshing towelette, and a plastic bag to hold it all in. The plastic bag was very smelly and some of its smell had transferred to the sweets, but after the first suck they were okay. Overall the MRE was surprisingly good. The Lithuanian MRE was okay but felt a bit half-hearted, and the main meal was dull. The Polish version is conceptually similar but much tastier. Let's try out the sweets:

The first is a coffee sweet. As mentioned in the last paragraph, some of the smell of the accessory packet's plastic bag had leeched onto the sweet, so for a moment it tasted awful, but after sucking it a couple of times the original flavour came through. It was nice okay! The kind of artificial coffee flavour you get in Quality Street chocolates.

The other hard sweet had Vitamin C in it:

It was hard on the outside, soft on the inside. Let's try out the tea drink. Fresh from the packet it smelled pretty dire:

But it tasted good enough. It's a lot like the mixer drinks from US MREs - it looks as if it should be sugary, chalky, and generally unpleasant, but it does eventually dissolve and it has a subtler taste than you might expect. I think you're supposed to drink it from the packet (the accessory packet also includes a plastic straw) but I'm not a small child, so I used a glass.

This raises an issue. US MREs are designed so that you can heat them up and put them on a tray, but you can also rip open the packets and stuff the contents straight into your mouth. Furthermore the food is generally either gloop or at the very least easy to chew.

Polish and Lithuanian MREs on the other hand don't work like that - the main meal is messy and you'd have to eat the rusks and meat separately. They're more fiddly. I don't know how often Polish soldiers are expected to eat field rations. Poland participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq but withdrew its troops in 2008. Conscription ended shortly afterwards, and although Poland has a relatively large military - on a par with Spain, smaller than Italy, bigger than most other Eastern European nations - it isn't deployed abroad very often. Can the soldiers nip back home for food? Can they order takeaway? Perhaps that's why there are so many Polish MREs for sale on eBay. Let's try the crackers:

The crackers, technically SU-1 rusks, are a kind of hardtack. They have a distinctive aftertaste, almost minty, that apparently comes from having caraway seeds. It's not overpowering. The rusks are rock-hard. You have to break them up and chew them. I'm not going to try biting through them with my front teeth in case I snap my teeth.

To go with the rusks there's a tin of meat and a tin of honey. The Lithuanian honey had a fruity, almost marmalade-y taste but the Polish honey is much more conventional. The canned meat looks horrible, but it tastes great. Much better than spam, better than a cheap tin of luncheon meat from a supermarket, and I'm now tempted to raid the local Polish shop for Polish munchies. There was a bit of gelatin around the top but otherwise it was meat all the way down. Let's try out the main meal.

The MRE comes with a flameless, water-activated ration heater. At first it didn't seem to work but after a bit of shaking it started fizzling nicely. Another thing that separates US MREs from the Polish variety is that the US food is in plastic pouches, so you can put it in a microwave if the FRH doesn't work. The Polish food is in a metal tray, so if the FRH doesn't work you have to heat it on a tank exhaust, or use a hexy stove, or something.

The Fasolka po Bretonsku looks pretty grotty:

With little globs of fat. However it tastes really good. Steve1989 is naturally positive, and I can never tell if he's genuinely impressed with the food or if he's pleasantly surprised that thirty-year-old food is still edible. I can confirm however that the Polish main meal is genuinely tasty. It's spicy enough without the salt and pepper. The sauce is mildly savoury, the bacon is subtle, the chunky beans have a nice mouthfeel and with a bit of stirring the sauce thickens up.

As with US MREs the only problem is that the main meal is monotonous. If I was eating this as an actual meal, instead of an internet novelty, I would add onions, perhaps mushrooms, perhaps gherkins, topped with parsley or something, but for what amounts to mass-produced reheated military food it's much better than it has any right to be.

Let's finish off with the fruit bar:

It's coated with edible paper. It's a clever idea. The bar isn't particularly crumbly, but the paper keeps it held together so that bits don't go everywhere. I imagine that Polish soldiers can draw secret maps on the paper, and if they're about to be captured by the Russians they can just eat the bar.

Imagine if the German navy had thrown away their Enigma machines and instead sent orders to their U-Boats written on edible paper instead. How far can pigeons fly? How far can pigeons fly if they're on amphetamines? The internet doesn't say, but I reckon it's pretty far.

Without intimate knowledge of U-Boat movements the UK would have had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. First the dead, then the freshly-dead, then the soon-to-be-dead. But on the positive side without the government breathing down his neck Alan Turing would probably have lived to a ripe old age, so to paraphrase Lou Reed there is loss, but there's a little bit of magic to even things out.

Albeit that in the long run there is only loss. Ultimately the Polish MRE is a lot better than the Lithuanian variety, despite being conceptually similar. Taste-wise it's on a par with US MREs, albeit that it's more awkward to eat on the move and the range of meals is much simpler. Also, the idea of a military ration that consists of meat with beans plus meat feels a bit Second World War; it gets the job done but it's unsophisticated.

Would I eat it in real life? As with US MREs it doesn't make much sense for civilians. You can emulate most of the experience with a flapjack bar, some boiled sweets, a tin of spam and a tin of stew, or if space was an issue you could empty out several Pot Noodles into a plastic bag, or just take some Benylin cough syrup and a bottle of vodka and rely on mountain rescue to get you home. You pay taxes, you're essentially paying their wages, why should they complain?