Review: The little supertelephotos

Gordon from CameraLabs is one of my favorite reviewers, and he recently has reviewed the Canon RF 600mm and 800mm F11 super telephotos. 

He's also a lot braver than me, keeping his camera sitting on the grass while it's raining.

I appreciate Gordon's viewpoint, where these lenses are interesting lenses, it depends entirely on your comfort level on image quality.  As with a lot of lenses, your usage depends entirely on your use case, and at times, your imagination.

Gordon concludes;

The Canon RF 600mm and 800mm f11 are relatively light and affordable super-telephoto lenses for the full-frame EOS R mirrorless system. An aperture of f11 may ring alarm bells on older cameras, but the EOS R bodies can autofocus at f11 - or even at f16 and f22 when using tele-converters - in all but the dimmest conditions, while the brightness of their viewfinders automatically increase to avoid the dim image you’d get with a DSLR. Meanwhile a non-adjustable aperture and a fixed tripod foot rather than a rotating collar allow weight and costs to be kept down. In practice both lenses proved remarkably usable, successfully tracking birds in flight and various sports in good to fair conditions, while also proving more than capable for aviation or lunar photography. 

Watch the video above, and also go here to see more samples and read more of Gordon's write up.

• CameraLabs