Lens Impressions

I bought a 17-40mm F4L lens with my first digital SLR as a general walkaround lens but I had always used manual focus telephoto zooms with my film SLRs so was desperate for an EF digital equivalent.

My FD 70-210mm F4 had served me very well for many years so this lens, the EF equivalent, was an obvious choice. It's a fantastic lens. It's small, light, and the image quality is incredible. It's one of the cheapest 'L' lenses available and, as such, it is something of a bargain.

I sold it. The only reason for this was that my next purchase was the 300mm F4L IS and I got bitten by the Image Stabilisation bug. When Canon announced an IS version of the 70-200 F4L I couldn't resist it.

On my film camera 70-210mm was 70-210mm, but with the crop body 10D 70-200mm of course became 1.6x that focal length. All of a sudden I found myself trying to hand hold a 320mm lens and the lens shake was quite noticeable.

By the time of the 70-200mm F4L IS announcement, Canon had improved the Image Stabilisation significantly over my 300mm F4L IS and for me there was no choice.

The only negative thing I can say about the non-IS version is that it doesn't have IS but that is rather obvious. It's still available new and there are lots of good used ones on the market. It's an absolute bargain and regardless of your camera body, this lens will give great results.

The lack of IS means you will need to use a bit more care when shooting in low light but high ISO performance keeps improving, as does noise filtering software.

I really didn't want to sell this lens but as I had already bought the IS version it just wasn't worth keeping.

Post-Processing

I owned this lens when I was mostly shooting JPG images. Some original images were shot in the RAW format and converted with Adobe Camera Raw. Noise was reduced using Imagenomic Noiseware Professional. Small amounts of image enhancement were applied using Adobe Photoshop CS2 (curves, levels, saturation) before sharpening using the Smart Sharpen filter (Amount: 30% - 120%, Radius: 0.2px - 0.3px, Remove: Lens Blur).

The large JPG images that open if you click on a thumbnail were saved with a 'High' quality setting of '8' on a scale of 0-12.

Caveat

This isn't a review. If you want MTF charts and comparisons with other lenses, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. However, there are plenty of excellent sites around that offer this kind of information.

Just as with audio equipment, a list of specifications doesn't mean very much. My old original Quad Electrostatics never looked very good on paper but once fired up they had the ability to make hairs stand up all over your body.

With photography I prefer to look at photos of real things and real people that evoke emotion, rather than look at MTF charts or other meaningless images.