The Canon RF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 is a VERY cheap full frame RF mount telephoto which has kind of appeared out of the blue. Its headline feature is surely its price – just £289 in the UK, with US pricing yet to be confirmed. So at that price, there’s got to be a catch, right? Oh yes.
There’s no IS, for a start. Canon is aiming this telephoto zoom squarely at the beginner market with a price point to match, but selling a long telephoto lens to a beginner with no image stabilization seems like asking for disappointment, especially since none of Canon’s beginner-level RF mount cameras have in-built stabilization either. There can’t even be many experts who would want to shoot at these focal lengths without image stabilization, so beginners will be thrown in right at the deep end.
There’s something rather familiar about this lens, too. Is it by any chance related to the old EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 DSLR lens? Hmm.
The new Canon RF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 does offer a decent telephoto range for a very low price, and mounted on an APS-C RF mount camera, it has an effective 120-480mm focal range. The maximum aperture is f/5.6 at full zoom too, which isn’t bad at all.
Other specs include Super Spectra coatings, a 7-bladed diaphragm, a minimum focus distance of 1.5m and an optical construction of 13 elements in 9 groups – all identical to the old EF 75-300mm lens, in fact, so it doesn’t leave much doubt that the Canon RF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 is simply a cheap reboot of the cheap old EF version.
I also don’t like the sound of the DC autofocus. The only other Canon DC lens I’ve used is an old EF 18-55mm kit lens – the cheap non-IS version only ever seen in cheap kit lens bundles – which was neither quick nor quiet when focusing. Maybe this lens will be different.
So my initial excitement at this lens’s amazingly affordable price has diminished considerably. If Canon has indeed exhumed the old EF 75-300mm telephoto and adapted it to the RF mount, that’s very disappointing indeed, and the lack of IS in an RF telephoto zoom is just madness.
It wouldn’t be the first time Canon has pitched a product so cheap it falls below even the most basic levels of acceptability. Canon does make some great camera gear, but it also shows some pretty poor judgement from time to time. Anyone remember the EOS T100/4000D? That too was old tech, long forgotten, but then reheated and recycled as a cheap (too cheap) budget buy.