Big and Beautiful - Canon's EF 600/4 L

by Don Baccus

Who would want this lens?

What person in their right mind would want to own a lens that not only weighs 13.2 pounds, but, like an aircraft carrier, must travel constantly with a flotilla of expensive and heavy auxillary equipment to be of any use?

This is clearly not a lens for everyone. But, for the serious sports or wildlife photographer, this bulky telephoto delivers the goods when a subject is dangerous or difficult to approach, or when the photographer's ability to move is hampered by physical barriers or sidelines. I'm writing this review from the perspective of a serious wildlife photographer who concentrates on birds.

Physical construction

Like the other fast telephotos in Canon's L series of lenses, the EF 600/4 L is ruggedly constructed, with its metal lens barrel finished in white. It has a non-removable, rotating tripod collar with detents at the vertical and horizontal positions. This has a very large foot which is threaded for both 3/8" and 1/4" screws. The generously deep plastic lenshood is removable, and can be reversed on the lens for storage. It comes with a soft cover that slips over the reversed lenshood and serves as a lens cap while protecting the lenshood from being scratched.

The lenses in this series take 48mm gelatin filters. You place them in a filter holder that goes into a slot between the lens mount and the autofocus motor control module. Since all Canon big glass takes the same drop-in filters, only one set need be purchased.

Though I've never dropped this lens, I have dropped my EF 300/2.8 twice, once about seven feet onto gravel, with no ill effects, and am confident that this lens would survive such treatment just as well. I have no plans to field-test this notion, though!

Focus Module

One of the nice features of this series of telephoto lenses (200/1.8, 300/2.8, 400/2.8, 500/4.5, 600/4, and 1200/5.6) is that they share a common autofocus motor control module. The ring USM motor focuses the lens very quickly, and the 30,000 Hz sound it makes while rotating is silent to our ears, though some animals hear and react to it. The module provides manual or autofocus selection, autofocus range limiting, a choice of three manual focus speeds, a pre-focus capability, and like all of Canon's ring USM lenses, the ability to freely switch between manual and autofocus without switching the lens from AF to MF.

The autofocus range limiting feature allows the user to optionally limit the range to 6m-15m or 15m-infinity. The pre-focus capability allows the user to lock in the current focus position by moving a spring-loaded, sliding switch. If set, the lens will return to that spot whenever the metal, notched ring near the focus ring is slightly turned in either direction. This feature can be used to return quickly to a fixed location after following a subject elsewhere, for instance to snap focus onto a bird nest after using continuous autofocus to track a parent flying from it.

Being able to chose focus manual focus speed sounded silly when I first learned about it. Then I bought the lens and started using it. I find the slowest speed to be excellent for touching up focus after autofocus, for instance to get an animal's eye in perfect focus after using autofocus to focus on its body. The medium speed is about what you are used to with traditional gear, and the fast speed is useful for tracking quick-moving action in situations where autofocus gets confused.

Since there is no physical connection between the focus ring and the USM motor, the designers were free to damp the manual focus action without regard to drag on the motor. The focus rings of the telephotos that incorporate this module have the best feel of any autofocus lens I've used.

Optical Quality

This lens is extremely sharp, with plenty of sharpness to spare for teleconverters. I routinely use Canon's 1.4x extender when photographing songbirds with this lens and can't see any quality difference in an 11x14 enlargement. The resulting 840/f5.6 retains autofocus and is excellent for photographing from the car in refuges, where drainage ditches often separate you from birds or other non-aquatic wildlife.

When used with the 2x extender, autofocus is lost, and image degradation is somewhat apparent wide open, though certainly sharp enough for magazine submission. I recently photographed some barely fledged Cooper's hawk young with this combination. They were perching quietly in a tree about 30 feet up and 100 feet away from where I had my tripod set up. Because they were still, I was able to shoot using mirror lockup and to stop down 2/3 of a stop to f10. The resulting slides are extremely sharp.

Though you can't really judge sharpness with highly compressed jpeg images, the images on this page hint at the performance of this lens, with and without teleconverters. All three images were shot with the lens wide open. The great-horned owl was shot with no teleconverter, on Velvia, using a tripod. The burrowing owl was shot in light rain on Lumiere 100x, from my car using a beanbag and homemade shoulder stock, using the 1.4x teleconverter and EF 25 extension tube. The great blue heron was shot on Velvia, again using beanbag and shoulder stock from my car, and the 2x teleconverter.

Auxillary Equipment

If you buy this, or any other fast telephoto in the 400+ range, budget for a sturdy tripod, big ball head, monopod, and, if you shoot wildlife from your car, a Kirk window mount. Closest focus for this lens is six meters, about nineteen feet, so an EF 25 extension tube is necessary if you wish to fill the frame with songbirds or other small subjects.

The lens comes with a bulky suitcase for transportation. While you can probably airdrop the thing to remote sites without a parachute, it is too big and bulky for normal use, so you'll want to buy a Domke long lens bag as well. In this bag, the lens, with body attached and a brick of film in the outside flap pocket and another fifty rolls stuffed inside, can be legally stored under an airline seat.

Conclusion

I bought this lens after a year of using a 300/2.8 and a doubler for bird photography. After two weeks in southeast Oregon with the 600, I had quadrupled my "salable quality" inventory by shooting at 600/5.6 rather than 400/5.6. With the 600/4, which is also extremely usable at 840/5.6, I can knock off "salable quality" images almost at will. Because of some deadlines at my software development day job, I could only spend about eight days shooting this spring in southeast Oregon, but I still managed to add about 200 slides to my files in that time, mostly high-quality bird pictures.

A Bit of Bad News

I bought this lens from B&H Photo in August, 1994. I paid $7399. Today (July 1996), B&H advertises it for $9,199.