Extender EF 1.4x III

I recently moved from a crop sensor to a full frame mirrorless camera. The one thing I missed was the relative loss of zoom because my crop sensor was behaving like a 480mm is now demoted to just be a 300mm zoom, albeit much sharper. In the past I have avoided any doubler or extender after experiencing vignette and other artifacts.

Since the native RF lens offerings are still a bit slim, I decided to reconsider an extender. Canon’s web site has contradictory information about compatibility. The lens appears on one list but not another. Where is does appear, it says it will loose one ƒ-stop off the ƒ/5.6. Not horrible. So I get the extender, and try to mount it. No go. I’m about to give up completely when I return to reviews I read earlier. The trick is, the extender only work when zoomed out to 240mm-300mm.

Yeah. It works. I was able to walk in the yard and take a couple of bright daylight shots. Immediately I noticed that it was hard to focus on anything closer than about 25 foot away. I use the 4-foot macro ability. Out at distance you can see the lens giving the equivalent of 420mm zoom — although the EXIF data still reported 300mm and ƒ/5.6.

When I travel I want a simple, versatile, and compact lens. For years my favorite lens was an EF-S 18-240. When I moved to full frame I could still use this lens but it would act like a crop sensor when I did. I did some analysis of the photos that I’ve taken for the last decade and found that only about 5 percent of my pictures were using the 240mm zoom. I was spending a lot of time in the 18mm range. This made moving to the RF 24-105mm easier. I still have my 70-300mm for the purpose it was bought: sports and wildlife. I bought it for an Alaskan Wildlife cruise and recent used it on an Airboat tour. In those cases, I spending all of my time at 300mm. This lens is compact enough to slip in my bag so long as I’m prepared to carry the considerable weight.

The reality is the inability to un-zoom is a deal breaker for me. With the extender, the 70-300mm cannot be unzoomed. That would have me walking around with a 13″-long contraption. That’s 16″ with the hood. I don’t even think that is structurally a good idea.

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