[Music] hi I'm Dustin Abbott and I'm here today to give you my review of the Sony Fe 400 to 800 mm f6.3 to8 G OSS lens now I bought the 200 to 600 mm this is the F5 to 6.3g OSS shortly after its release and I've used it for the Last 5 Years if you've been watching my channel for a while you know that this has shown up in a number of different comparisons along the way I've compared it to a lot of the thirdparty lenses that have come onto the market on Fe and generally I've come out thinking you know what I made the right choice in purchasing this but what Sony has done now is basically take that same formula and expand it out all the way to 800 millim basically shift everything about 200 mm forward that makes it the first Sony zoom and probably the best zoom currently available to actually reach 800 mm that also makes it bigger heavier and more expensive so is it worth it well that's what we're here to explore here today which we'll jump into right after a word from our sponsor today's 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their most recent offerings now what's interesting is that although these two lenses have the same number of focal links available they cover a range that covers basically 400 MM but what's interesting is because of where they both start the 200 to 600 mm has a three time zoom range starts at 200 mm up to 600 mm which if you do the math that's three times Well ironically if you move that that starting position forward to 400 millim as we do here even though it still covers 400 MM it's only a two time zoom range and so that looks like this you can go from this framing at 400 MM to this now like the 200 to 600 this is a variable aperture zoom and so we start at F6 .3 and so f6.3 that is from 400 to 482 mm at 483 mm it becomes f7.1 as the maximum aperture all the way through 594 millim and then from 595 millim roughly 600 mm to 800 mm you're going to end up with the maximum aperture of f8 now of course variable zooms also means that the minimum aperture is going to scale in the same way and so at 400 MM minimum aperture is F3 6 at 800 mm the minimum apture is f45 now again like the 200 to 600 mm it is compatible with their teleconverters so that includes the 1.4 times which I own and I have here and then also the two times telecon converter now I say that it's compatible that comes with a little bit of a caveat here so with the 1.4 times I have tested it it focuses fine image quality is is decent so that will get you all the way out to 1120 millim and uh that's going to be a maximum aperture of f11 now with the two times telecon converter that'll get you all the way to 1600 mm however your maximum aperture is going to be F16 now you might be able to get away with that if you're shooting with a low resolution body but both of my Sony cameras are either 50 or 61 megapixels respectively and so frankly at F-16 defraction is going to take a hit on pretty much any lens and so I don't know that I would recommend that and of course you're going to need a lot of light to be able to get any kind of reasonable shutter speed when you're shooting at F-16 now be beyond that consideration what we have here is a another beautifully built lens you know and frankly I've used a lot of uh GM lenses at this point and frankly as I look at this lens and I look at the new 400 to 800g I kind of wonder what's the difference between a g and a GM in this case obviously they're reserving reserving the GM label for um either the 100 to 400 MM and so that was an early GM model and beyond that mostly for the telephotos the GMS have been reserved more for the super Telly primes and so in this case however what you've got is what I would call a GM level of build quality what you do have here is a very professional grade lens it's made out of a mixture of metals metal alloys and engineered Plastics and it feels tough and durable and frankly over the last 5 years that's exactly what this lens has been it's held up perfectly well during that time it is a thoroughly weather sealed lens um in this diagram I count about 21 different gaskets plus a flooring coating on the front element obviously a gasket at the lens mount so we've got thorough weather sealing at all the points throughout the lens itself and so when you've got a high grade of build you've got full weather ceiling I don't know what more really you could ask for out of a lens like this you know to make it a g master and certainly when it comes to the feature set it is a you know it's got a thorough Suite of features here most of those come in a bank of switches here there's kind of two different banks all operating the same or filling the same area on the lens here and so the top three are an AF MF switch there's a switch here that allow you to turn on and off full-time DMF and so if you have that enabled no matter what mode you're shooting in and with whatever camera you're shooting in you can do direct manual override which could be really useful if you're shooting birds for example Le in you know branches and some sometimes sometimes a branch might get in the way and so if you just need to pull focus a little bit tweak it into the area where it needs to be that can be very handy there's also a focus limiter and so that's going to give you three options you get the full range you can shoot from 10 m down to the minimum Focus distance and that's going to vary obviously depending on the focal length more on that in just a moment and then you can shoot from 8 m to Infinity now a little bit lower down you have a couple of uh OSS related so Optical steady shot which is the image stabil ization system two switches related to that a basic onof and then you've got a three position switch and so position one being standard two being dedicated for panning and three being a a mode that tries to stabilize the viewfinder more it's probably what I would reach for if you're shooting video as well now I looked very hard and I did not find any kind of actual rating for the OS s system here as is typically the P case with these Sony lenses if you have a a camera that has embod image stabilization built in it's not one or the other but they both work or they neither one of them work and so if you turn off the OSS switch here it'll also turn off steady shot inside the camera itself and so in so if they're working in concert let's just say that I doubt that the camera is doing much in terms of stabilization my experience has been the longer you go with telephoto lenses particularly on Sony the less the stabilizer seems to do and so what I found is that I when I was shooting at 800 100 mm at least I really couldn't get good handh holdable results until I got down to about 160th of a second so I tried first at 1/8 and then I tried going up to 130th and then I went to uh 160th of a second it wasn't until 160th of a second that I got any kind of repeatable handh holding results obviously your mileage going to vary depending on how stable your hands are bottom line is is that in my test I found about four stops of stabilization at 800 mm and so I because there is no rating if if it was better than that I suspect they would be bragging about it the fact that they aren't tells me that's probably about the zone that it's actually in obviously it makes a huge difference in a lens uh this long and so having stabilization makes a huge difference and the stabilizer is okay but it's nothing that's radically good and frankly on Sony it has been kind of rare that I have seen a lens that I think that the stabilization is fantastic I think maybe sigma's um you know new Optical stabilizer with their generation 2 algorithm is probably about as good as what I've seen but anyway um it's it certainly helps a lot but don't expect it to be like Rock Solid if you're trying to track at 800 mm now as you can see this is a big lens and I I'll pop off the hood for a moment because the hood is obviously quite large but just looking at the raw lens itself the lens is 1198 cm in diameter it is 34.6 um cm in length and so that breaks down to 4.72 in by 13.6 in overall obviously you put that hood in place it's going to add a significant amount of additional length to it so to give you an idea of comparison here so here's a shot where you can see them side by side and obviously here again the hoods make a difference if I remove the hood as you can see here the difference isn't quite as uh a significant so it's basically this lens is 9.3 mm in diameter wider than the 200 to 600 and it is a pretty significant 28 mm longer than it it weighs in at right under 2 1/2 kog 2.47 kg that's right under 52 PBS and so it's a good 300 plus grams heavier than either this lens or a lens like sigma's 150 to 600 uh sport lens so it's obviously a heavy lens also the front filter diameter is grown from 95 millimet on the 2600 it's now 105 mm so unfortunately you're probably going to have to buy some additional filters if you don't have any that they're that big now to help with those filters the lens Hood now has a window in it and so you can rotate a circular polarizer for example it also has a lock which is not there on the 200 to 600 but like both it has that rubberized front surface which as you can see as I'm doing with the 2600 it makes it for a nice stable place to set that and so um you can help to protect whatever surface you're putting this monstrosity on and that tends to be the most stable way to put things in place now the tripod foot and collar is somewhat similar in design to what we found on the 200 to 600 however this one is easily removable this one is not really designed to be removed and so you're going to probably want to keep it in place unfortunately like 2 to 600 the 400 to 800 its tripod foot is not ARCA compatible so you can see I I had add a quick release plate here and so that I could put it onto a tripod I don't know why that is but obviously it is what it is this knob here will allow you to loosen the tension and so that you can easily rotate the lens around and interesting is there is no detents there's markings on the barrel to line up at kind of the Cardinal positions but there is no detent there to give you a feel for when to adjust it but obviously you can easily rotate that around also in this section we have got a couple of attachment points on either side and so you can attach a strap that is included there's also a nylon nice nylon zip padded case that comes for it as well um in the package now minimum Focus distance here is actually a variable minim minimum Focus distance so on the short end which is 400 MM on the uh the wide as we'll call it the minimum Focus distance is 1.7 m or 5.6 feet and then that stretches out to 3.6 or 3.5 M on the telephoto end or 11 and A2 ft your maximum magnification comes at 4 mm and it's a decent 0.23 times and as you can see here you can you know fill the frame fairly well with an object like that and frankly even though the working distance is much longer at 800 mm 800 mm is a really long focal length and you can actually get fairly close to that magnification on the telephoto end as well but you'll get a little bit better results if you work on the wide end instead obviously we also have two rings here the manual focus ring I think it has actually a nice level of damping I liked the Precision of it and of course the best thing about these these designs is that most of the competing third-party lenses have an externally zooming lens and so even if they have a smooth Zoom action it's a lot more work a lot more rotation so you can't be as reactive in the field these lenses are amazing you can go just that easy from the whole extreme and so what I find is it's very easy to quickly acquire at 400 MM snap up to 800 mm if you want a tight framing or anything in between the balance stays the same so these lenses they're more difficult to transport but what I love about them is that when you're actually in the field the handling is so beautiful in these lenses it allows you to be much more reactive than with with with any kind of externally zooming lens so I love that we've also got custom or function buttons Focus hold buttons in three different positions and so bottom left side and top side and there's a Sony logo that's over on this side but what that allows you to do is that whatever your shooting position is you're going to be able to uh you know quickly have a custom or function button that's easily accessible to hand there now I did note that when it comes to the balance of the lens again because you have to introduce an extra variable in this uh quick release plate obviously you're going to want to go for as stable a plate as possible but what I found is in comparing these two lenses I actually found that the balance point is better in the 200 to 600 mm um I most shot handheld believe it or not when shooting the lens for my real world use but for doing all of my chart tests obviously I'm doing them on a tripod and being trying to be as steady and stable as possible so that takes a lot of work to frame the CH the test chart properly and what I found is that I could easily do it because of a great balance with the 200 to 600 with the 400 to 800 I felt like the balance wasn't as good so what I tended to have to do was overcompensate with it a little high to begin with cuz once I allowed that weight to fully settle down it was going to settle downward just a little bit on my tripod and so I had to adjust the framing accordingly so overall however this is a another beautifully made lens it handles great yes it's going to be heavy um it's certainly not impossible to handhold it but you have to be accustomed to handholding heavier lenses sometimes it can be handy if you know that's kind of in your way to just rotate that up out of the way and so you're holding it like this but I found that you know it's certainly possible to use it out in the field this way but obviously if you're shooting for extended uh times extended durations you may find that you get fatigued in carrying this let's just say that this is kind of like a weightlifting you're going to have to uh put in some reps before you get accustomed to carrying this kind of weight it is possible to do it but many people are going to find it more comfortable to work either off of a tripod or off of a monopod and using it so let's talk about autofocus uh obviously autofocus has updated a little bit it's a similar design to what we see in the 200 600 but they have updated to their more recent XD linear Motors we have nice big XD linear Motors in this particular model and so what it allows it to do is to have you know quick Focus Transitions and even when you're doing you know causing big Focus changes like what I'm doing in my test you can see at 400 MM it's really really quick and then at 800 MIM it's a just a tiny bit more deliberate but really for shooting at 800 mm that's impressively fast and what I found out in the real world is that this lens is very nicely reactive now I have tested autofocus on the alpha 1 so I was shooting up to 30 frames per second but this lens is designed for use also with the A9 Mark II which would allow you to keep up with 120 frames per second they also say that tracking will keep live while also while zooming in and out and so obviously that's going to be useful as well I did shoot this sequence for example with 138 frames as I was out and there was hundreds of geese out of on this ice flow and and I but most of them were just staying still and I saw a a goose take off out of the peripheral I turned and I snapped focus and it picked it up from the very first frame and you can see that the focus was perfect all throughout that frame which is fantastic and so I mean it's it's you have the right kind of light in the right situation uh Focus changes are just it it's fantastic at tracking I said with the right amount of light you know the problem is with the lens that has this small of a maximum aperture it means that you really do need adequate light so there's going to be certain applications that work and certain applications that don't I did test testing in a fairly brightly lit Fieldhouse of a runner moving at a a moderate Pace there and and so what I found however even in setting up the shot in that lighting though it wasn't bad and frankly I shot on the 4 millimet and so I could get the widest possible maximum apture of f6.3 what I found is I was still shooting at ISO 6400 and even then only getting shutter speeds like 1/200th of a second which frankly isn't enough to really stop action and so what you can see in these sequences is that while focus is keeping up um it's things don't look all that sharp because a majority of the frames have some degree of motion blur that are affecting them and so obviously that's going to be a significant issue and that was I mean I could boost things on up to 12,800 but even then I'm only going to be increas ining shutter speed so much and only stopping action so much so that obviously is going to be a huge consideration you're going to need lots of light with this lens and so you know frankly this is a lens to be used in daylight outdoor conditions either that you're going to have to be under extremely bright uh lights if it's some kind of sporting event this is the reason why people pay the big bucks for the you know the big super telephoto primes because they do manage to give you a long focal length with a fast maximum aperture or faster maximum aperture this is just kind of slow for those applications so it's not really an autofocus problem it's a light Gathering problem autofocus seems to be fantastic how about on the video side of things I actually frankly I didn't have high expectations and so my expectations were actually more than met when I tested for that now obviously I have to change all of my test paradigms when testing with something this long it's it's frankly a pain because it's just so long that it doesn't fit in any of my spaces you know for example when I was shooting my test chart this is how far away I had to be I had to set up everything outside I had to shovel some snow to even get to a place where I could you know work the range of the zoom and so it was a pain however what I found is that I was actually very pleasantly surprised by how nicely damp Focus pools were going back and forth between subjects and what you can see here is that Focus breathing is actually really low and yes I did have Focus breathing compensation turned off for this test and what I found is that is I put these side by side you can see that the size of the object changes almost not at all whether or not it's in or out of focus and so that was really really great I had to you do kind of a weird hand test you know instead of about the six foot difference distance that I usually work I was like 40 feet away but even though the the compression means that there's not much distance between my hand and my face it I it felt like it did okay in that and that it transitioned just fine from one subject to the other I also took some videos where I was tracking turkeys walking around in the early morning light in my backyard I did see one moment in one of the clips where Focus drifted onto a foreground Bush that was there but for the most part everything seemed to track just fine so obviously I mean video is going to be work as well trying to track and keep the subject in the frame but autofocus seems to be doing a good good job and so as far as the actual Focus I give it very good results for that particularly for being such an extreme focal length and zoom range so how about the image quality I'm going to give you the overview here and then those of you that want the deeper dive that will come at the end of the video this is a hugely complex lens 27 elements in 19 groups I think it ties with the sigma 60 to 600 uh DN sport lens as the most complex lenses that I have ever tested in terms of their Optical designs so there's a lot of elements six of those are extra lad dispersion elements you can see from the MTF chart that it looks really quite good and uh it's very sharp in the center of the frame and 400 MM in it kind of slowly drifts towards the edge on the 800 mm end it's really there's quite a difference between the two axes and so one drops while the other stays pretty flat now what's interesting here is that Sony's mtfs show wide open and they show f8 so you may have picked up at the 800 mm in because the maximum aperture is f8 it shows f8 twice there and so if it doesn't look like it it gets any better when it stops down that's because there is no stop down between wide open and f8 in this particular case now what I found when I begin to test other things is that I found that there is a minimal amount of fringing in that sequence where I was shooting the runner in the Fieldhouse I saw a little bit of green fringing in an open door where there was a really bright transition area but it was just really really minor and then these other shots with the geese out on the ice you know lots of opportunities there for fringing and frankly I really didn't see any and so I think overall that's not going to be an issue I also didn't really see any kind of issue with lateral chromatic aberration near the edge of the frame as I looked testing for vignette and Distortion what I found on the Distortion front is that it's all pen cushion Distortion to varying degrees and I actually found that it kind of fluctuated a little bit up and down as I move forward and so you know starting at 400 millim I saw about a minus four to correct and so a minor amount of pincushion Distortion it fluctuated as high as aus6 and then it was as little at the 800 millimeter and as a minus three what I also found is that vignette was consistently very very low surprisingly low throughout that Zoom range only about a stop maximum at any given point and you can see at this sh for example this is around 700 mm wide open no correction and you can see that even though we've got nothing but snow in the lower right corner of this image you'll see no U no Vin yet there and that's with zero correction so I think that that is pretty fantastic it is very good at keeping a even illumination all across the frame so how about the sharpness of the image I did a a multiple test here to try to you know callate the results make sure I got as consistent as possible because again there's a lot of EXT EXT variables when you're shooting with something that's this long and what I found is that at 4 mm the results are fairly good um good sharpness across the frame contrast is okay but not amazing in my experience and my test however again as I looked at that and I said well that's good but I think I I feel like I've seen better so I went to compare with the 200 to 600 millim lens that I have you know found in a lot of comparisons is as good or better than any of the competition that I've tested it against and what I found is that 400 mm I found this to be just a little bit sharper and so um you know that's great if it's taking something that I already considered to be kind of the standard Bearer and it's even a a hair better than that that's obviously great what I found also is that when I stopped it down there is a minor Improvement a little bit more contrast but nothing significant and so probably not much you're really going to pick up on in without looking at it at extreme levels of magnification now when I sto the lens on down remember that that minimum apture here on the wide end is f36 you're going to want to avoid that because defraction particularly on a high resolution body is going to really Hammer image quality you can see it's a lot softer at f36 than it was at f11 moving on in the zoom range I found at 500 mm that it probably achieved Peak sharpness it was definitely uh sharper better contrast and that was consistent across the frame I was very impressed at those results and so that's a great focal length if you're shooting at 500 mm you're going to probably get the best results out of the lens moving on to 600 mm I found that the results were not quite as good as at 500 millim and again when I went back to test with the 200 to 600 millimet I felt like at 600 millim I did slightly favor the results from the 200 to 600 millim but again that's at high levels of magnification with them side by side moving on to 7 and then 800 mm I found it 800 mm that results were good but contrast is a little bit lower but what's interesting is that even if you stop down just that 1third stop from f8 to F9 it's actually surprising how much contrast improves and you can see it here in this chart test so I thought well is that going to be true in a real world result and so I I shot another series of comparisons and you can see here in in anywhere where I look at it that there's definitely more contrast at F9 than what there is at f8 and and so uh that's a little bit of a pro tip there if you're shooting with this lens you know oneir less stop of light is not going to make a significant difference but the Improvement in image quality is probably worth doing it now what's interesting is that if I put the 1.4 times on the 200 to 600 I can get up to 840 mm at F9 on the telephoto in so if I compare 840 mm and that combo to 800 mm here both of them at F9 you can see that the uh 400 to 800 millimeter is definitely better and so um if you're looking to have good image quality at 800 millim then this is the way to go the overall rendering I feel like this lens is optimized to try to get as much sharpness as possible out of it the boa is okay I find that it can be a little bit busy with these kinds of um focal length it seems like at least you know in the time I'm shooting right now is the ugly season of the year so there's a lot of just bare stuff in the background I found that the Boke looked a little bit busy to my eye in a number of different shots a lot of stuff is going to be in the transition zone particularly if you're shooting at a you kind of a distant subject and then the background it's it's not a great ratio now if you get close to a subject you can obviously completely blur out of background and of course the bokeh is going to look fine there but I would say that if you want amazing bokeh at long focal links you probably need to pay for one of the higher end prime lenses or haven't tested it yet maybe a lens like the new uh you know Sigma 300 to 500 mm F4 lens like that is might give you a little bit more blurred out backgrounds I also found though I didn't really point it into the Sun a whole lot that the flare resistance is good overall uh this is obviously can get you to a very narrow angle of view and so perhaps the need to shoot right into the Sun is going to be pretty rare but Sony's Coatings are great and flare resistance is good so my conclusion is this I I recognize that for most photographers this this lens is going to be somewhat of a novelty it's you know it's we like looking at lenses like this but most people they're just not interested in carrying something this big and this heavy around and obviously it's also going to be at $2,800 us it's going to be somewhat prohib expensive for a lot of people and so they're probably going to be content with one of the $1,200 to $1,500 lenses from Tamron or Sigma that aren't as Extreme as this but much more affordable and maybe a little bit smaller and easier to carry around but for a certain niche of photographer this is going to be a game-changing kind of lens because all of a sudden it opens up completely New Horizons in terms of overall length this is the first Sony Zoom to reach 800 mm and as we've just seen it does so quite competently and while $2,800 sounds expensive if you're accustomed to looking at lenses you know below a th000 or you know from ,000 to $1,500 you know the truth of the matter is that this lens is $10,000 000 cheaper than the you know the primes that are the closest to getting to this kind of focal length and so in that sense it's quite a good value it really all depends on your perspective I will also note that lenses like this have a steeper learning curve than more accessible lenses you have to learn how to use them right you have to learn the conditions where they actually work you have to be a little more intentional about making sure you have the right lighting conditions and so yes they do involve some work how however this is a lens that's going to enable you to get photos that maybe you were unable to get before it's got fast autofocus it's got good Optics it handles great it's heavy but it handles great and so this may be the lens that you have been waiting for and if you want even more information about it you can check out my full text review that's Linked In the description down below and there is also buying links in the description if you would like to purchase one for yourself or get a pre-order in right now and of course if you want an even deeper dive into the optical performance stay tuned we're going to jump into it together right now okay let's start by taking a look at the different framing options available so we got 400 MM we have 800 millim if we take a look here at 400 millim in the center of the frame here with a still static subject you can see detail looks really really great and we as we pan over we can see that it's pretty consistent right off to the edge of the frame we look over here on the right side we can see that contrast isn't as strong in my opinion uh if if we look at the 800 mm end but it looks pretty decent you can see that the corners look a little bit softer relative to what we see at 400 MM end now for the sake of bringing all my charts outside I took just the one chart and so we can see that there is some pin cushion Distortion at 400 MM fairly mild and you can see here in my correction on the right side I used a plus or excuse me a minus four to correct for the pin cushion to Distortion you can see nice straight lines all around no problem there and vignette is really quite minimal this is about a plus 301 to correct for as I went throughout the zoom range I found that there was a little bit of a seesaw up and down in terms of the quantity of the pin cushion Distortion the most I saw was about minus 6 and so all relatively mild and the actual amount of vignette was just consistently really quite low at 800 mm I saw even a hair less of the pin cushion Distortion this is only a minus three to correct four so you know kind of one percentage point less vignette is incredibly low as you can see it really doesn't look all that much difference I've added a little bit about a plus 29 to correct for vignette but it stays really really mild and so you can see it's really quite uh evenly illuminated across the frame this is probably the worst example that I saw at any point of any kind of fringing you can see we've got a really bright high contrast and Open Door and so you know the light coming through there's just that tiny bit of fringing there but again this is the worst that I saw at any point so nothing to be concerned about here we can see that lateral style chromatic aberration are really just not a problem there's no nothing showing up in terms of the transition here from black to white now here is the test chart and so we're going to be looking at 200% magnification 61 megapixels and so in the middle of the frame at 400 mm you can see as we saw in the real world shot it really looks quite good pretty good contrast and detail and uh as we move over here towards the mid-frame again still looking quite good and as we pan on down towards the corner we can see that really the corners look quite good and so a really consistent performance across the frame if we put that into perspective with the 200 to 600 mm here at 400 we can see that you know there there's a little bit of give and take there uh I would say just a little bit more detail on the 400 to 800 mm contrast is arguably a hair better on the 200 to 600 we look at this Zone however there's no question that the uh 200 or excuse me the 400 to 800 is resolving better I mean that detail looks great you can see it's a little bit more blurry looking even though contrast looks quite good down here into the corner and again you can see that the amount of information that is resolved is just a little bit better than what we're seeing on the 200 to 600 if we pop up and look in this Zone it's kind of a wash to me they look roughly similar up into this corner I think maybe the 200 to 600 looks a little bit better up in this corner stopping down to f8 you can see does give us a contrast boost that the blacks look a little bit darker here I would say that things are resolving just a little bit better we look back here into the mid-frame and you can see that it's not super pronounced but uh definitely some improvement there we look up into this corner and I would say yes I'm seeing a little bit of improvement there as well f11 is the last place you can go before defraction really starts to affect things and you can see that uh here at f36 defraction has just demolished the image quality and so I would avoid you know shooting at anything F-16 would be the absolute last I would go but anything beyond that I would completely avoid on a high resolution body Now by 500 mm I think we hit what I consider the Peak Performance for this lens you can see that the contrast is noticeably higher at 500 mm versus 400 MM Zone if we look here in the mid-frame really quite obvious I mean it looks really gorgeous uh great detail great contrast up here into this upper left corner again and you can see just a really noticeable difference there um look at this Zone here versus here pretty remarkable difference now maximum apture is f7.1 at 500 MIM by 600 mm it is now f8 where it's going to stay throughout the rest of the zoom range we can see that there's a pretty obvious decline in terms of overall resolution just mostly it's the contrast just doesn't look quite as good uh looking at this Zone you can see what I'm talking about there's still I mean there's lots of things being resolved there you can just see that the contrast doesn't look as good there so there's just kind of a little bit of haze over the textures if I I bring the 200 to 600 millim back in here at 600 mm we can see that it's got the edge at 600 millim you can just see the contrast is better even its ability to resolve is improved there uh going up into the mid-frame we can see that it's maybe not as pronounced here but definitely still better overall we'll take a look in this upper left corner and we can see that it's pretty similar there down in the lower right corner I would say that the 400 to 800 has a very slight Edge if we pop over into this Zone looking roughly similar over on this side again more similar than different at 700 mm we can see a fairly similar performance to 600 mm looking good but not necessarily great it's resolving a lot of information but contrast doesn't jump off the page Corners are looking pretty decent however and so it's holding up on its image quality fairly well here's some quick real world perspective near 700 mm with a fairly still subject I mean I think that's a pretty pretty great amount of information that's being resolved there so uh I don't think I have much of a complaint about that so finally near 800 mm it's very similar to what we saw at 700 mm in that detail is good contrast is just okay now this actually looks quite good here in the mid-frame and down into the corner Corners are holding up fairly well so overall a pretty good performance just contrast isn't mind-blowing as noted however even at 200% magnification if you'll stop down even just that oneir stop to F9 you can see that it really makes a difference in improving that contrast it actually improves really quite quickly and so everything looks a little bit deeper if we look in some of these zones you can just see that more of the textures pop on here on the right side and that's due to just improv contrast so it's definitely worth that little bit of stop down at F9 if you want that extra bit of top of resolution if we compare the 800 mm at F9 of the 400 to800 versus the 200 600 with the 1.4 times that gets us up to 840 mm you can see you're definitely going to get a better result at 800 millim on the uh the 400 to 800 and so pretty obvious difference in the middle in the mid-frame you can see still that it's just a better contrast better detail better performance there down into the corners pretty obvious win uh there and up into this corner as well you can see a nice amount of centering and just an overall better performance versus the telecon converter combination and how about if we throw on the teleconverter and so here on the wide end it becomes 560 mm and F9 on the telephoto end with the 1.4 times it becomes 1120 mm at f11 and so we can see looking in at both of these obviously you're going to get higher performance on the wide end it's you know it's for a variety of reasons but you can see that it's certainly still a usable amount of image quality here even at 1120 mm just not incredibly sharp but I think that if you did a little bit of work with that if you you know this is again this is high resolution if you scaled that down a little bit I think it' probably look just fine now here's the look at the maximum magnification on the 400 mm end and again I think that the you know the result holds up pretty well here pretty good detail and contrast looks good there uh this is an example of you know what you can do in Catching something in Flight here and this is probably one of my favorite images out of my review period with this you can see the detail looks great there and a great looking image since we've already looked at flare resistance let's just end this off by taking a look at the rendering and boket quality so as mentioned if you get really close to a subject as we've got here you can strongly blur out the background and the bokeh is great image like this however with some complicated layers I just find that that looks a little bit busy to my eye I also don't love these kind of elements with the bright kind of specular highlights there and so that isn't fantastic this to my eye looks kind of busy and so um you know the it's just it's not a great ratio of my distance to my subject and then the distance to the background here's a kind of of a more moderate result where my distance to the subject isn't too bad and then the distance to the background there's still some stuff in the transition zone but we'll call this the neutral shot and I think it looks okay so in other words you're just going to have to be selective about your backgrounds and what you put in the frame thanks for sticking around to the very end I hope that the Deep dive into the Optics has helped you to understand whether or not this is the lens for you as always thanks for watching have a great day and let the light in [Music]