Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveA
LOL.. I just checked Craigs list.. you right. Guess my "looking for" skills need a little sharpening.
My lens are all EF - besides the kit I've added
EF70-300 f4-5.6 and the EF 50 F/1.4 USM
My body is the T3 will L Series even work with that body?
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Yes, the EF bayonet mount is standard across all modern Canon bodies, film or digital.
FYI, the thing that essentially makes a lens an "L" designation is the quality of the internal optics, not the mount or interface. Canon used to have a prior mounting system in the 70's or 80's, I forget the designation, it like F or something. Anyways, you could have conceptually had F-L lenses and EF-L lenses, they would not be cross compatible, but being designated as "L" in either series would indicate the higher-end lens.
There are many factors that make up a good quality lens. Would you *should* generally notice from better lenses would be:
-Constant aperture across the focal length, and usually a low number (f/4 or better). Aperture is a function of focal length, not an absolute aperture opening size, for a given aperture opening (say like an 8mm diameter), that would be f/4 at 100mm, but f/5.6 at 200mm (note, I'm totally making these numbers up because I don't feel like looking up for doing the math
So, the ability to maintain f/4 over a 100-400mm range for example takes more engineering complexity inside the lens to both have an opening that wide, and scale it with the lens zoom.
-Better sharpness at the edges of the lens. It's relatively easy to make the center of the lens elements crisp, but maintaining the same sharpness uniformly throughout the entire field of view takes more precision and time in the lens glas grinding process. The result of course is that your images appear sharp throughout, and with less visible aberrations at the edges.
-Less chromatic distortions at the edges. Lenses shape and funnel light, we've all seen the Pink Floyd logo of the light beam going through the color splitter, a similar effect happens with camera lenses. Better quality glass, coatings, polishing and groupings reduce this effect so that you don't have color distortions near the edges of the lens.
An interesting side effect of cameras that use APS-C sized sensors (pretty much any Canon that is not a 1 or 5 series, and all but 1 or 2 Nikons), is that the sensor is smaller than a standard 35mm sized sensor, so it's not "seeing" the light coming from the edges of the lens, it's using more of the center of the glass, which tends to be the best area in terms of overall sharpness/etc.
This is also why you hear about a "1.6x" zoom on these camera bodies. If you mount a 50mm lens on your 40D (or whatever camera body), your sensor is seeing less area than that same lens on my 5D body, because the 5D has a larger sensor. This has the apparent effect of a "zoom", because if we both print out the images we take with a 50mm lens on an 8x10" print for example, your print would show an image of approximately the inner 2/3'ds of what my camera would show, or in a manner of speaking, your print at 50mm would look like an image I took with an 80mm lens. None of this part really matters, I just mention it because it seems to be confusing to a lot of people...
Hope that's helpful
