Canon 200-400mm Lens Review

Hi, this is Ian Plant with Outdoor Photography Guide, and I'm gonna be talking about one of my favorite lenses. This is my go-to lens when I'm shooting wildlife, and this is Canon's 200 to 400 telephoto zoom lens with a built-in 1.4 extender. Let's talk about some of the key features that make this lens stand out from other lenses. First of all, this is a zoom lens, which is really great when you're shooting wildlife. Most of the lenses used by wildlife photographers are fixed focal length primes like a 500 millimeter or a 400 millimeter.

And these lenses are really great, but it can be very, very difficult to properly frame your subjects. A lot of the times, you're shooting a little too tight or a little too far away. If you're shooting just a little too far away, you end up cropping a lot of your images. Now, every lens manufacturer will make an extender that you can put in between your camera and your lens, but that results in you taking the lens on and off whenever you wanna take the converter off or put it on. Not a problem with the Canon 200 to 400 millimeter lens, the extender is built into the lens.

So all you need to do is flip this switch. So let's say, for example, I'm photographing a subject at 400 millimeter, and my subject moves a little further away or I decide I wanna make my composition more tight. I just go ahead and flick the switch to the 1.4 X converter, and suddenly my 400 millimeter shot becomes a 560 millimeter shot all with the flick of one switch. Being able to zoom in and out isn't just great for fine-tuning your composition, it's also really useful when you're working with a small wildlife subject like a bird or maybe a subject that's further out in the distance. Sometimes when you're zoomed out all the way, it's hard to actually find your subjects.

So with this lens, you can do two things. You can either zoom out and then you can find your subject, and once you've got it, you can lock on and zoom back in for proper framing. Or you can simply take the 1.4 X converter switch and you can switch it out back to the normal position. And then, when you find your subject, you can switch to the 1.4 converter and have a tighter framing. So between the zoom lens and the built-in 1.4 X converter, this lens gives me unparalleled flexibility for fine-tuning my compositions when I'm working with wildlife subjects.

Another great feature of this lens is image stabilization which provides up to four stops of assistance. This makes hand holding a lot easier. This makes it a lot easier to get really sharp images in low light. So this allows me to shoot at shutter speeds I normally wouldn't be able to shoot. So, for example, with this lens extended to 400 millimeters with the 1.4 X converter, that's a focal length of 560 millimeters.

Normally, I wouldn't think of shooting that handheld at a speed any slower than 1/500 of a second, but I'm able to get away with sharp images at 1/250 of a second, even 1/200 of a second. In a pinch, I might even be able to get 1/100 of a second because of the image stabilization. This increases my flexibility and allows me to shoot in lower light and trickier lighting conditions. This lens has three image stabilization modes. Mode one is for normal shooting, mode two is for when your subject is moving from left to right and you're panning with your subject.

And mode three sort of acts as an automatic image stabilization mode. It can tell whether you're stationary or whether you're panning with your subject. So it'll automatically switch over to the correct panning mode that you need. In terms of image quality, this lens is exceptional. It's easily one of the sharpest zoom lenses ever made.

Now, it's not quite as sharp as some of Canon's super telephoto lenses in a fixed focal length, like their 500 millimeter or their 400 millimeter, but it's really, really close. So close that you won't notice the difference. This is easily one of the best telephotos zooms that's ever been made. This is true even with the 1.4 converter engaged. There's a little bit of a sharpest penalty when the converter is engaged, but this converter was made specifically for this lens, so that penalty is pretty small.

You're still gonna get phenomenal images, very sharp images with he converter engaged. I really love this lens because of the image quality it delivers and because of the zoom flexibility that it gives me, but no lens is perfect. So what are the cons? Well, first of all, the price tag. This lens comes in at about $11,000, U.S.

Wow, that's a really expensive lens. It might seem prohibitively expensive, but if you're really serious about wildlife photography, this lens is gonna take the place of several prime lenses. So normally you might have a 500 millimeter, a 600 millimeter, a 400 millimeter lens, and maybe even a 300 for wildlife shooting. This one lens will cover almost that entire range, and it'll do it for a cheaper price than buying all four of those lenses. Another challenging feature with this lens, it is relatively heavy.

It's probably heavier than most of the prime lenses out there, even like a 500 millimeter lens. So this means you're not gonna be doing a lot of handholding with this lens. I have done significant amounts of handholding when I was in Indonesia photographing orangutans. In the rainforest, I found that I had to handhold this lens a lot because the tripod wasn't really realistic. Basically my arms were getting tired after about 10 minutes.

It was quite a workout to handhold this lens. So you're gonna wanna have some sort of support, a tripod, or a beanbag support if you're shooting from a Safari vehicle. Another downside for this lens is the fact that its maximum aperture is f/4, which is actually not bad compared to some lenses. For example, if you're working with a 500 or a 600 millimeter lens, your maximum aperture typically is gonna be f/4. But some of the shorter telephoto lenses like 300s and 400s come in f/2.8.

Now, f/2.8 gives you a bit of an advantage, it'll blur the background more. So your background is gonna look a little bit nicer if you're shooting with a 2.8 lens rather than an f/4 lens. Your auto focus is gonna work just a little bit better if there's more light coming into the camera. So having that 2.8 lens is a bit of an advantage when you're working in low light. So because you're getting about one stop less of light compared to a lot of the prime fixed focal length lenses out there, that means you're often using a higher ISO, which introduces more noise into the photograph that's gonna reduce your image quality.

So it would have been great if this lens was an f/2.8, of course, I think that would have been a very unrealistic construction. It would have ended up being much bigger and heavier and much more expensive than it is now. So I think this was the most realistic option for Canon. It's not ideal that f/4 is the maximum aperture, but it works pretty well. Of course, once you engage the teleconverter, you lose another stop of light.

So that f/4 becomes a 5.6 instead. Finally, I've noticed that this lens doesn't quite handle flare as well as a fixed focal length prime lens would. And this is a problem for me because I really love shooting into the light. Now, the lens does come with a lens hood that you can put on the front, and this does help shield the lens from stray light. But when I'm shooting into the light at sunrise or sunset, when the animal is back lit with this gorgeous light, the sun is very low on the horizon, so the lens hood isn't doing anything to stop the light coming through.

So you need to have a lens that really handles the flare effectively. And even though this lens has got some great modern coatings to help reduce flare, because it's a zoom construction, it's not gonna handle flare as well as a fixed focal length lens. So I would say that this lens handles flare adequately. It's not superb, it's not as good as some of the other lenses I've used. It's good enough, I just have to be a little careful.

And sometimes when I'm trying to shoot into the light, I'll notice the flare, it'll be too bad, I just won't be able to get the shot. The Canon 200 to 400 millimeter lens with the built-in 1.4 X extender is a heavy, very expensive lens. It's certainly not for everyone, but if you're really serious about wildlife photography and you wanna optimize both your image quality and your artistic flexibility, there's no lens quite like it. That's why I have this lens in my bag, and that's why I use it for about 90% of my wildlife photography.