UPDATE 3/31/07***********

Thieves recently invaded my home and stole much of my camera gear. As a result, I've been in the process of replacement. I acquired a Canon 30d as a replacement for my stolen 300d. I borrowed a friends Canon (70-200)/2.8 AF EOS IS and another friends Canon (70-300)/(4.0-5.6) AF EOS IS for evaluation and added the results to these galleries. I ended up buying my own Canon 70-300 and think I'm going to be quite pleased, of course the Canon 70-200 L glass is superior but too expensive for my occasional long glass needs. I will continue to use the Tamron 28-75 as my general walk around, fortunately a friend had it borrowed at the time of the theft.

Because I am now using a 8MP 30d instead of a 6MP 300d I adjusted my shooting distance so that I could crop the 30d images to the 350d image size. I think this makes for an easier comparison between the lenses. All images are shot in RAW format with no image enhancements or sharpening other than the direct crop for the 30d.

A suggested method to compare lenses is to open two separate browser windows on your desktop. Open one lens gallery in the first browser window and the other lens gallery of interest in the second browser window. Set the view in both galleries to Original and use the sliders to move through the side by side images. I have posted an example of viewing in the galleries. The example is showing the Canon 70-200mm @70mm&f8.0 on the left with the Canon 70-300mm @70mm&f8.0 on the right.

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I’m an owner of a Canon 300d Rebel. In the past couple of months I’ve purchased a variety of old manual focus M42 screw mount lenses along with several M42 to EOS adapters. These were purchased on Ebay at fairly cheap prices. One afternoon out of boredom, I guess, I decided to evaluate the variety of lenses I had. I setup my tripod and shot photos of a box, plastic bottle, and some old alkaline batteries that happened to be handy. I attempted to adjust my distance from this test target arrangement to arrive at identical frames for the various lens focus lengths. All photos were shot in raw format with some exposure adjustment and color balancing in post processing, in order to correct for lens to lens variations. A remote shutter release was used for all shots. I was extremely careful in focusing but only as good as my eyes. No sharpening was done. The posted photos are original size but underwent significant jpg compression in order to fit within this database. Jpg artification seems insignificant. EXIF data included. Each lense was ran through it’s range of f-stops (aperture settings). Lenses tested included:

Canon 50/1.8 AF EOS
Canon (18-55)/(3.5-5.6) AF EOS Zoom kit lens
Canon (55-200)/(4.5-5.6) AF EOS Zoom
Super Takumar 35/3.5 Pentax MF M42
Super Takumar 50/1.4 Pentax MF M42
Super Takumar 135/3.5 Pentax MF M42
Tamron 90/2.5 SP Adaptall MF Macro
Tamron 135/2.5 Adaptall MF
Tamron 180/2.5 SP LD Adaptall MF
Tamron 300/5.6 Adaptall MF
Tamron 2X SP 140F Adaptall 7 element tele-converter (used with Tamron lenses)
Tamron 2X SP Pro AF EOS tele-converter (used with AF EOS lenses)
Carl Zeiss Flektogon 35/2.4 MF M42
Carl Zeiss Sonnar 135/3.5 MF M42
Tamron (28-75)/2.8 AF SP DI LD
Canon (70-200)/2.8 AF EOS IS and Tamron 2x SP
Canon (70-300)/(4.0-5.6) AF EOS IS

The photo names are hopefully self descriptive of the tests. Please draw your own conclusion as to the quality of the lens optics. I’ve drawn mine but don’t wish to get in an argument. They were purposely posted at full image size so that you can better evaluate. Unfortunately I can’t afford L-glass so can’t post for comparison. A VIEWING NOTE: If when viewing, you select LARGE size instead of ORIGINAL...you can use PREVIOUS and NEXT to step through the Apertures and note the effect...nice method to generally evaluate Sharpness with Aperture.

I will maintain this gallery until I need the space……ken