Soon I will be buying my second lens for my Rebel xti (probably in November for my birthday) Any reccomendations between the 55-200 or the 75-300? I am by no means a pro but I do want to be able to get some distance shots (say across the lagoon at World Showcase or in the case of last weekend, across the beach). I also dont want to be changing my lens every five minutes. Is there that big a difference betwen 55 and 75 mm? Opinions please! Katie
if you are looking for a solution that helps you avoid switching lenses, many companies (not canon) offer a 28-300 lens. that would pretty much mount and never come off. i have no experience with said type of lens so i cannot recommend one over the other. click the banner for b&h and search for "canon 28-300" to see the offerings. personally, i used to have the 75-300 is/usm and liked it. there is a HUGE difference between 55 and 75 on the wide end, esp. when you have a crop factor like most canon's 1.6x. with a 1.6 crop factor, the equivalent on the wide end would be 88 and 120 respectively for the lenses you asked about.
Well they do. In fact B&H's first hit on that search is: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/3 ... S_USM.html I'm guessing out of the price range.
Do you think I really need to go up to 300 or would I do well enough with 200mm? Im still trying to figure out this mm stuff...not quite sure of the conversion. Like how far does 200 mm reach?
200mm reaches 200mm. the conversion comes in to play when the sensor is smaller than a 35mm piece of film. for example, a piece of 35mm film is 1.6 times larger than your sensor, so you have a 1.6x conversion factor. that means although the lens is 200mm it has an equivalent of 320mm. it is only an equivalence, it is not a true 320mm. this happens because the middle of the image that the lens is capturing is "cropped out" because the sensor is smaller than full frame. think of a box inside of a box. the inside box is the "cropped out" and the outside box is the full frame. clear as mud?
Katie, Tamron has an actually pretty useful page that is a depth-of-field comparison - and one of the options is to change the focal length, so you can move the the FL to see the different effects. You can also switch between full-frame and "digital" which would be most on the market (i.e. 1.5/1.6x crop cameras) as there is a depth of field difference between a full-frame and a crop (basically the full frame has less depth of field at the same "equivalent" focal length because of the crop factor, that's another long issue) http://www.tamron.com/lenses/learning_c ... arison.php
Thanks for the Roger! That is a big help when it comes to truly understanding the differences between full frame and cropped.
Katie, Before we made the jump to the Canon 28-300 we shot with a LOT with a Tamron 28-300. The Tamron lens is definitely less expensive and smaller than the Canon, but the results you get are really very good. Yeah, there's a difference with an L lens but trust me, you'll be happy with the shots that you can get with a Tamron. Our main reason for shooting primarily with the 28-300 is the ability to shoot most of what we want without having to change lenses. Hope that helps. Mitch
I was looking at the 18-250mm that Tamron makes, the one thing that is holding me back from that one is that it doesn't have IS.
