I finally got myself a cheap 400mm lens!

Hey all,

Just before last weekend I received a Tokina 80-400 I bid on from a dutch auction site. This weekend I had some practice with it, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised at how good it handled. At just over 1kg, it doesn't really have a huge impact on my arms or back, so nice to walk around with a larger tele lens. For the last 2 years my longest lens has been the 100mm macro, so this is a HUGE boost for me. 400mm handheld worked very well so far. Focus is accurate and smooth, it's even pretty sharp wide open at 400mm, but CA can be really bad. Figuring out the best workflow to get rid of it though - all tips welcome.

To the important stuff!
Mandatory duck shots - missing because I didn't find any nice looking ducks... here's some gooses though - hope they are satisfactory.

I challenged the lens (and my camera) to give me handheld shutterspeeds in the afternoon shade, which does give the better images I think.
Both are clickable and full-size is available through flickr (they are cropped a bit).

#1 - EXIF: 400mm, f/5.6, 1/500 (handheld), ISO 400.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/mdstoop/4702215​579/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/mdstoop/4702848​064/

The first shot is great!

Looks like you got a good deal.

That first shot looks really nice.

Thanks to you both The first one was my favorite from this weekend as well (from ~300 shots, but most with the 35mm macro). Second one looks a bit underexposed now, that looked different before I uploaded it
Forgot to mention one of my favorite things about this lens. There's a rubber wheel on the base of the lens hood that you can press down (onto a filter thread) to rotate a CPL. I want this on all my lens hoods from now on...

Sweet! I have been thinking about the tokina 80-400 for awhile now. Looks like a very capable lens.

Jam.radonc wrote in post #10364967
Looks like a very capable lens.

It definitely is, I've never shot long lenses and I was able to pretty much use it without any trouble for the first time. MFD is pretty decent, but you really need to watch out for CA. It's all easy to PP away, but factor that in as an extra step. Wide open it can show some haloing (similar to the canon 28mm 1.8 @ 1.8 ) in harsh contrasts.

Apart from that, sharpness weight, balance is excellent, especially if you consider these things sell for about 275 euros only. And for that you get the complete package, including the hood and tripod ring.

Now I'm just worried it'll act like a gateway drug... before you'll know it, you'll justify the need to shoot at f/4 around dusk/dawn, so you'll need a 600mm f/4

Capable for sure and I really used to like the size of it ... tiny for a 400mm lens.

I have the II version, is yours the same or is it the newer D version?

I have found mine to perform similarly, maybe slightly less sharp wide open but usable, taking it to an airshow next month hopefully, unfortunately my 350D broke and while I'm excited to be replacing it with a 550d I'm worried the difference in pixel pitch caused by pixels half the size may result in softer images but it should be fine at F8

I may well end up trading the 550D for another 350D if it ends up asking too much of all my affordable lenses!

fatdeeman wrote in post #10366962
I have the II version, is yours the same or is it the newer D version?

I have found mine to perform similarly, maybe slightly less sharp wide open but usable, taking it to an airshow next month hopefully, unfortunately my 350D broke and while I'm excited to be replacing it with a 550d I'm worried the difference in pixel pitch caused by pixels half the size may result in softer images but it should be fine at F8

I may well end up trading the 550D for another 350D if it ends up asking too much of all my affordable lenses!

I have the D version. Not sure what the difference is though... Maybe just build/coatings.
Also, what a coincidence, I bought this lens with an airshow next saturday in mind. I thought I'd give it a chance over the summer and see how much I like it. The weight and size makes it a great traveling lens. I was honestly expecting very poor wide open performance, but as long as you keep CA in mind it really amazed me how well it does wide open. About keeping CA in mind, I found out it's crucial to keep high contrast areas sharply in focus. That way the CA is easy enough to remove in the raw conversion with lightroom/DPP/DxO. Once it gets slightly out of focus it's annoying to get rid of (takes more time, but still doable with a masked desaturation or fiddling with channels). If they are completely OOF, I don't bother because you don't really notice

I wouldn't worry about using the lens with a body that has a higher resolution though... just resize it down and stop yourself from pixelpeeping. As long as it's good 2000 pixels wide or so, it's good enough for printing up to magazine cover formats - let alone viewing online.

TweakMDS wrote in post #10367143
I have the D version. Not sure what the difference is though... Maybe just build/coatings.
Also, what a coincidence, I bought this lens with an airshow next saturday in mind. I thought I'd give it a chance over the summer and see how much I like it. The weight and size makes it a great traveling lens. I was honestly expecting very poor wide open performance, but as long as you keep CA in mind it really amazed me how well it does wide open. About keeping CA in mind, I found out it's crucial to keep high contrast areas sharply in focus. That way the CA is easy enough to remove in the raw conversion with lightroom/DPP/DxO. Once it gets slightly out of focus it's annoying to get rid of (takes more time, but still doable with a masked desaturation or fiddling with channels). If they are completely OOF, I don't bother because you don't really notice

I wouldn't worry about using the lens with a body that has a higher resolution though... just resize it down and stop yourself from pixelpeeping. As long as it's good 2000 pixels wide or so, it's good enough for printing up to magazine cover formats - let alone viewing online.

The D version has different coatings and also the focusing mechanism is changed to an internal type so that the front element doesn't rotate during focusing (as far as I know) also it seems to have a little wheel in the lens hood so you can turn a CPL filter with the hood on, nice touch!

You are right about the resizing of course, it's just nice to know the lens is good at a pixel peeping size! But yeah, nearly all of the photos I have taken that over people have seen have been online at 1280 pixels wide or as A4 prints so it really is non essential at the end of the day.

Oh and I forgot to add, I'll be looking our for your airshow shots!

fatdeeman wrote in post #10367174
You are right about the resizing of course, it's just nice to know the lens is good at a pixel peeping size!

Pixel peeping will cost you about $1000 more (100-400)
(I kid though, you'll also get USM and they'll make it white).

I have a couple of old relatively cheap manual focus lenses in this range that are very sharp, sometimes I wish I could somehow retrofit an autofocus mechanism on them!

excellent shots! yah Tokina's generally have alot of CA, my 80-200 has *ehemmmm* quite a bit to say the least. LR3 gets rid of most of it pretty well

I just got another 350d, had an offer I couldn't refuse!

I should still be able to get a 550d in time for the airshow but I have the 350d to fall back on just in case!

Maybe I should get bigma instead?!

I'm not sure it's worth the extra expense though.

Decisions decisions