Picked up my new-to-me Canon 55-250 STM this afternoon. Shot the mergansers on the way home, then this evening I saw the fox in the field next to my house. The fox was cropped by about 60% and the mergansers by 70%.
I shot aperture-priority and used S-AF. There’s a slight amount of motion blur with the foremost merganser. AF speed was fairly reasonable IMO; however, I am a longtime Pentax shooter and I think most of us know about Pentax’s history of slow AF, so surely that influences my perception.
I’ll continue documenting my experience with the 55-250 in this thread.
Looks pretty good to me, especially for the amount of cropping involved. The Fox shot looks really good as far as detail goes. Definitely keep us updated on your experiences with it, & if you get a chance, perhaps compare the 55-250 with something like the PZ 45-175 or one of the 45-150 or 45-200 lenses. Not so much for IQ, but for AF speed & accuracy.
Great shots. I am dusting off my 55–250 and adapter (Commlite) as of today, when my Olympus 75-300 began to show symptoms of a failing ribbon cable. I will be shooting it on an OM-1.
This morning I walked around my yard with the 55-250 and the Panasonic 45-150.
With both lenses set to 150mm, the Panasonic focused at least 3x faster. I would first focus near my feet, and then on a tree about 30 yards away. The Panasonic was dramatically faster locking focus, and also the Canon would sometimes - maybe 25% of the time - require a second attempt to lock focus on the tree. This did not occur if I aimed at something closer.
Even just randomly pointing the lenses at branches, grass, etc. the Panasonic felt nearly instantaneous when locking focus, whereas the Canon would take a beat or two, and the infamous DFD “wobble” was quite pronounced.
Sharpness between the two lenses seems similar. Haven’t done any careful comparisons yet, though.
The maximum magnification between the two lenses is, well… Canon (250mm) on the left, Panny (150mm) on the right…
Cool. Thanks for that. I think I’ll just continue with my PZ 45-175 as a lightweight kit, & PL 50-200 + 1.4TC for longer duties. The image quality does look very good though.
Yeah, I couldn’t imagine buying a converter just to use the 55-250 STM - and the price of that combo is already 2/3 of the way to a used Oly 75-300ii or Panny 100-300ii… and also 2/3 the weight of the 50-200/2.8-4.
I do plan on getting a couple more EF lenses, though, so it’s worthwhile for me.
I’ve used the Commlite and Viltrox adapters and Olympus/OMDS bodies with Canon EF 100mm f/2, 40mm f/2.8, and Tamron 100-400 with good results. Single AF is quite usable, while continuous AF is more like Russian roulette with 2-3 rounds loaded up instead of 1. The 40mm maintains its sharpness when adapted.
One advantage you will have with Panasonic bodies is that the sensors will not exhibit the same chromatic issues as those in Olympus bodies. Something about the sensitivities at shorter wavelengths.
Adapting lenses is fun. Aside from the C-AF issue, I think the adapters could be made to be a lot lighter. The ones I have use feel like such big lumps. Although I guess exotic materials would bump up the price.
The fox came by again this evening, and this time I was ready - on the ground, staying as still as I could. A little bit darker this evening.
The 55-250 STM definitely focuses slowly in the cloudy evening light, but it does focus. Images were not tack-sharp with the slow shutter speed, but not too bad.
Inspired by your test, I dug out my 55-250 and Commlite adapter and have been taking them out over the past couple of days. I can post notes and sample photos here, or in a new thread if you’d like to keep them separated.
This afternoon - very sunny, albeit quite windy - I made a casual comparison between the Panasonic 45-150 and Canon 55-250 STM.
I took several dozen photos with each lens, shooting in bursts and refocusing between the bursts. All the Panasonic shots looked identical, whereas maybe 25% of the Canon shots looked slightly soft, as though maybe critical focus was not attained.
The target was about 50 yards away.
The Panny was shot at 150mm f/5.6, the Canon 149mm f/5.6. DXO Optics Pro is my RAW converter. I disabled all the lens corrections that I could: vignetting, “Lens Sharpness”, and CA.
First pic, Panny is on the left, Canon on the right:
I just did a quick comparo between the 50-250 STM and my Lumix 12-60. According to Canon, the 50-250 has a maximum magnification of 0.29x. This seems reasonable to me because when I compare images at minimum focus distance with my Lumix 12-60 (0.27x max mag), the image from the Canon is slightly larger.
