Review by Klaus Schroiff, published August 2011

Special thanks to Markus Stamm for providing this lens for testing purposes!

Introduction

Typical for most designated Canon L-grade (Luxury) lenses it provides an excellent build quality based on an tightly assembled metal body and smoothly operating zoom and focus control rings. The physical length remains constant regardless of the zoom or focus action. The front element does not rotate thanks to an inner focusing system so using a polarizer is no problem - that is unless you attach the deep petal-shaped plastic hood, of course. The supplied tripod mount is detachable.

As already mentioned it features a ring-type USM drive with and extremely fast and virtually silent AF. The tested sample focused accurately during our tests. The AF speed is slightly reduced when combined with the Canon EF 1.4x (III) or EF 2.x (III) converter - this is a side effect of the smaller effective max. aperture. It's also worth to note that Canon advises to use the central AF sensor only when using this lens combined with tele-converters (the flanking sensors may cause focus errors).

The similarities among the various 70-200mm f/2.8 incarnations are quite interesting so let's have a short look at the paperwork here before going on to the test results.