MEGAZOOM Battle! Canon R5 + 100-500 vs Sony A1 + 200-600 In The Field! Does FLEXIBILITY beat REACH?

[Music] do [Music] [Music] hi guys and welcome to the channel i'm jan wagoner and i'm happy that you're joining me here today because i have two really exciting lenses and cameras on my table the canon eos r5 with the rf 100 to 500 millimeter lens the sony alpha one with the sony 200 to 600 millimeter lens when i was making my videos about the rf 100 to 500 millimeter lens a lot of you guys asked but what about the sony 200 to 600 millimeter lens it offers an extra 100 millimeter reach advantage on the long end and comes at a very attractive price point so when i finally had the chance to take out the 200 to 600 millimeter lens in the field i was really interested to see how it would compare to the much smaller canon 100 to 500 millimeter lens so does the sony really have a huge reach advantage or is the difference much smaller than we think in the field let's find out so when you're reading about these lenses on the internet they might sound quite similar but looking at them side by side they could almost be not more different couldn't they the sony is the much bigger much heavier internal zoom weighing in at 2.26 kilos or around 5.2 pounds the canon is a small flexible external zoom that weighs in at just 1.3 kilos or 2.6 pounds so that's the first really big difference between the lenses i thought it's kind of interesting that the 100 to 500 with an attached r5 is still shorter than just the bare 200 to 600 millimeter lens and this is largely caused by the different philosophies when it comes to the zoom the canon is an external zoom that zooms in and out so if you want to shoot at the 500 millimeters the lens will be this size but it packs away really nicely to this small size that basically fits in any bag if we look at the sony it's an internal zoom so nothing on this lens zooms in and out and the throw of the lens is really nice it's very very easy to zoom from 200 to 600 millimeters just with two fingers so that is really really awesome but it obviously comes at a price and that is weight and size i mean both of these lenses you can still hand hold all day so it's not really a problem there but when it comes to flexibility and size and the ability to fit in like smaller backpacks the canon definitely has a huge size and wide advantage over the sony the canon is wide open at 500 millimeters at f 7.1 and the sony at f 6.3 so the sony has a ever so slight advantage when it comes to the f-stop but in the field i found that difference to be really negligible when it comes to the design of the lenses they're kind of similar but what i prefer about the sony is that you can actually replace the lens foot like what was done on this lens on the canon you can't really do that because this whole lens color thing is one big piece and if you want to use it on a tripod you will have to get one of these plates and attach it to the bottom here at the same time the advantage on the canon is that if you know you're only hand holding the lens you can just take this whole collar off and then just use the lens without it so while there's a downside if you want to use the lens on a tripod there's a definite upside if you want to handle the lens because you can just remove the foot and have an even smaller more compact and lighter lens both of these lenses obviously also come with a lens hood the canon one you twist it on and then it actually stays into place and you have to press a button for the lens suit to come off again and it also has that little nice hole at the front if you're using a polarizer for instance you can just open that and then turn the polarizer with your finger that's a little bit more difficult on the sony the other thing i noticed that a few times the sony lens so it just fell off in the field because it doesn't have a button to actually unlock it it just kind of screws on and off it kind of screws into place but it seems to come off fairly easily so a few times i just had that fall off not really a big problem but yeah just something that was a little bit annoying in the field talking about filters the good thing about the 100 to 500 millimeter lens is that it actually has a 77 millimeter front element so most of you if you're using filters polarizers for instance or like mutual density filters for filming you will already have those filters available the sony has a 95 millimeter front element so it's actually quite difficult to find any sort of filters for it and if you find them they will be very expensive so this is something that if you want to use filters especially for filming then the 77 millimeter front element of the 100 to 500 millimeter lens is definitely a great advantage the one thing the canon has is this rf control ring where you can assign different functions to for instance your iso your shutter speed your aperture so that can be quite handy in the field although personally i don't really use it the sony doesn't have that but it has these three buttons that you can actually assign functions to for instance you could assign the 1.6 crop factor to one of these buttons and whenever you're in the field you press the button and it switches to the 1.6 crop factor so that can be quite handy the main problem i found with that is that the position of the buttons is well let me say not great because what happens i like to hold the lens like this i don't like to hold it by the lens foot i hold it in my hand but the problem now is that these buttons are very easily pressed and whenever i hold the lens in my hand i involuntarily press these buttons all the time so in the end i just had to turn off any functions on them because whenever i held the lens i pressed the button and then i was just messing with my settings all the time so this is something that is very good but the design of the buttons is actually done in a way that i just pressed them all the time so i had to turn it off so if they could have put the buttons maybe just on top of the lens rather than at the bottom of the lens that would have really helped so let's talk about the minimum focusing distance of the lenses that's where the canon has a huge advantage it goes from 0.9 meters at 100 millimeters to 1.2 meters which is about four feet and the 500 millimeters the sony has a minimum focusing distance of 2.4 meters or about 7.9 feet throughout the focal range so i can basically be twice as close to the subject than i can be with the 200 to 600 millimeter lens and that can be a huge advantage in the field especially because this hundred to five and it can function as like an emergency macro lens so let's talk about the image stabilization these two lenses and the ibis in the cameras because when we're hand holding lenses this is actually quite important and both of these combos allow me to hold reasonably low shutter speeds without getting too many blurry images at the same time as you know when we're shooting birds we don't really want to have too low shutter speeds because then we just get motion blur from the birds moving so within reason i could easily hand hold decent shutter speeds with both of these combos where i really saw a huge difference was when it came to handheld video on the r5 and 100 to 500 millimeter lens with the is and the ibis in the camera i could take fantastic really steady video and combined with the eye tracking in the video mode of the r5 it's really easy to take beautiful handheld video of birds because i can simply concentrate on holding the camera still and then the ibis and the image stabilization do their thing giving me nice smooth frames and the eye tracking tracks the bird throughout my viewfinder so i've been really using that a lot and has given me fantastic video that you can see in a lot of my videos when i tried to replicate that on the sony i just couldn't there's just no way for me at least to have it as stable as the canon combo when i'm trying to handhold the sony a1 with the 200 to 600 millimeter lens it just doesn't want to seem to stay in one place and be nice and stable if i had to describe it it's almost like someone is kind of pushing the front of my lens in a direction and the whole time i have to kind of counteract that resulting in not so smooth and more shaky footage and the a1 also doesn't have eye tracking for birds in the video mode i tried the active steady shot mode as well but there it was even worse than just a normal optical steady shot because with the active steady shot engaged the image started to move really robotic without it it was kind of shaky but i think i could stabilize it in post whereas with the active steady shot engaged the more focal length i had the worse it got and the image really started to move like that rendering it unusable video essentially so when it came to the stabilization the 100 to 500 with the r5 has a distinct advantage at least in the video mode four stilts are found both to be more sufficient but yes with video i could only really recommend 100 to 500 with the r5 if you're planning on doing a lot of handheld video also because it does have the eye tracking in the video mode as well talking about autofocus that's obviously something that's very important as well and i talked about it in more detail in my video about the r5 and the a1 but generally speaking both of these combos deliver fantastic and super fast and super accurate auto focusing the canon animal eye autofocus is a little bit better at subject recognition especially at greater distances it just picks up the burst quicker and more reliably however once the target is acquired both cameras track the bird very well but i would give a slight edge to the sony that really seems to jump onto the bird and then just stay glued to the bird throughout the whole series of images overall both of these combos have delivered me fantastic action fast action and also just still portraits and there's no real concerns there for me i would be very happy with either of them in the field when it comes to the auto focusing but now i've been talking so much about taking images in the field but haven't shown you images so let's change that and jump right into my image examples so let's look at a series of images and start with the same rainbow lorikeet from my backyard low light higher iso but if we zoom into these shots at 100 we see really nice sharpness and really nice details in both of the images if we look at the sony shot on the right i think it maintains some more detail in the really bright areas a little bit better than the canon shot and also in the dark areas there you see a tiny bit more detail but all in all i thought the files of both cameras in this example and both lenses were very nice and sharp with very nice details so then we went out to one of my favorite places in victoria to photograph the cape baron geez and we managed to have a goose stand in front of us for probably like 15 minutes or so so we were able to capture shots without the extenders from the same position and then shots with the extenders to really show you the difference between 500 and 600 millimeters but also just how nice files both of these cameras can produce so if we zoom into this file at 100 percent now we can see that both of these images are really really nice and sharp the canon on the left is sony on the right the sony is a little bit bigger because the camera has 50 megapixels so a little bit more pixels than the r5 and alts obviously 500 versus 600 millimeters that's why the file on the right is a little bit larger but i think overall the sharpness and details are very very comparable in both images and it would be hard for me to really pick a winner in this scenario so let's look at the shot with the 1.4 extender on here you see the difference between 700 millimeters on the left and 840 millimeters on the right in this case now i was actually moving forward a little bit trying to match the goose in the frame so the advantage between the 700 and 840 i kind of negated it by moving a bit further forward but if we zoom in to that to 100 again we see really really nice sharpness and very good details still on both of these lenses and it's interesting if the further we go back the more it seems like the cannon has a little bit smoother nicer looking fine detail but then when we go to the area around the eye it feels like the sony has a little bit more crispness overall but all in all looking at these two as well i would say that both of these cameras also with the 1.4 extender attached on their respective lenses did a really fantastic job and i have a few more examples for you here with the extender because especially for the sony lens if you put a 1.4 extender on the 600 millimeter lens that gets you to 840 millimeters in this small size and that's something that's really cool especially if it delivers good quality and when we look at these samples it does the first one is a singing honeydew with a 100 to 500 700 millimeters on the r5 and here we see beautiful details in the shot all around just sitting on the bush with that like and branch coming out of it an image that i really liked the next image is image with a1 200 to 600 in the 1.4 extender and that was quite impressive because the sun was already fairly high up and if we zoom into this shot we can see that the a1 at 840 millimeters delivered really impressive sharpness and details at a fairly decent distance so that was another great example how the extenders worked very well on both of these cameras and if you're using the extenders wide open is f10 on the 100 to 500 and f9 on the sony lens there's one thing that you should know about the canon that i'm really not a fan of but it is what it is i suppose and that is if you want to put an extender on to the 100 to 500 you have to zoom out to 300 millimeters grab your extender put it on and then the lens doesn't zoom further back then 420 millimeters to 700 millimeters with the extender attached and then it actually also loses its compact size so with the 100 to 500 if you want to have it compact you can't leave the extender attached to the lens with the extender attached it's actually almost the same size as the 200 to 600 now so this can be quite annoying in the field if you know that you're using the extender you will still have to take it off to be able to then zoom back so the lens and camera fit nicely back into your backpack so this is something that's quite annoying and not really a great solution but that's what it is i guess to keep it this small size and on the sony this is where it's very well done you put the extender on and the lens stays the same size and this sony extender is actually so tiny that it almost adds no weight or length to your lens so that's really awesome when it comes to the sony lens because it works really well with the extenders if you ask me which combo would you pick to photograph a small distant bird with the extender and that you think would more reliably give you a good result i would have to pick the a1 with the 200 600 millimeter lens and the 1.4 extender because it did really really well with that it delivered me great sharpness the 100 to 500 did well at 700 millimeters as well but overall i felt like it was a little bit more iffy to get sharp shots at times another awesome series of raws that i want to show you is when behind my house a whole flock of cockatoos landed and i had the opportunity to just go there and take some cool images with both of these cameras and the first series of images are with the r5 and you can see it was able to very well track the fast action and the cool stuff that these crazy cockatoos were doing and then here's a few files with a1 where the cockatoos just did some crazy stuff gave me some really cool poses so once i added these up they will look really amazing all in all i think both of these delivered fantastic images also when it came to action photography and neither of these cameras get distracted when there's a lot of busy backgrounds or anything in your background once they acquire focus they track the birds really reliably against any sort of background and then let's move on to some more images here's an image that i really liked r500 to 500 in the very early morning light super nice super crisp and i just love the colors in the breeding form which with the bright red on the eye and the beak and then that nice and blue background next i want to show you this shot of the little cruella that i really really like a1 turn it to 600 with the 1.4 extent i was just driving along and i saw this cockatoo sitting on top of a bin so i quickly stopped the car grabbed a sony combo snuck up to the bird it was quite difficult to find a background but then i spotted like this red colored house with a few bushes in front of it behind the cockatoo so i positioned myself in a way that i could get that red house in my background and then i actually got this very cool shot and when we zoom into this you just see what an amazing job the a1 did with the 840 millimeters it's pretty amazing isn't it and another shot a1 200 to 600 mid air action i've never seen the cockatoos actually do that almost flying upside down like birds and prey so that was a really cool scene that i was happy to capture with the a1 200 to 600 and it did a phenomenal job on staying on the birds very well done so next i want to show you some awesome images from the k barangis with the babies and this was one of those times where the r5 seemed to focus a bit better on the babies the a1 struggled to find the eye on the babies and often would focus on the body or in the grass or somewhere else in the image so when i was photographing the baby geese i often gravitated towards the r500 to 500 combo first of all because it was tracking the birds better secondly because it had the 100 millimeter advantage at the short end and i want to show you some examples there because the difference between 100 millimeters and 200 millimeters in the field can be quite dramatic so first i want to show you what i'm talking about with the sony camera here you have a nice series of images the baby bird is right in the center of the frame so you think it should pick up the eye should pick up the bird but when we zoom in you can see it completely missed focus and it's kind of on the grass in front of the bird and then like on the mom's neck we zoom into the next photo same thing next photo same thing next photo same thing and then here you can see it can actually get it especially in better light but this was disappointing so here's now an image that i really like where you can see the little baby just walking in front of the parents with the siblings if we zoom into that you can see the r5 in this case was able to really nicely track this image giving me a beautiful shot of this baby and then here's one of my favorite images from the outings that i have with both of these cameras that's r5 100 to 500 millimeters with that really cute little baby goose just on these plants and then the mum just poking the head into the shot keeping an eye on her baby so one of my favorite images this is the edited version here's the before version as you can see just with a few little tweaks you can transform your good raw images into spectacular final images and if you want to know how to do that make sure to check out my master class in the description where i show you step by step how you can master image editing and then the geese just started walking in front of us in this dramatic morning light where the sun was just coming out between the clouds and a real big advantage here was that i could take this amazing scene at 100 millimeters get all three babies and both parents with the stunning scenery in the shot whereas i could kind of hit dwight behind me swearing because when he tried to get that with the 200 to 600 millimeter lens this is kind of what happens this is essentially the same scene but just trying to get the shots with the geese from some sort of angle to fit them all in but at the 200 millimeters it was just impossible to get that same point of view and he wasn't able to get those images that i was getting in i always talk about the flexibility but this would be one example where having the hundred millimeters was a real game changer for me and also having 100 millimeters right at the turn of my hand if i had to grab another camera with another lens i might miss those shots so here having the ability to zoom quickly out to 100 millimeters allowed me to get these amazing shots and then what i also like is the flexibility of the 100 to 500 millimeter lens that i just talked about because you can get the shot on the left and then from almost the same position you can also get the headshot on the right hand side so that flexibility is really amazing to me and then i've prepared another example here for you that was taken from the exact same spot with both cameras and it dramatically shows the difference between 100 and 200 millimeters that's quite an astonishing difference isn't it and in the field i personally felt like i would really struggle considering that i do a lot of photos videos b-roll without the hundred millimeters they gave me a distinct advantage in this location because in this location it wasn't all about getting tight shots of the birds or having small distant birds but it was also to include the scenery and i could include the scenery with this lens without using another lens and that was kind of impossible with the 200 to 600 so that's just something to consider i'm not really saying one's that much better than the other but for different use cases one or the other will definitely be the better tool for the job and personally i really value the ability and the flexibility that i get with the 100 to 500 millimeter lens for the price of the sony lens the image quality was really incredible and it's a fantastic tool in the field if you want to get maximum reach so let's talk about one thing that white and i discovered in the field when shooting with these lenses side by side in the past when i was shooting with a 500 millimeter lens and a 600 millimeter lens the difference between the two is usually like one really large step like about 1.2 meters or around four feet maybe but when we were shooting side by side and trying to see how much closer i would have to be with 100 to 500 to the subject compared to 200 to 600 it seemed like we could shoot from almost the same spot the difference between the two lenses was only maybe 50 60 centimeters or like two feet to explore this issue further and see if the 200 to 600 potentially has a lot of focus breathing i set up a perch about 5 meters or 15 feet away from me in my backyard and then photograph the incoming lower kids side by side with the 100 to 500 and to 200 to 600 millimeter lens so when we look at the resulting images we can see that at this close distance the difference between the 500 and the 600 millimeters is actually not that large so now i was quite curious to see how the 200 to 600 would actually compare to my 600 millimeter prime lens so i went ahead and got that lens lined up the cameras in the back and then shot with the 600 millimeter at 600 millimeter and the 200 to 600 at 600 millimeters there was a huge difference in the size of the bird in the frames the 600 millimeter prime lens had a significantly larger bird in the frame compared to the 200 to 600 millimeter at 600 millimeters so this is quite a fascinating issue and actually affects all lenses but how much lenses are affected by this issue depends on the build and the design of the lens the reason that the focal length are different at shorter ranges is because the focal length of a lens is actually measured at infinity and another contributing factor is the distance between the sensor and the optical center of the lens so these two factors combined caused the issue that at infinity the 600 millimeter prime and the sony 200 to 600 have both the same focal length but the closer you're getting to the minimum focusing distance of the lens the more effective focal length both lenses are losing however the design of the sony 200 to 600 millimeter is the most effective design when it comes to losing effective focal length so prime lens like the 600 millimeter lens loses the least amount of effective focal length the 100 to 500 with the external zoom design is somewhere in the middle and the most affected is the sony 200 to 600 or any internal zoom design they lose the most effective focal length the closer you're focusing to the minimum focusing distance off the lens so this is quite an interesting situation in the field now where both of these zooms lose significant focal length when compared to 500 millimeter prime lens or a 600 millimeter prime lens but because of the different designs of the two lenses the 200 to 600 is actually also losing focal length or effective focal length compared to the 100 to 500 millimeter lens because if i put 100 to 500 millimeter lens at 500 millimeters and focus on a bird five six meters away from me i will have to zoom the sony lens out to around 525 millimeters to match the magnification of the 100 to 500 millimeter lens so this is where i felt like not having the 100 millimeters on the wide end is almost more of a disadvantage than not having the 600 millimeters on the long end at the same time you've obviously seen that i own a big 600 millimeter prime lens so because i have that prime lens for ultimate reach the 100 to 500 gives me a lot of flexibility that i miss when i'm using the 200 to 600 millimeter lens if you're just after ultimate reach in a smaller package then the 200 to 600 still has an advantage over the canon lens even though the actual advantage in the field seems to be less than what you think it would be on paper so both of these lens and camera combinations deliver fantastic auto focus great image quality even with the 1.4 extenders attached and all around great performance so which one of these combos might be the right one for you r 500 to 500 a1 200 to 600. i think if you're looking for a length that can give you ultimate reach you can use with a 1.4 extender or you can even use in the 1.5 crop mode on the sony giving you over a thousand millimeters of rage the turnitin 600 still has a distinct advantage when you want maximum reach to photograph those small birds but if you're looking for something that's much smaller much lighter has a lot more flexibility because you can shoot wider and you still get a lot of reach and have to maybe be a little bit closer to the birds at times compared to the 200 to 600 then the 100 to 500 offers you a very compelling package you let me know in the comments what do you value do you value ultimate flexibility small size or the ultimate reach which obviously is quite important when it comes to nature photography another consideration is obviously price let's look at the prices in the us the 100 to 500 is about 2700 us dollars and r5 is about 3 800 us dollars so all together this combo at b h today you can buy for around 6 500 us dollars with the sony combo that only gets you an a1 in saying that though the price of the 200 to 600 on its own is unrivaled for what it delivers it's essentially is steel even the performance with the 1.4 extender is still outstanding and i would actually love to own this lens because it's so good and it offers this fantastic reach at an incredible price point so the real difficulty stems from sony only having the a1 available with animal eye tracking i should say bird's eye tracking and this is something that i would not want to miss any more in any camera the r5 and r6 have it and for sony only the a1 has it so the only sony camera i would personally consider in the sony lineup at this stage would be the a1 so the a1 with the 200 to 600 millimeter lens brings us to almost 9 000 us dollars so there's significantly price increase for this combo compared to the canon combo however i know in most other countries this 100 to 500 is a lot more expensive than in us kind of shrinking that back gap a little bit but i think it's fair to say there's probably about a 2 000 price difference between the two combos so if you take that into consideration i think the r5 with the 100 to 500 offers you a lot of bang for your buck great files great flexibility great size but at the same time the sony combo offers you the ability to shoot distant birds or birds larger in your frame that the cannon combo can't match to the same degree so which one would it be for you let me know in the comments i really hope you enjoyed this little insight into these different lenses my finding my photos let me know in the comments what your thoughts are which combo would you consider give me a thumbs up for this video thanks for watching make sure to subscribe to my channel check out my master class down there in the description and i will see you in my next video very soon bye you

Channel: Jan Wegener

Views: 48,572

Keywords: bird photography, jan wegener, birding, wildlife photography, which camera to buy, bird photography equipment, bird photography gear, birding gear, birds in flight, eos R5, Canon EOS R5, animal eye AF, animal eye autofocus, R5, flight photography, canon mirrorless, F11, RF lens, 100-500, zoom lens, RF 100-500, Canon RF 100-500 L IS, Sony A1, Alpha 1, Sony Alpha 1, A1 vs R5, Sona A1 vs Canon R5, rolling shutter, Sony 200-600 vs Canon 100-500, Sony 200-600, Sony vs Canon

Id: W5c8_7n0yI8

Length: 33min 41sec (2021 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021