BUDGET TELEPHOTO ZOOMS

If you’re after serious telephoto reach on a tight budget, a classic 70-300mm zoom lens still has lots to offer

A constant-aperture 70-200mm f/2.8 ‘trinity’ zoom is often the go-to telephoto lens for enthusiast photographers, but they tend to be big, heavy and expensive, and they’re certainly not the only option. The 70-300mm zoom range is something of a classic, stretching back to the 35mm film era. These lenses typically have a slower, variable aperture range of around f/4-5.6 but they give more powerful reach on a full-frame camera, and go further still on APS-C format bodies, with an effective range of around 105-450mm (112-480mm for Canon), which is stretching into super-telephoto territory.

Other advantages of 70-300mm zooms are that they’re relatively compact, lightweight and easy to live with, especially for travel, action, sport and wildlife photography. The slower aperture rating compared with f/2.8 zooms isn’t necessarily a drawback, considering that many current digital cameras maintain good image quality if you bump up the sensitivity setting a notch or two, and you can still get a tight depth of field, especially at longer zoom settings. Compared with faster 70-200mm lenses, they’re also much less expensive.

Considering all the benefits, especially when many of us are on a tight budget, it’s surprising that 70300mm zooms are still missing from the native lens lineups for most makes of mirrorless camera. That said, the Canon and Nikon lenses in this test group work well with EOS R and Nikon Z system mirrorless bodies, in both full-frame and APS-C formats, via the respective mount adaptors, and still enable a compact and lightweight overall package.