The table (sortable) and charts on this page may help you decide which telephoto lens to buy if the weight plays a major role.
It is kind of frustrating that the Canon lenses are about half to a full kilo lighter than the Nikon ones if you are an owner of Nikon equipment. For the weight of a Nikon 500mm you get a Canon 600mm…
It appears as though your legend is backwards. It shows Nikon to be the Purple/Magenta bars and Canon to be the Green bars on the charts. The charts show better focal_length to weight ratio as well as lower weight for given focal length for the Purple/Magenta bars which would imply Nikon is better in the weight to focal length category but that’s obviously not the case.
Thank you for pointing that out. I updated the page recently and didn’t notice, that I inverted the order of items in the legend. It’s corrected now.
Thank you very much for this useful comparison. And additional graphic could be Dollar/lens mm: I think there Canon has a quite high coefficient..
Then a very specific question for the 800 mm: did you try AF performance with the TC? and also AF 3D function? I have some doubt whether it will be that performant at aperture 7.1 e.g. where have you shot the mighty eagles? Thank you for your reply
http://www.flickr.com/photos/79975168@N06/8692842191/
Hi Martin
I guess the currency/mm focal length would be an interesting measure. But I’m not really sure what prices to use, they can vary a lot from reseller to reseller. For example the official price for the Nikon 600mm in Switzerland is about 15000, but you can already get it for 9500 CHF.
BTW: I’m not the same guy that wrote the 800mm review, so I can’t tell you anything about about its AF performance and the eagle location (Alaska?). I ‘only’ own the 600mm.