Latest Lenses

Canon’s 70-300mm f4-5.6 IS USM lens is a step up from the average telephoto zoom. Canon also makes a much cheaper 75-300mm, but the lens tested here is designed for photographers looking for a step up in both build and picture quality – and this lens has an image stabiliser. Like Nikon, Canon has stuck to lens-based stabilisation systems. Pentax, Samsung and Olympus have chosen a different route, building image stabilisation into their camera bodies. With camera-based stabilis

You don’t always need a top-flight telephoto lens. It all depends on what kind of photographer you are and the subjects you prefer. You may find that the vast majority of the shots you take are with the standard ‘kit’ zoom and that you only rarely need anything longer. If so, then Nikon’s 55-200mm VR is ideal. It doesn’t cost the earth, it’s light, and it’s small enough to slide into a spare compartment in your kit bag. The plastic construction and mode

It’s taken Olympus a while to gather momentum with its DSLRs, but its digital lens range has long been impressive. These lenses are split into three groups: Standard, Pro and Top Pro. The 50-200mm here comes from the Pro group. And it certainly feels like a professional lens, weighing in at over a kilogram and coming with a rotating tripod mount – with lenses this size you need to mount the lens on the tripod, not the camera. Olympus doesn’t seem to have made much effort to r

Once upon a time, film SLRs were sold with fixed focal length lenses, usually 50mm (which equates roughly to the normal human field of vision) and with a maximum aperture of f1.7 or f2. You didn’t get the flexibility of a zoom, but you didn’t get the barrel distortion or chromatic aberration we now have to put up with either. Zooms have, however, taken over to the extent that prime lenses have all but disappeared. There are signs of a tiny resurgence, though, and Samsung’s D-X

Macro lenses are not like ordinary lenses. First, they have a fixed focal length. This provides maximum image quality without any of the distortion that characterises zoom lenses. Second, they focus much closer than ordinary lenses. Third, the optics are designed specifically for close focusing – all lens design involves compromises, and everyday zooms can’t be optimised for both everyday photography and close-up work. This Samsung 100mm f2.8 isn’t cheap, but it does enable yo

The standard 18-70mm kit lens on the Sony Alpha does a reasonable job, but it’s not the best lens in the world and suffers particularly from chromatic aberration near the edges of the frame. Kit zooms are renowned for value rather than optical quality, so if you want to know what your Alpha can really do, you might be taking a close look at the Carl-Zeiss-badged 16-80mm lens. It’s designed specifically for Sony Alpha SLRs and, unlike some other recently announced Zeiss lenses, it&rs

The Tamron 28-300mm is not designed specifically for digital SLRs. It also fits 35mm film cameras and full-frame digital SLRs, and the type of camera being used has an impact on its effective focal range and everyday usefulness. On a full-frame camera, it’s a genuine 28-300mm – a very useful all-purpose super-zoom that offers wide-angle and long-range telephoto capability. On a digital SLR, though, the smaller sensor size means that the Tamron’s equivalent focal range is appr

The Tamron 18-250mm offers a huge 13.9x zoom range. That’s even longer than a fancy ‘super-zoom’ compact. It’s designed specifically for DSLRs with APS-C sized sensors, so once you’ve applied the usual focal factor, it equates to a 28-390mm. Not many photographers will regularly need to shoot wider or longer than that, so it makes a great everyday lens and an interesting alternative to a kit zoom and telephoto combination. This lens is available in Nikon, Canon, Pe

The longer the focal length, the bigger the lens. And if you need a 500mm lens (800mm equivalent when fitted to a digital SLR), you can’t expect it to fit in the average gadget bag. To its credit, the Tamron 200-500mm is pretty compact for a lens of this range. While it’s quite long at 227mm it's also slim, only flaring out slightly at the front end. Interestingly, Sigma’s 50-500mm is a lot fatter, but a lot shorter. It also remains a good deal shorter when both lenses

The kit lenses you get with DSLRs generally have one or more failings. They’re usually quite sharp, perhaps because that’s the first thing users test, but they typically suffer from fair amounts of distortion and chromatic aberration. The variable maximum aperture means that at longer focal lengths you are shooting at smaller apertures, hence slower shutter speeds, and they often have rotating front elements and weak focusing rings that put you off using filters and manual focus resp