Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM Review

As well as a generous aperture range that stretches from a fast f/2.8 down to a small f/32, the lens has internal focusing, so the barrel doesn’t extend at shorter focus settings. This is great news in a macro lens, as you can get very close to subjects with less risk of the lens obscuring ambient light, the output of a standard flashgun, or even the camera’s pop-up flash.

Even better news is that the lens’s 9 rounded aperture blades give a particularly beautiful background blur, or ‘bokeh’, which is crucial because most macro compositions include sizeable areas that are outside the very small distance covered by a minimal depth of field.

Miniscule focus adjustments in close-up photography mean that macro lenses need very low-geared autofocus systems, so they’re notoriously slow at focusing in general photography. However, the EF 100mm’s USM (Ultrasonic Motor) system is much faster than most, as well as being almost silent.

To make focusing even quicker in varying scenarios, you can switch to any of 3 focus-limit settings: locking the distance range to 0.3-0.5m; locking it to 0.5m-ini nity; or switching to the full range of travel.

Hybrid IS (Image Stabilization) - a world first

Camera shake is a perennial problem in macro photography, especially when you’re not using flash. A sturdy tripod isn’t a practical solution when photographing bugs and other tiny wildlife because, by the time you’ve set everything up, they’ll have scurried off. The EF 100mm comes to the rescue with a whole new Hybrid IS (Image Stabilization) system that’s a world first on any D-SLR lens.

But how does it work? Canon’s regular IS system is based on a vibration gyro, or ‘angular sensor’, which counteracts the usual effects of camera shake. In simple terms, it cancels out any wobble while you’re holding the camera. This is fine for portraiture or landscape photography, but as you move in very close to a subject in macro shooting, any physical movement or ‘shift’ of the camera either up, down, left or right is equally disastrous, and conventional IS can’t do anything to cure it.

The new Hybrid IS system includes an additional accelerometer, or ‘acceleration sensor’, as well as the regular gyro-based system, so that it can effectively counteract shift as well as angular vibration.

Hybrid IS gives a 4-stop advantage in general shooting, 3 stops at 0.5x magnification when you’re very close up, and 2 stops at full 1.0x macro when you’re using the very shortest focus distance of 30cm (measured from the back of the camera body). That might make it sound as though the effectiveness is tailing off just when you need it most but, in our tests, the system worked brilliantly, enabling us to get consistently sharp handheld macro shots that simply wouldn’t have been possible with any other lens.

See below for some test shots (click to see full size, opens in a new window).