It’s time to speculate!
With Nikon’s very recent announcement of the Nikkor 500mm f/5.6 Phase Fresnel lens you’ve got to wonder if Canon will follow suit with an update to its DO lens lineup… which has grown incredibly sparse…
The Nikkor 500mm f/5.6 looks to be an astounding lens. It’s priced reasonably at $3600, which is shocking considering it’s Nikon, and it comes in at a minuscule weight of 3 pounds. This lens is absolutely perfect for birders and enthusiasts and I can easily see the lens selling better than the previous PF lens (the 300mm f/4).
I myself want to switch to Nikon just for that lens…
So what about Canon?
They don’t have any comparable lenses… and you would think that Canon would realize it’s pretty important to actually compete with both Nikon and Sony otherwise… well, they’ll turn into the next Nikon.
So it genuinely seems like a real possibility that we could see a Canon 500mm f/5.6 DO lens.
Canon recently went from one lens in the 500mm lineup to two 500mm lenses. Both are insanely expensive and both are just generational versions of the same thing. So having a third 500mm lens that is both smaller and cheaper makes a whole lot of sense. It obviously did to Nikon.
And you know, considering that Canon has never fleshed out their DO lens lineup past the 70-300mm zoom and the 400mm prime lenses, Canon may very well abandon the DO branding and instead focus on any new DO lenses it makes as an ‘L lens with DO elements’… just like Nikon does with it’s PF lenses.
Frankly even if Canon were to get off its butt and make utilitarian lenses like a 500mm f/5.6 instead of show off lenses for their new mount… I imagine they’d mess it up by giving it a ridiculous price. Maybe $4000 to $5000.
Not because it’s worth that, but because equivalence doesn’t exist within Canon’s lineup. There is no lens where consumers can go “I can get the same performance for half the cost!” So Canon will shrug its shoulders and price it at half the cost of the 500mm f/4.
Which all seems fitting considering the state of our world.
We can’t get what we need because of other people’s imbecility and conservative decision making, and even if we could get what we need it’d be so overpriced that we still couldn’t get what we need!
Common sense, utilitarian products, and fair pricing are just not part of our current world… unfortunately.