Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L Review: Innovative, But Why?

If you spoke to gear heads, they’d say that we should have more lenses like the Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L. They’d also probably tell you that the Canon EOS R5 II should have even crazier video abilities when the R5C exists. Don’t get me wrong: the Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L is an innovative lens that I’m sure Nikon and Sony dream they would’ve made. But I’d probably never really use it for anything beyond sports photography. And as it is, the Canon RF 100-500mm does everything the 100-300mm can — only better. Yes, lots of photographers out there have made reviews of the Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L lens and gave it too much praise. Canon is making some wonderful and innovative lenses, but lots of them make no sense in practice.

The Big Picture: Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L Review Conclusions

The Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L IS USM is an incredibly innovative lens. Like the 24-105mm f2.8 though, it’s large. And because of how large and heavy it is, I don’t know who’d use it often. The same goes for Canon’s 28-70mm f2 L. Are they making innovative lenses? Yes. In fact, I think Canon has the most innovative lens options on the market. But I question how practical many of them are.

The Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L gets four out of five stars from us. Want one? Check it out on Amazon.

Pros

• Beautiful image quality
• Fast autofocus
• Weather resistant
• f2.8 aperture
• Innovative optics

Cons

• I don’t know who wants to carry this thing around. It’s big and heavy.
• Everything this lens does, the 100-500mm does better.
• It’s not at all practical.
• Doesn’t always keep your subject in focus: not with the R3 or the R5
• Nearly $10,000

Who Should Buy It?

Who should get the Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L?

• Sports photographers

That’s really it. For literally anything else you’d want to do, the 100-500mm is a better lens.

Gear Used

We tested the Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L with the Canon EOS R3, Canon EOS R5, and the Profoto B10. The cameras are long-term loaners from Canon, and the light is ours. Lensrentals loaned the Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L to us.

Innovations

The Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L is the only lens of its kind. Nothing more needs to be said.

Hardware

The Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L is a behemoth. Take the idea of their super-telephoto prime lenses and put them into a zoom lens. Then you’ve got this. You can also take the 100-500mm, make it a dwarf that you customized in your favorite RPG game, and you’ll have this. It’s big, heavy, and in many ways, I think it’s impractical for most photographers. But it’s weather resistant, simple to use, and has an f2.8 aperture throughout the range. Sure, Canon did something innovative. I’m not sure how useful this is though.

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Ease of Use

There are lots of controls on the Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L. Notice how the focus limiter only has two settings. To be honest, I always kept it on the full focusing range and it worked just fine. However, the lens doesn’t have enough reach that it would realistically be an issue.

If anything, you’ll probably be annoyed at how big and heavy it is. I carried it around for more than five hours in a day along with a big, heavy backpack of gear. Granted, I work out several times a week and I’m used to doing this for work. I don’t think most folks would want to do that.

Throughout this review, you’re going to read a lot of complaints about this lens vs the 100-500mm. The 100-500mm is smaller, lighter, and more capable. You can get an idea of how much smaller it is than the 100-300mm. And that’s also why I’d use it without question.

Focusing

There was a point when photographing a bird where I knew that it was going to fly for a while. So while using the Canon EOS R5, I tracked it flying across the water. Granted, I was shooting on low continuous mode and I still got great photos with the Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L. Make no mistake, the Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L can autofocus very well if the camera can tell it where to focus. And it usually doesn’t have an issue locking onto subjects. But at certain times, it surely did miss the focus.

Image Quality

If I told you that the images above were shot with the 100-300mm f2.8, you might believe me. But in truth, they weren’t. They were actually shot with the 100-500mm. With sports, you often need more reach than you do a super fast aperture. One of the best lenses that I’ve shot sports with is the Sony 200-600mm lens.

In fact, if I were to search around on Instagram, I’d see the Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L shooting mostly birds and wildlife. Photographers are making beautiful images with the lens. However, they’d make even better ones with the 100-500mm. Sure, you’re losing stops of light for extra reach. But the thing is that high ISO output is so good these days that it won’t matter.

Sure, the lens is sharp, can exhibit beautiful bokeh, and has nice colors. But again, the 100-500mm can do everything better.

Let’s Talk Art

In an effort for us to remind people that photography is art and not just something all of us casually do with phones, Phoblographer’s Reviews Team talks about sets of images that they feel they really like for artistic reasons. In the case of the Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L, I was so uninspired by what I got that I really am only proud of a single particular image. That’s the photo below. With some editing in capture one, I made the light on the little bird look like spotlight. It turned into a beautiful photo of a very rough bird. Perhaps it’s a youngster of some sort or a bird not in very good shape. But either way, I really like this photo.

Bokeh like this is really hard to get from lenses with deeper depth of field. However, so is reach like this. I shot this with the EOS R3 and I needed to crop in quite a bit to show this image. Canon, at the moment, only has two decently high-megapixel full-frame cameras in the form of the EOS R and the EOS R5 series. As it is, every time I shot with this lens, I wanted my 100-500mm instead.

Extra Image Samples

The Phoblographer has been huge on transparency with our audience since day one. Nothing from this review is sponsored. Further, many folks will post reviews and show lots of editing in the photos. The problem then becomes that anyone and everyone can do the same thing. They’re not showing what the lens can do. So, we have a section in our Extra Image Samples area to show edited and unedited photos. From this, you can decide for yourself.

Unedited

Edited

Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8 L Tech Specs

These specs are from the Lensrentals listing.