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Buying a super telephoto lens on a budget

Buy 3rd party lenses

One thing you may notice when you are looking for used equipment is that certain brands depreciate in value much quicker than others – 3rd party names (i.e. lenses not made by the same company that made the camera body) such as Sigma, Tamron and Tokina tend to lose value much faster than Nikon or Camera lenses. That works against you if you buy a new Sigma or Tamron lens, but it is to your great advantage as a buyer of used equipment. If you look for used 3rd party lenses you can get some great deals, and a lot of the depreciation will already have taken place.

There are two main disadvantages to buying 3rd party lenses. One is that the quality may not be as good as equivalent Nikon or Canon lenses. This problem may be diminishing as at least Sigma is supposed have really stepped up their quality controls since 10 years ago, although those are simply rumors I’ve heard and I have no idea if they are true. Either way this problem can fairly easily be solved by searching the internet for reviews of equipment that you’re looking to buy; the internet is full of reviews such as the ones I’ve written for my equipment. At the bottom of this page I listed links to places that I know of where you can find reviews of different lenses.

The second problem with 3rd party lenses is that you may lose compatibility as new camera bodies come out. Canon and Nikon are pretty careful to make sure that new camera bodies will work with older lenses, but Sigma in particular is rumored to have problems with older lenses not working on newer Canon and Nikon bodies. You can sometimes have lenses re-chipped so that they will work with newer bodies, but that will probably cost you money and you’ll have to send your lens away for some time. Maybe it will be a problem, maybe it won’t; either way it’s worth being aware of the risk, since it is one reason why 3rd party lenses depreciate in value more rapidly over time than brand name equipment.

Lens and equipment suggestions

To cut to the chase, below are some suggestions for super telephoto lenses that you should be able to get relatively cheaply. I give an approximate street price based on what I've seen, but since my sample size is rather small for most of these, my numbers could be pretty significantly off. Also remember that cosmetically beat up lenses usually sell for much lower prices than cosmetically good looking ones, meaning that there can be quite a bit of variation in price for each model.

I have a nifty little chart of prices of new super telephoto lenses in my review of the Sigma 500mm F/4.5 EX APO HSM.

Manual focus lenses

Most, but not all, manual focus lenses are out of production, meaning that many of them are cheaper both because they are old and because they don't have autofocus.

Nikon manual focus lenses

Nikkor 400mm F/3.5
Approximate street price: $1500
400mm is a bit on the short end for anything but large mammals, but with a 1.4 teleconverter you have a 560mm F/5.0, which is pretty good.

Nikkor 500mm F/4.0 P
Approximate street price: $2000
This might be the best option for manual focus lenses; the “P” means that it is re-chipped to work with modern camera bodies. It seems to be the most popular of manual focus telephoto lenses.

Nikkor 600mm F/5.6
Approximate street price: $2000 used, $3000 new
This is supposed to be an excellent lens and quite light weight (probably the lightest 600mm you can find). F/5.6 might be a bit dark in the viewfinder for focusing, but pros used it for a long time so it shouldn’t be too bad. A review of the lens can be found here. It can be bought at B&H.

Nikkor 600mm F/4.0
Approximate street price: ?

Nikkor 800mm F/5.6
Approximate street price: $3000
This is a beast of a lens and is best suited for bird photography. Its main weakness is that has a minimum focus distance of 26’, which means that birds can rather easily get too close for you to be able to focus on them. Still, it was THE lens for bird photography before autofocus came along. F/5.6 might be harder to manually focus on a cheaper SLR with a dark viewfinder.

Canon manual focus lenses

Canon 300mm F/2.8 L FD
Approximate street price: $1000
Short and fast means that it’s good for large mammals and gives you flexibility if you couple it with teleconverters.

Canon 400mm F/2.8 L FD
Approximate street price: $1500-$2000
This could be a great lens for large mammals. Moose Peterson used to have both a 400mm F/2.8 IS USM and a 600mm F/4.0 IS USM (that’s about $15,000 in hardware) and said that he kept the 400mm because it has such a tremendous shallow depth of field and its shorter focal length was better suited for large mammals. Since mammals are relatively easy to manually focus on (see the autofocus section), if you do a lot of large mammal photography a manual focus 400mm F/2.8 could be a great option. A F/2.8 lens will also be bright in the viewfinder, which makes it easier to manually focus. Coupled with teleconverters it gives you a wide range of focal range options (400mm, 560mm and 800mm). I’ve seen them for as low as $1500, which is a steal. Now that I think about it, maybe I should get one…

Canon 500mm F/4.5 L FD
Approximate street price: $1500

Canon 600mm F/4.5 SSC FD BL
Approximate street price: $1000

Canon 150-600mm F/5.6 L FD
Approximate street price: ?
Somewhat of a legendary lens back in the day. It’s strikingly similar to what you get today with a Canon 100-400mm F/4.5-5.6 on a digital crop (160-640mm). F/5.6 might be harder to manually focus on a cheaper SLR with a dark viewfinder.

Canon 800mm F/5.6 L FD
Approximate street price: $2000
Comments: see Nikkor 800mm F/5.6.

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