# Help with telephoto for vacation



## Zo0m (Apr 4, 2012)

Hi!
I will go on a long holiday traveling around East Asia this summer. For the occasion; I was thinking of getting a telephoto lens to complement my lens lineup since I'm leaving my 70-200 at home for weight/cost reasons.

This has led me to the conclusion that I will either get:
Panasonic 100-300 f4-5.6 for my Olympus E-P2 (effective FOV 200-600 on FF).
Tamron 70-300 f4-5.6 VC SP DI for my Full Frame 5D Mark 2.

Further digging into the subject basically revealed that >ISO800 is a "no go" area for the e-p2. The aperture of the Panasonic lens is 5.6 at the tele end. And the IS only seems to be good for 1 stop. I would hence be forced to shoot at 1/300 sec on 5.6 aperture, something that is hard to do in less then perfect situations.

The Tamron by contrast is more forgiving offering a 2,5-4 stop working IS but has considerably lesser reach. I could probably be able to counter some of the reach advantage of the panasonic by cropping on the 5D. I would be able to shoot at ISO3200 at 1/100 sec with 5.6 aperture with acceptable results. Which is a 3.5 stop advantage compared to the Panasonic lens. This combo is less mobile and has considerably smaller reach though...

Any help rendered would be helpful. Especially on how cropping on a 21mp FF image would compare to 12mp crop image. The canon 70-300l is out of my budget and the Tamron trumps the non-L version in the reviews I've read.


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## lol (Apr 4, 2012)

What matters is not what others think, but what you think of the E-P2 high ISO performance. I've used the E-P1 up to ISO3200 on a regular basis when I had it. So do try it and find out what level still satisfies your requirements.

21MP full frame cropped to APS-C is about 8MP, or about 5 or 6MP at FourThirds. Is that enough for you?


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