C200: Canon C200 with 18-135 and Servo Zoom

brettsherman

brettsherman

Well-known member
Is anyone using the PZ E1 servo zoom with the 18-135 USM lens? I'm thinking of getting this combo for live streams. The old 18-135 has a terrible time maintaining focus during zoom. It goes way out and comes back in focus a second later. Does the new version suffer this same problem? It seems to me it would make the servo zoom sort of useless, so I'm guessing they sorted it out. But it is Canon we are talking about here.
 
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I will speak of my experiences using the combo with C100 MK2 and briefly with C200.
The focus while zooming in or out was consistent. It did not go out of focus.
The aperture, on the other hand, will change as you would expect.
Overall, I liked the combo and miss it ever since I sold it with C100 MK2. I would repurchase it when ENG type job comes around.
The battery might not last more than 2 hours if you frequently zoom in and out, so bring extras!
 
Thanks. That's helpful. I plan on rigging up a USB power cord to provide power via the Core SWX NANO-C98 battery. That way I never have to worry about the batteries.
 
If you do a crash zoom, you will lose focus. The lens is constantly adjusting focus to keep the focal distance constant. The zoom controller is fairly slow, though, and it holds focus. The problem is that there isn't a decent way to feather the zoom to make it feel more organic. It stops rather abruptly.
 
I had this lens and used it for a while on my C200. I loved having the servo and the auto focus was super fast but (and maybe it was my copy of the lens) it always came off a little soft to my eye. I was using it to film live performances in mostly unevenly lit performance venues but there were also a handful of times I used it for ENG style interviews. In the end, I preferred the sharpness of my Sigma Art / Sport zooms and ended up selling the 18-135 and PZ combo. This also coincided with the pandemic basically killing all of my live performance work, if I'm being honest.
 
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