The two lenses have different physical lengths. Therefore, even though the camera remained in the same position, the working distance - the distance from the front of the lens to the subject - changed when the lenses were swapped. This resulted in different framing for each lens at a focal length of 100mm.

Zooms will always suffer with image quality compared to primes. I would like to see the same test using primes alone.

Just a point to note, the Canon 100mm f/2.8L is known as one of the very sharpest L lenses. While the 24-105 f/4L is one of, if not the softest L lenses. If I use extension tubes on my own 24-105, I get similar results, but on the 24-70 f/2.8L I get much better results

This is very helpful, I’d always ignored expansion tubes as a far inferior way to go. I upgraded to a Nikon D850 when it first came out but could not justify the cost of a good macro lens for as much as I might end up using it. This gives me a good price point to dig deeper into the world of macro. Thanks!!

Thanks for the comparison video. It would've been cool to see the results of the extension tubes on the macro lens too!

Thanks for the interesting and informative post! On a completely unrelated topic, I couldn't help but notice your Macallan and Glenfiddich on the shelf behind you. My drinking days ended long ago, but I did enjoy a good Scotch back in the day, and the Macallan was one of my favorites!

The reason the 100mm isn't the same in the frame is because you didn't use enough extension tubes. you would need the tubes to add up to 100 for it to be a <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="61">1:1</a> magnification the same as the dedicated macro lens. I tend to keep the 36 on my 24-105 and zoom out to 50 for very closeup work and zoom in to 100 for easier shooting of things I can't get too close to, like flying insects that scare away easily. I find adding more tubes makes focusing too difficult and not fun. I'd rather have a bunch of shots that look good, than 0 shots that look awesome.

It so happens I have the 24-105 L series lens you used as well as extension tubes. I concur with your findings, but as you suggest, I don’t (yet) find macro photography so enticing that I’m willing to spend the money on a true macro lens. In the meantime, I can still play around. That lens plus extension tubes is rather unwieldy though for non-studio work. I’ve done some bubble photos - great fun! Great video.

Great great comparison! Very much like your work and your delivery sir!

Incredibly helpful and interesting! Thanks so much Andrew!

Thanks indeed for this video, you've answered my questions! Good job!

Great video, good info. I'm using the Tamron 90mm macro on the EOS R. I'm still a beginner to photography. Your channel is great. Thanks keep up the good work.

Great Video Andrew! Thank you so much and God bless you!

Pretty useful video.Got a clear idea of what are the pros and cons of these two options👌👌👏👏

Very interesting! The day you uploaded this, I was making a video I just posted where I am using extension tubes for the first time and asking this exact same question! :)

Hey great comparison, Andrew. Always expected this would be the outcome but have never actually done any comparison. Maybe your next video can be comparing the 100mm macro to reverse rings (?)

Ive just started trying Macro. I have my old Canon 90D a cheap 50mm 1.8 and cheap extension tubes. I was pretty impressed with a few test shots. Ive now bought a cheap set of light cubes . I little budget Macro set up for around £200. Not professional images but perfect for what I need

very helpful and may have just saved me a lot of money since I was only using it for reviewing watches on KZfaq vs paid product shots.

Excellent comparison!

This is very helpful, thank you very much.

Great video Andrew I have the extension tubes, and was pondering whether buy a macro lens. Now though for the moment I'll stick with the tubes for a while longer.

Excellent topic and appreciate the test. I use both extension tubes and macro lenses. Macro lens tends to be heavy, not super fast (f2.8), not too fast in auto focusing and very very sharp. Extension tube is cheap, convenient and work well with most lenses, but it slows down lens and may not be as sharp as dedicated macro lens. Not sure why you choose a zoom lens for the test, a prime will perform better. Anyhow, I agree with your conclusion, macro extension tube is good enough for majority use cases. Canon 100mm macro is a great lens, 1.4 magnification is better competition plus that softing effect (sorry forgot what it’s called).

Thank you! I have been looking to buy the 100 mm Canon lens but since there is a shortage of components right now the delivery date is set to somewhere in the future. I saw your video and realized I had both the 24-105 mm lens and the extension tubes in my kit, but never thought about combining them. I had only used them on my 50 mm prime before with some okay results but nothing out of the ordinary. Thanks to you I won't be needing the new lens so I will be saving roughly 1.000 pounds. Now I just need to see if the kit works in the wild as good as in the studio. :-)

Informative vid! Thanks Would've been nice to see the full image quality but still decent to see the options together 🤙

Such great info. Thank you so much. I want to do some macro for wall art or impressing social media. But i'm not going to do it for a coffee tabke book or something printed fine. I think the tubes are exactly what I need before I commit to something more expensive than my camera. 😊😊😊

I'll be honest... I didn't pay attention to the first minute of what you were saying in this because I was perusing your scotch collection... which gives me an idea. Okay... got my own pour now, so back to the video. Thanks for the inspiration (photographic and consumable)! Love all your videos.

Interesting results, I've been using extension tubes with a prime lens and found the results good for most things however it became problematic when trying to photography flat surfaces (e.g. film copying) due to field curvature. Probably going to need a dedicated macro lens to do that properly.

Andrew, excellent video, thanks for sharing. And, great taste in your Scotch!!!

Quality beverage selection in the background 🥃👍

One huge advantage of macro tubes is that you can choose any lens and old vintage lenses are great for this due to having all sorts of nice and interesting bokeh. I have a Canon lens with macro capability and never use it.

Side by side comparison rather than A/B flipping may be a good comparison tool.. Good video!

I tried extension tubes with a good prime and got good results, but some things to be aware of - generally a macro lens has a flat plane of focus, so much better for copying film, and generally the tubes are weak in the corners …. Often not a problem, depending on subject, but the biggest hassle was the limited range of focus ….. you can’t focus to infinity with the tubes attached ….. in fact the range you can focus is only a few centimetres at best. I ended up buying a Laowa macro lens - manual focus but goes to <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="121">2:1</a> magnification, super sharp and a reasonable price ….. there are even cheaper macro lenses from 7 Artisans and TTArtisans that are great value for money

I wonder if you had some focus shifting with the extender stack as the aperture closed down. The RF 100 macro lens has that issue. Try using the "depth of field of view preview" button when you're setting focus, or give DOF a check after you set focus and see if it shifts. Anyway, thanks for the video. Looks like I'll be starting my macro exploration with the tubes instead of diving into that RF 100 😁

One other item to mention .When you stack all three tubes there is definatly a fair amount of play on the tubes which will definatly create distortion and decentering .not to mention ,zooms arent the best choice with tubes .Still great fun to use.

The indicated focal length means nothing on lenses with internal focusing - except at infinity focus. This is because focusing changes the focal length of the lens rather than it's physical lenght (or extension) to focus closer to the camera. The true focal length can be calculated from subject distance and actual magnification. The same extension tube will increase magnification more on a 50 mm lens than on a 100 mm lens. If you want to compare the two lenses, you should either zoom to crop or adjust subject distance to crop ... or a combination of both.

Not shading here but I have to disagree at the very end... shot for shot... hell YES it's as good as! Only photog nerds like us zoom in 32x time image to "check focus" that's already in focus fully zoomed out. We too critical lol. Good thing of course but do consumers zoom in and say "nah I don't like this at all Andrew, it's not sharp fully zoomed in I'm not buying this" ... nah. Will you even as much as notice a difference shot for shot, no you don't and won't. I think extension tubes is a great alternative given the fact you use a prime lens over a zoom lens but having a zoom lens will for sure do the job. Love the interesting comparison though but would be nice to see this on some primes. Professionally I would get a macro lens that's just me but if I seriously need an alternative, i would reach for those in a split and thanks too because My 100mm is broke lol. I've wondered about these and you explained in pure detail!

Great comparison, with stunning shots. This was just the info I was looking for, can you recommend extension tubes I should look into?

The quality comparison was very interesting Andrew. You didn’t mention any details about your extension tubes but I know most of the cheaper tubes have no lining to prevent light reflecting inside. There is a set on Amazon for around £100+ (Sony) from Kenko, and they have a flock lining. I’d love to know if that would have changed the quality. Also, regarding the magnification question. You didn’t say what the combined extension value was from your three tubes, but for a <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="61">1:1</a> magnification, the extension should be equal to the focal length of the lens. So 50mm extension tubes on a 50mm lens would be full size magnification. So, do you fancy trying a set of flock-lined tubes to see if it makes a difference? j/k 😃

thanks for the video. i tried it once and reached the same results. to my opinion the solution is to get a third party macro lens. i have the 100mm tokina which lacks all the luxuries but is a stunner in terms of image quality. it cost me 350€ some ten years ago and it is currently my most used lens cause i'm dedicating all my free time to copying my slides and negatives with my digicam. the tokina is not the only one. sigma and tamron have their own superb alternatives.

I found that using anything above f/5.6 with extension tubes will lead to moderate to heavy diffraction. The effects of diffraction is multiplied since sensor is further away from the apature blades I reckon. f/8 is razor sharp in normal cases but with the tubes it's a different story. Still; a dedicated macro lens is almost always sharper. However this comparison could've probably be a bit *closer* in sharpness at f/4 or f/5.6.

You need to try the 50mm f1.8!

I did macros with the Nikon Z 50mm F1.8 S, a superb prime lens, and the Meike extension tubes. The results were much more encouraging than yours. And there is not really a comparable macro lens for my camera.

One thing you are not mentioning here is that you're not spending all that money on a lens that is just dedicated to macro photography because you can also use it as a non-macro lens. So when you consider that to you're actually buying effectively two lenses in one so that would be effectively reducing the price overall.

extension tube on the macro lens

Comparing lenses with different qualities of glass and different coatings will often reveal differences... One might yield lower contrast or chromatic aberrations as compared to the other, and differences in sharpness would not be unusual. As to whether the differences are the result of lens coatings or the configuration of the lens elements... that doesn't appear to be addressed in this video. Even lenses of the same focal length, from the same manufacturer can yield significant qualitative differences. There's more to it than meets the eye!

As Jake says, great video! There are third party options out there too, the Tokina 100mm macro has outstanding reviews so may be a viable option in the performance per pound stakes. What happens if you put tubes on a macro lens?

Doesn't Lightroom's chromatic aberration correction slider remedy most or all of the aberration defect (for the extension images)? In any case, one shouldn't expect the lens aberration settings for the extension+zoom to be the same as that for the macro or any other lens.

Thanks great explication, I mist the mark of the tube you use.

Both!

maybe with a sharper lens than that 24-105 the quality can improve. A good macro lens like yours is incredible, and can be very useful even outside macro photograhy, but maybe for most people it's just much more convenient to have extension tubes: they're cheap, small, light and they allow you to experiment with any lens. Downsides, of course, they can get really annoying to work with. If your focus distance varies, you have to be constantly adding or removing them. Also, at least the cheap ones are really flimsy, specially when you stack them, and often they don't offer really sold electronic connections. My 70-200 attached to my 5D with extension tubes... that looks and feels very flimsy... it's not ideal, but you can get incredible photos with that combo

Hi Andrew! First video I see from you (you got a SUB from me)! So... Sorry to say but the 24-105mm is really bad lens as L series goes... I would say to test this like a prime lens, like the nifty fifty perhaps? Whana bet? It will be better than the 24-105mm

I tried the same set up of three tubes on a 24-105mm using my 6D to scan 35mm negatives (not quite <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="61">1:1</a> but close enough) Fringing was bad but worse was the edge definition. The results were unusable, might this be a ‘flat field’ issue??

Extension tubes or macro? Hmm. The more important question is ... which single malt? ;-)

I have a 90mm macro lens. im curious about using these rings on a macro lens for even more magnification.

Thanks for the comparison but I think you missed a critical issue with extension tubes and that is you have to get much closer to the subject and having enough light on the subject and the subject remaining in position if it alive.

here in brazil this canon 100mm macro lens is already costing about 9 months of work for a common citizen

Thank you for this great comparison Andrew! When using the extension tubes on the macro lens does it degrade the image quality a bit? T.I.A. 😊

What about putting a extensions on something like a 40mm mikro?

I like to use my Nikon 105mm f/2.8 macro lens w/extension tubes it gets insane results

Did Macallen 18 taste outstanding? :)

What about the ext tubes on the 100 macro

But my question is - What happens if you use Macro Lens with Extension tubes? Not sure why, but nobody talks about this combination.... And I'm asking simply because a dedicate macro lens focus nearly 30cm away from the subject. If I use an extension tube with the macro lens, can I focus at 5 or 10 cm away? .. or is simply not works! Please help...

Extension tubes are great for beginners in macro. You can have quite decent/great quality, and you can learn all the tricks and ways of macro photography without spending too much money. I used the tubes for 1,5 years when I started macro photography, before I decided that this field interest me much enough, to buy a macro lens. If you learn to use it right, you can have great pictures with it! (this year one of my pictures which was made with extension tubes made it to the final of the Golden Turtle award, so you can make really good quality pictures with them).

Both are perfect together. Canon 100mm f2.8 USM EF Macro lens it's not an L lens but it is as sharp as L glass and it's not stabilized. Plus it is half the cost. But I shoot 95 percent of my macro images with flash and softboxes. So I have no need of stabilization in my set up. Combine this lens with a kenko extension tube set. Again low cost yet works perfect. After all no glass in these tubes, just rely on CANON glass.

Idk how viable this is , u cannot compare the sharpness between a zoom and a prime

The thing is, you tested the tubes on a zoom lens and then tried to compare it to a prime!

What happens with extension tubes on macro lens?

What would happen if you used a macro lens with extension tubes?

I enjoyed your test but it would have been a more accurate comparison if you used your Macro lens without the extension tubes and then with the extension tubes. This would then truly decide if extension tubes degrade the picture.I know your intentions were to show what a cheaper lens would do compared to an expensive one so fair enough. Enjoy your macro series though. Thankyou.

what happen if you use the extension tube on the macro lens?

As soon as you add extension tubes to any lens, you change its focal length.

While I agree with the theory you propose, your test was far from fair. s1opp pointed out that the 24-105 was not a great lens. My copy was terrible compared to other L lenses. If you had tried a better L lens like a 70-200 set to 100 you would have had better results. Both of the lenses you used focus by moving internal elements but using tubes moves the entire lens closer. This means that the 100mm macro focused close made itself into a much shorter focal length making the reported focal length deceptive. To see this difference place the macro lens on a tube but focus set to infinity and compare results from the same camera position with what you get with no tube and the lens focus set closer. Yes, a dedicated macro is better but, used by a new photographer, other factors like focus placement and camera support are more likely to make the difference between good and better. I always suggest trying tubes first, as you said, to find out if you are really interested in macro photography.

micro contrast .tool for the job is the tool.

What if you put a extension tube on a Macro lens ?

Apples and oranges. The lens are not of equal quality out of the box. So of course the 24-105 falls short.

great video as always - my only observation is that the canon 100mm lens although being a dedicated macro lens is also a pretty versatile lens as it focuses to infinity and with 100mm focal length its a decent portrait lens also

Large medium small as in 25, 10, 5

The 24-105 is not exactly the sharpest of lenses, especially at the long end. Canon for example does not recommend this lens in any version for their 5DsR or 5Ds. I ordered a set of Canon extension tubes and will test on the 5DsR with the 90mm TS-E f2.8 (non Macro version).

I just ordered some cheap extension tubes just for s**TS and gigs and plan to put them on my 100mm 2.8 L macro... Has anyone here done this? Is it good for magnification?

Macro Lenses will always be best ! Macro Lenses are designed to have optimal performance in close-up photography, period. To get better results with a non-macro lens, then reverse it ! But ditch all zoom lenses...

Adding the extension tubes messes up both the focal length and aperture measurements - They're not just numbers on a lens, they are physical measurements. The lens may be set to 100mm, but you've added around 15mm of extension tube too. Extension tubes have the odd effect of decreasing magnification as you increase focal length (To decrease the minimum focus distance and increase magnification, you actually have to ~decrease~ the focal length), so by adding the tubes to the focal length, you've actually reduced magnification. Same goes for aperture. Aperture is actually known as the focal ratio, and is the ratio of focal length divided by aperture. For example, a 100mm lens, with a 50mm aperture gives a focal ratio of F2. If you were to stop down the aperture to 25mm the lens would then be an F4. So, by introducing extra focal length with the tubes but keeping the aperture the same, you're also increasing the focal ratio, which means when you stop down to usual levels like F8 or so, you're actually reducing the focal ratio by more than you think, and are likely introducing diffraction. So it's no wonder you saw the differences you did. I'd wager you could get a better comparison by using just the one large tube, setting the lens to ~85mm and f5.6 - This would probably be closer to 100mm F8 in truth.

You definitely needs to get new glasses!!! It’s obvious the difference, micro lenses are definitely sharper.

Uhhhhhhh, why not use extention tubes to make your macro lens get closer then it normally could??? Isn't that what they are for??? Plop them on your 100mm macro, see the type of shots you can use them on, it's not a replacement for your glass. I feel like this video is more why prime glass is better then zoom glass, the tubes don't change the quality of your glass, you went from a prime to a zoom lens, of course the prime would look better.

I do not see the point of comparing a fixed focal length (prime) macro lens with an extended zoom lens. It's like rhetoric - we already know the results before the tests are done.

Your battery is low.

Just wondering.. are the issues you see with the extension tube, issues with the Canon lens itself?? or because of the extension tube??