Will the lens for a D30 fit a 5d mark ii, iii, or iv?

Question

Will the lens for a D30 fit a 5d mark ii, iii, or iv? I'm upgrading my mums camera and want to make sure.

Answer 1

The Canon EOS D30 used/uses EF mount lenses.

All Canon 5-series DSLR camera bodies also use EF mount lenses.

Any Canon EF lens that will mount on a canon EOS D30 will also mount and be fully functional on any Canon EOS 5-series camera.

The D30, though it used a crop sensor, was(is) an EF only camera. EF-S lenses will not mount on the D30, nor on the D60 or 10D for that matter. The first EOS camera that accepted EF-S lenses was the 20D, introduced concurrently with the first EF-S lens in 2004 (both were announced in late 2003).

If you have third party lenses that were made to fit Canon EF mount cameras around the time the EOS D30 was a current model between 2000-2001, they will also mount on any Canon EF mount camera body. They may or may not communicate properly with newer camera bodies such as the EOS 5D Mark II (2008), EOS 5D Mark III (2012), and EOS 5D Mark IV (2016).

This issue with using older third party lenses on newer camera bodies has to do with the fact that third party lens makers "reverse engineer" their products to work with camera makers' cameras. If the camera manufacturer introduces a previously unused part of the lens-camera communication protocol, often third party lenses will not work with the newer body. Third party lens makers will sometimes update the firmware for their existing lenses to make them work with newer bodies, but the time for getting any third party lenses made around 2000-2001 updated to 2016+ standards has long passed. More recently, though, Tamron and Sigma have introduced docks that connect a lens to the end user's computer via a USB connection on one end and a connection to the lens' electronic contacts on the other. This allows the lens' firmware to be updated by the end user, as well as allows for very detailed calibration of the lens' AF system. But only lenses introduced since they created this system may be updated by the USB docks.

For more about the issues that accompany using older third party lenses with newer camera bodies, please see:

How risky are 3rd party lenses?

Answer 2

Assuming we are talking about a Canon EOS D30 or EOS 30D (NOT a Nikon D300!):

Yes, a lens that fits one of these cameras will fit a 5D mark anything.

If the only lens you have is whatever was supplied with an EOS D30 as a kit lens, it might not be satisfactory on a 5D, and it might also not be a full frame lens - though the D30 is so old that it is not unlikely to have come with a film lens, which is full frame. A crop lens (as opposed to a film or full frame lens) will need you to use the 5D in a mode where only a part of the sensor area is used, so you lose some resolution and have to calculate focal length as you would for a crop camera.