| Pro: | - VR, the 4 stops claimed by Nikon are not exaggerated.
- Weight and size. Even on my D40 it feels right. Even when fully extended at 300mm.
- Fast and Silent Focusing, thanks to AF-S (Ring SWM)
- Good sharpness, especially when you avoid the edges of the zoom range
- Very good price/performance ratio
- Decent build quality
- No rotating front element
- Big zoom ring that rotates smoothly, but not so smoothly that it starts creeping when hanging down. Focus ring is smaller, but operates well too. |
| Con: | - Slight softness at the edges of its zoom range (especially past 200mm)
- No constant (2.8 or 4) aperture
- No tripod Collar
- Slightly long minimal focus distance (1.5m)
- Made out of plastic
But all in all nothing distressful for a lens in this price category. |
| Review: | As you could already conclude from the Pro's and Con's this lens is not perfect, but judged by the kind of money that you pay for it (between € 500 and € 600 at the moment this review was written) it's definitely a great piece of equipment.
After buying my D40 kit, I soon realized I was really missing some tele-reach. Coming from a Minolta Z1 superzoom camera and loving the outdoors, spotting birds and other wildlife, this isn't to strange.
At first I looked at Nikon's 55-200 lenses, but after a while I decided that it would be smarter to invest a little more and go for the 70-300VR.
And ever since I bought it a little over a week ago, I haven't regretted that choice. Being a novice at dSLR photography I haven't really got much to compare this lens with, but I can say that I really like it.
I was surprised by how well the VR works. 300mm can be shot out of your hand at speeds down to 1/25 of a second, without becoming unacceptably soft. And with some practice maybe even slower speeds can be reached. I took some test shots today which can be found at: http://pics.orion84.nl/70-300tests/vr/
These are shot out of my hand, with VR set to Normal. The filenames (and exif info) tell you all about the settings I used.
As I mentioned in the 'Pro's' section the sharpness is quite good as well. Compared to the 18-55 that came with the D40 it is definitely a good step forward for me.
After taking the VR test shots, I mounted the camera on my tripod for some sharpness tests. Even though the lens is lacking a tripod collar and my tripod is rather cheap and flimsy it didn't tilt forward, even with the lens fully extended. So the tripod collar is not something you will quickly miss.
I tested the lens at varying focal length and aperture settings. The shots can be found at: http://pics.orion84.nl/70-300tests/sharpness/
While taking these shots I only touched the camera for adjusting the focal length. To rule out any motion blur everything else was done using Nikon's Camera Control Pro capture utility.
All in all, I really like this lens and I do not expect to replace it anytime soon. Simply because all the lenses that would be a real improvement are way to expensive for me at the moment.
All images mentioned in/included with this review are shot as RAW (NEF) and converted to JPEG by Adobe Lightroom, using default settings. |
