Nikon AF-S DX NIKKOR 55-300mm f/4.5-5.6G VR Lens

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The focus ring feels like a bit of an afterthought, a ribbed rubber ring a quarter-inch wide. The ring offers ninety degrees of focus travel, with hard stops on either end of the spectrum. It's worth noting that there's some slight lens extension during autofocus, with the lens barrel protruding an additional 3/4 inch at 300mm. It's not impossible to achieve accurate manual focus, but it's definitely harder than it needs to be. Clearly, this is a lens that's not intended for anything but autofocusing. That said, autofocus, while dependent on the body, is very accurate. Handling-wise, the lens is simply amazing. When I first mounted the lens on my Nikon D750, I could not believe how light it was when compared to my 300mm f/4D – it did not feel at all like a 300mm lens, more like a 70-300mm VR zoom in terms of size and weight. The lens was so light and easy to hand-hold, that I never bothered to put it on a tripod. I even let it hang off the mount on my Nikon D750 when hiking, which is something I certainly do not feel comfortable doing with my 300mm f/4D. In this regard, the 300mm f/4E VR is a game-changer, as it handles a world better than any other lens in its class. Here is how the lens compares to the new Nikon 80-400mm VR (center) and Nikon 70-200mm VR II (right) lenses: During testing the Nikon 55-300mm lens proved itself capable of producing decent results. It fills a gap in Nikon's lens line up giving DX camera owners the popular 300mm focal without leaving a gap after the 18-55mm kits lenses provided with most of Nikon's entry-level SLRs. For this reason alone it will be popular, but also for its lightweight and decent build quality for the price point.

Nikon 300mm f/4E PF ED VR Review - Photography Life Nikon 300mm f/4E PF ED VR Review - Photography Life

As you can see, the vignetting is clearly gone by f/8.0. The same thing happens when shooting at the longest focal length of 300mm. Ghosting and Flare I’m surprised to see how well the lens does at 105mm – all corners look pretty sharp with no difference between the crops. Sharpness Test – Nikon 55-300mm @ 200mm Center Frame Macro results are fair for this lens, with a magnfication of 0.28x, and a close-focusing range of 1.4 meters (around 4 and a half feet). Overall, the lens sharpness performance is pretty good, with a slightly worse performance at larger apertures when shooting at long ranges above 105mm. The remedy is to stop down to f/8.0, which increases image sharpness.

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Vignetting is typically not a problem on telephoto lenses, however, the Nikon 55-300mm does have a significant amount of vignetting present past 135mm when shooting at the largest aperture. Stopping down the lens to f/8.0 completely gets rid of vignetting though, which is great. Here is an example of vignetting at f/5.0 @ 200mm (left) and at f/8.0 @ 200mm (right): The corners are very similar to 105mm – consistently good images from f/5.6 to f/11.0. Sharpness Test – Nikon 55-300mm @ 300mm Center Frame

Nikon 55-300mm f/4.5-5.6G ED VR DX AF-S Nikkor Review Nikon 55-300mm f/4.5-5.6G ED VR DX AF-S Nikkor Review

Apochromatic lenses have special lens elements (aspheric, extra-low dispersion etc) to minimize the problem, hence they usually cost more. The AF-S Nikkor 55-300mm f/4.5-5.6 lens has a very narrow focus ring located in front of the – much wider – zoom ring. There are hard stops at both ends of the range, making it easy to set focus at infinity. Polariser users should take note that the 58mm filter thread rotates on focus.Although not terribly compact, this optic only weighs 530g. It's light weight should make the lens balance well on Nikon's entry level bodies such as the D40, D60, D3000 or D5000 as well as more advanced bodies such as the D90 or D300 used for testing. Chromatic aberrations, typically seen as purple or blue fringes along contrasty edges, can be detected in shots taken at or near the longer end of the zoom range, but they are not too prominent. At shorter focal lengths, CAs are practically nonexistent. At 200mm, the best performance is between f/8.0 and f/11.0, with the wide open and f/5.6 performance getting a little weaker, but still pretty good.