Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I tried hard to think about what you need to know about the Nikon 28-300mm VR II zoom lens. I read some other reviews too; some are great, some are ignorant, and some are just plain wrong or misguided (hint: don’t use this lens on a DX camera! I’ll explain why.) So I will tell you my own take on this lens. It’s going to turn some common themes on their head. And if you’re a novice photographer, I hope I might introduce you to some ideas that you might not have thought deeply about. First of all: This lens is an elegant compromise. It’s stuffed chock-full of compromises, in fact; on-purpose compromises, made by optics engineers with more history and experience than you can possibly imagine; and aided by a small army of computers and a fabrication shop to rival any lens factory on Earth. If you don’t understand this, you have no business buying this lens and complaining about it. Compromise #1: price. I keep seeing folks comparing this lens to a group of 3 other lenses, a kit that costs five thousand dollars and is two or three stops faster. Do you want to drop five bands on three lenses - one of which actually outweighs this beast - or do you want to buy this lens? When you shop for a Ford, do you want to read angry reviews about why the Ford I bought is not as good as all three of my Ferraris put together? No? All right then. This lens is made of plastic, has a plastic aspheric optical element, has no aperture ring, dilates only to f/3.5 at 28mm and f/5.6 at 300mm - and it’s big and clunky and has had some other little corners cut in its manufacture. Compromise #2: Feel, fit and finish. It’s a big old lens. The big zoom ring triples the physical length of the lens and doesn’t feel very nice doing it, it feels like a plastic pipe turning inside another plastic pipe. Which it is. There are three identical, not very nice switches on the left side of the lens. Autofocus (so much for “Silent” wave) is noisy enough to get picked up by the on-camera mic - I can hear it too - and the manual autofocus override ring, which is twitchy as hell and feels lousy, will itself be immediately overriden and re-focused before you are permitted to take a picture, unless you hold down a series of increasingly annoying buttons. Compromise #3: Sharpness. This isn’t a prime lens. It doesn’t have the tack sharp look of a prime lens. It’s chock full of aberration and the corners aren’t as sharp as the center. And more than that: Nikon engineers have played with various chromatic aberrations, distortions, focal planes, and vignetting so that you don’t notice, or so that the unsharp parts have a more-pleasing effect. Off-center green foliage glows unsharply, looking more alive. Reds also focus slightly off, which softens cheeks in portraits. The worst places for sharpness are also the most heavily vignetted so you see it less. Compromise #4: Distortion and vignetting. This lens goes to 300, doesn’t weigh 10 lbs, isn’t 2 feet long, manages f/5.6 at the long end, and zooms to 28 too. Something had to give and what gave was a lot of pincushion at the long end and barrel at the short. I mean a lot - people who don’t know what those kinds of distortion are can see this and comment on it. At worst it can look like a funhouse mirror. Why was this the compromise that was chosen? It’s because it can be mathematically characterized, and, given that, it can be corrected away to any degree of accuracy. Lots of modern Nikon cameras will do it in-camera; if you’re shooting fast continuous and don’t want to tax your processor, or if you don’t have one of those more modern Nikons, one click of a checkbox in Lightroom will correct all the distortion away as well, and more precisely to boot. Vignetting, a word for darkening of the corners, is extremely heavy in this lens; the distortion corrections remove it too, and that’s why Nikon didn’t mind (although Lightroom offers you a second checkbox in case you want to put just the vignetting back.) So what’s good about this lens? The sharpness doesn’t show. If you take a pic and enlarge it to 4x6; or 5x7; or even 8x10 like we used to do because that’s the size Ilford and Kodak used to make their paper in; you’ll see no difference between this lens and any other. What you’ll see is the famous Nikkor optical perfection; nothing else. But if you do what digital makes people do: namely, compose the picture weeks after it was taken, by cropping 95% of a shot away on your desktop computer; and then enlarge this tiny crop; yeah, you’ll see that there’s a certain fuzziness. Who cares? Take a real picture to start, you won’t have that problem. Let’s talk about what this lens can do that a bucket of primes can’t. It can zoom. Zooming is not about bringing distant objects closer, did you know that? (Bringing distant objects closer is what telephoto is about.) Zooming is about helping you compose your shot; about arranging your foregrounds and backgrounds to your liking. Walk back ten feet; zoom in and reframe. Now walk forward twenty feet; zoom out and reframe. You have the same frame, same subject, but 3 different shots there; with three different foreground-background ratios. I find myself using 3 different ranges with this lens. At 28-35 or so, it’s a landscape lens, and a very nice one at that. I don’t use the normal range much. At 85-135, it’s a good lens for close subjects, like flowers, or people’s faces; I find myself landing on 135 a lot, it seems to be a sweet spot for distortion, which isn’t corrected away yet when you’re in the viewfinder. I use 300mm a lot, but mainly for birds, which I enjoy. As a bird lens it’s surprisingly good. It's light - easy to pan with. It can be sharp, but focusing can be a little fussy - the AF sensor on my D750 would really like a little more light, I think. It’s very light and very easy to pan with, and the VR makes it easy to not foul up your shot of a bird in flight. It’s not a fast lens; if you’re someone who needs an f/2 300mm lens, why are you reading this review? One of the things I do notice at 300mm is that the vignetting kind of taxes your sensor at higher ISOs, which means higher shutter speeds or smaller apertures - i.e., during bird photography. The vignetting correction just really applies a not-exactly-radial exposure gradient filter; but the problem is, the corners really aren’t getting a lot of light, so in a way it’s as if you were pushing shadows up. You can expose high-ISO noise in the corners that way, which depending on what you’re shooting can look very odd because it’s not consistent across the frame. Like I said: Nikon makes an f/2 300mm. I’d rather buy a small house. Were you paying attention? Because I just told you this lens does landscapes, portraits, macro (flowers), and birds. And it weighs about a pound. And it’s only about the size of a WWII pineapple grenade. And it has autofocus, 4-stop vibration reduction (more like 3 stops in my hands). And you can get into it for a grand or so - Nikon sold me my new one, with warranty, for the used price because I bought it with my D750 during a bundle last Christmastime. And it gives you that Nikkor look - every color of the rainbow, sharp and pretty and vivid. It’s a good counterweight to my D750; slung over a shoulder it hangs nicely, comes up to the eye easily. It looks ungainly but it’s not as heavy as it looks. I can shoot with it and hike with it for hours with no problem, which I was worried about when I first saw it; and I’m no muscleman. It’d be way too front-heavy for the smaller cameras in Nikon’s range, but it doesn't tip the D750 over, it hangs snug against my chest. And all those compromises I talked about for most of this review? They were designed with FX in mind. If you shoot DX and want a lens with this many compromises built in, get one where the compromises were optimized for DX - may I suggest the 18-200. Enough talk. Have a look at the photos I’ve attached - all taken with this lens in my first week of owning it. If you like ‘em, quit reading reviews and buy this lens and a fast 50mm prime to go with it and never worry about “the missing lens” again. Instead: Go take all the pictures. Because this lens will do it!