My observations of Nikon 70-300 VRII

[astroNikon]

Well recently I bought a 70-300 VRII in order to get closer to my kids soccer games in which they went to a much larger field. Fun Fun. I was using my d600 with a 80-200/2.8 and did great with that. The 80-200 lens responds well to any Shutter Speed and setting that I did. I normally shot at f/2.8 at various shutter speeds to stop action or to give a bit of ball/leg blur if it seemed good.

I bought the 70-300 recently and kind of have a love/hate relationship with it so far.
What I've noticed is that:
anything under Shutter 500 I need to leave VR ON, otherwise everything is OOF. It's like I miss my subject focusing. It's mind boggling. And I know I'm not missing my subject using AFS- Single focus point.
I put it on VR and it does alot better.

Anything above 500 Shutter and all is well with VR OFF.
My only other VR lens, the kit 18-105 and I can take photos with or without VR at any Shutter Speed.

pointing the lens towards the sun in any direction and I get enormous washout. I can get it back in post but it certainly is annoying when I first load them in Lightroom.

With AUTO ISO I get plenty of shots that are washed out while I'm not pointing into the sun- especially 45 degrees and I'm using the Big Tulip Hood. Something else annoying.
Colors - are okay but I have to really saturate blacks to get the colors back inline.

I've gotten the same results on both my d600 and d7000.

And I've used it to take photos of the Sun. It's okay, but I seem to get more detail with my 80-200/2.8

I'm curious what other's results are like with the 70-300 VR II
I'm contemplating selling it and looking at another 300mm solution.
I really do need the short focal length of 70 or 80mm though.

 

[Derrel]

Yeah, I know what you mean, love/hate and the 70-300 VR II. I bought a nice, clean used one in the earlier part of 2012 for $329 OR $319--a really GOOD deal at the time, from my local high-tech pawn shop. I've used it for portraits, landscapes, day trips to the Oregon coast and Columbia Gorge, youth soccer games, a few modeling shoot gigs. All on one body, 24MP FX D3x, which has a powerful CPU and a high-spec AF module. My biggest issue with it is the refusal to initiate autofocus at times, when the lens is focused significantly closer or farther than a desired AF target, the focusing system in this lens is somewhat well known for needing a manual turn of the focusing ring to get the AF system nudged into action. I think the issue is the slow maximum aperture of f/5.6 through much of the range. This behavior is mentioned in the Ken Rockwell review. Besides that quirk, sometimes the lens just does not focus with that ONE-press sureness we've sort of come to expect from AF-S lenses. Sometimes mine will hunt back and forth before locking on. On one casual day of 350 shots I took earlier this summer at the Oregon coast, the lens had maybe seven or eight times where it hunted for focus, and cost me the shots I wanted.

Overall, optically it's good to very good up to 210,maybe 220mm, then it starts looking more 'consumer', but it's not horrible, like say the earlier 70-300 G, the first generation, screw-driven one, which I have also, got that for $99 a long time ago. I have not used it on DX; it might be pretty good. I like the size and weight and price of it, and the filter size is good. It CARRIES easily, which is the reason I keep it. When shooting in brighter light, at like f/7.1 to f/10, it's pretty good. I shot almost all of this set with the 70-300 VR II except for a handful of shots done with the 85-1.8 G.

Randi in PDX Photo Gallery by Derrel at pbase.com

 

[Vince.1551]

I did mentioned somewhere it's very soft at max zoom of 300mm. It performs ok in bright light or at shutter 1/1250 and above. I leave VR on all the time unless I'm on tripod. And don't expect fine details like say the 70-200 VR. Continuous focus for sports is not ideal as in it can't lock focus fast. I'm still holding on simply because I can't fund a better lens atm. My next buy would be the 70-200mm F4 and the Tamron 150-600mm.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[astroNikon]

I'v even used my technique of half release alot to maintain a short focus throw. But even that the lens seems to lose focus.

Derrel
I had a 75-300 AF lens which was very sharp on my d7000 16mp. But on the d600 24mp it seemed to have lost it's sharpness even though in crop it is less MP. Plus the AF focus is slow and was not good for sports at all. Even though it was a $100 lens I sold it. It might have made a good portrait lens but everything I used it for required a faster focusing. And if you did a half release focus and miss the subject, the focus hunting on it is incredible long, noisy and a problem to reacquire focus.

From what I'm reading I might just revert back to my 80-200/2.8 and use cropping. With my technique I was well 90%+ focus accuracy, my shots went down as I could relie upon the shots that I took. My shots this past game ran close to 300 like when I first started as I tried to increase the InFocus shots. My my IF shots was probably well under 50%

An oddity though. I took shots and the IF was the Ball flying through the air. So it did something right, even though I wanted to maintain the player in focus even as the ball left the AF-C Dynamic 9 area.

 

[astroNikon]

FYI ... I think this lens has a built-in Random Focus Point generator.

The next game I'm at I'll be using my 80-200. If the shots go as I think they will then I'll sell the 70-300.

 

[Derrel]

What I see with the 70-300 VR-II is exactly what Ken Rockwell's review stated: if the focus is close to the needed focusing point, the AF in the 70-300 VF is as fast as any AF-S lens. Which is a very cleverly worded way of saying the lens does not acquire focus all that well over varied distances. The SAME, exact thing was told to me by a very good salesman close to 15 years ago when I bought the 80-400 VR lens: "If the focus is CLOSE to being at the target distance, it focuses FAST--as fast as any other AF lens." Which is true! Buuuuuuut...the 80-400 VR, the old model, is asked to find a target that's close, and the lens is focused at 200 meters...there can be a lot of hunting behavior. And that is one of the 70-300 VR's problems: it can NOT always, reliably, predictably, dependably pick up a target at a new distance fast enough for it to be used as an "action" type lens. Used in slow, casual scenarios, it's okay. But it is definitely NOT a pro-type 70-200 or 80-200 Nikkor type focuser. As long as people understand that characteristic, it's okay. It tends to focus pretty accurately, but that's not the issue, the issue is that it also gets fooled, or fails to re-focus fast and surely, a lot of the time when new subjects pop up at different distances. If people have never owned a pro-grade Nikkor and seen what AF-S focus is capable of at the highest levels, then it might seem like a pretty good lens, and that is what it is: pretty good.

 

[Braineack]

I threw my 70-300 on over the weekend. Been collecting a lot of dust since I got my 70-200. I couldn't believe how many times I had to reset the focus manually to get it to go when it wasn't close.