Nikon AF-S FX NIKKOR 200-500mm f/5.6E ED Vibration Reduction Zoom Lens with Auto Focus for Nikon DSLR Cameras

This is an amazing lens for shooting long shots in nature out outstanding clarity.

I've been researching telephoto zooms here for a while as I was trying to decide which one to get. I narrowed it down to the Tamron 150-600, Sigma 150-600 and this lens the Nikon 200-500. After reading/watching a bunch of reviews and comparisons of the lenses I decided to go with the Nikon, mainly because of it's sharpness throughout all focal lengths but also because of it's incredible VR (Vibration Reduction).Apart from being a great quality lens it's also affordable. For what you are getting it's a steal! Compared the it's Big Brother the Nikon 500m f4 Prime it's about 9 grand less and produces just about the same amazing quality. The lens itself is fairly new, it was released in 2015 I believe and because of that there isn't a whole of info out there like there is for other lenses. As of writing this review there is still no DXO Mark score which really bothers me, but hopefully they will get it up at some point.The real beauty of this lens is it's VR, it's Nikons latest generation of Vibration Reduction and it's incredible! It's really quite amazing how low you can drop the shutter speeds. I posted some pics with my review that hopefully help give some ideas as to what to expect with this lens. One of the pics was taken at 1/8th a second at 500mm handheld, that's just insane! Obviously you wouldn't want to be shooting at that speed if you don't have to, I just wanted to test the capabilities. At 1/8th I couldn't land a super tack sharp pic, but scaled down to any reasonable size it then looks totally sharp. In general I was able to land tack sharp images at 1/25h and lower, and 1/100 to 1/300 gave me super sharp images almost every time, even at 500mm focus. The bokeh on this thing is impeccable, blowing out the backgrounds is a snap with this lens. Colors are also deep and saturated with good contrast. Chromatic Aberration isn't a problem either, however I've noticed a very slight hint of CA on a few images, though I am talking about a very minimal amount, if you weren't pixel peeping you would never see it, and even then you might still might miss it.Focusing isn't as snappy as the 500mm f4 prime, but at 1/10th the cost the focusing works pretty darn good. Once you get used to it and know how much time you need to adjust you will get the hang of controlling the focus properly. The zoom wheel also requires a bit too much turn to go from 200-500, you won't be able to make a full transition in a single hand turn which is a bit of a bummer especially if your starting at 200 and zooming is as your tracking your subject, but again this will improve over time once you practice with it. My only other criticism thus far is the weight. It's definitely light enough to hand hold, but holding it up to track a bird or take a series of pics can get tiresome pretty quickly. However, this too will get better with practice as you build up some muscles.All in all I would say this is one of the best telephoto zooms to date, if not the best if you take the price into consideration. This is about as good as it gets at this price range, you really won't find a better lens. It's extremely versatile, you can focus close enough to take some macro shots as well (a few included in my review), you can use this lens for tight portraits, candid shots, birding, macro, and even landscapes to a lesser extent.

With a Nikon D7100, this lens produces beautiful results at f/5.6 and f/8 and 500mm, the only parameter values at which I have checked it. Color rendition is attractive as is contrast. This lens-camera combination is acceptably quick to reach focus when initially fully defocused but no speed races will be won with it. When the lens begins close to exact focus, focusing is very snappy with the D7100 set as indicated.When using a 500mm or other long telephoto lens, the photographer often wants to crop the photo to bring out a target of interest that does not fill the frame, a bird for example. A reasonable amount of cropping, say 50% produces attractive results, but as the cropping becomes more extreme, the results become less attractive. This is no surprise. One apparent way around this is to increase the focal length with a Nikon teleconverter such as the TC-14E III. Attached to this lens and mounted on the D7100 the TC-14E III produces an f/8 lens-teleconverter combination which will autofocus with speeds quite like the speeds achieved in the absence of the teleconverter.The addition of the teleconverter produces some image degradation, which becomes more and more apparent as the crop percentage increases. Again, this is no surprise, but those photographers who wish to crop photos thus produced should keep in mind that the sharpness reduction caused by the teleconverter becomes more and more apparent as the crop percentage increases. Based on photos I have taken of outdoors scenes with and without this teleconverter, I suggest that those who wish to use a high crop percentage, forget the teleconverter and crop images taken with the lens alone rather than cropping images taken with the lens-teleconverter combination.This seems a bit counterintuitive because the crop percentage needed with the teleconverter in place is significantly less than the crop percentage without it when the target of interest is the same size in both cropped photos. With this lens at 500mm on a D7100 use of a teleconverter degrades photos made from highly cropped images noticeably more than does the more severe cropping used with images made without the teleconverter.When photographing shy birds in the wild, it is often necessary to shoot from long distances, sometimes hundreds of yards. My own tests were at 400 yards and I conclude that the sharpness of the final photo made from a cropped image will be better without the teleconverter than with it. The majority of wildlife photographers want the greatest possible sharpness in their final cropped images and the way to get it with this lens on a D7100 is to leave the TC-14E III in your camera bag. Inasmuch as the image degradation has nothing to do with the camera, I suspect that similar results would be obtained regardless of the Nikon camera body used with this lens. Not having tested a full frame body I will not speculate unduly on what the degradation would be like with a FX sensor. But I will go so far as to say that the sharpness difference between the lens-teleconverter combination compared with the lens without teleconverter on an FX camera would be less noticeable simply because the DX sensor subtends less of the circle of illumination that the FX sensor does.