Monday, 28 September 2015

Nikon 300mm F4 PF VR impressions

Introduction

I am not a serious sorts or wild life photographer, but I shoot different sports and events from time to time - surfing, tennis, dance competitions, etc. When it comes to telephoto lenses it is surfing that I mainly have in mind while picking a lens.



While some of the best surfing photos are taken by people in the water or on jet skis, I am not one of them. I shoot either from the shore or a boat. This means that on one hand my equipment does not get wet all that often, though it could be exposed to ocean spray once in a while; on the other hand I need lenses with some reach. It is always the best to get as close to surfers as possible, but what is possible varies - during annual Mavericks competition sometimes I find myself shooting in 500mm+ focal length while being on a boat, and shooting a casual surfers in Santa Cruz usually requires 200-300mm range. It is rear to find yourself on the shore and requiring range far below 200mm.

Up until now all of the lenses I was using were zoom lenses: Nikon 70-200mm + TC1.7, Tamron 200-500mm, Sigma 150-500mm. Those are very reasonable lenses, giving a good price/performance compromise; but they are decidedly not the pro choice like Nikon 300mm VR, Nikon 200-400mm VR, etc. Nikon PF 300mm F4 is the first lens of this kind for me.

Appearance

It is well understood that one of the main features of this PF version of Nikon 300mm F4 is that it is the lightest and most compact lens of a kind ever made. This was clearly the aim, and Nikon needed to make few decisions to get there. Lens' unique PF element is one of them, another is the material that the lens is made out of - high quality plastic, and not metal. So lens clearly does not feel as solid as many other Gold bands, but quality appears very, very good, with smooth and precise action. Despite non-metal feel lens feels very good.

Length wise being just a touch longer than Nikon 24-70mm F2.8, lens is amazingly compact for 300mm. It is also very well balanced on my D750 body. It makes extremely easy to stay fast and mobile with the set-up. 


Performance

To test the camera I took it for a few hour shoot of surfers. Given the layout of the beach in Santa Cruz, 300mm the right focal length for most shots. But for most action shots there is not that much room for a framing mistake. This is good when framing is correct, bad if it was just a bit off. This set-up should also really stress D750 + 300mm focusing.

Results were impressive, in fact they significantly exceeded my expectations. Out of 1,500 images only a handful had clear focusing errors. I have never seen such performance from other 300mm+ set-ups that I have used - I expected full 1/4, or even 1/3 to be plagued by focusing issues. Unfortunately, this 1/4 would always include the best images from the set - with the most dynamic scenes. 



Sharpness and rendering from the lens was excellent. Based on specs PF lens should produce suboptimal bokeh. Since I was using camera for shooting sports, I could not care less. Also in testing I did not see any remarkable shortcomings in that department, but perhaps they would be noticeable if I was to do side-by-side comparison with a better bokeh lens.


Being alarmed by the report of VR performance I also tested that separately. The claim is that while VR is effective at low shutter speed, and unnoticeable at high speeds, in the mid-range of shutter speeds (1/60-1/200) it actually does not work well and equally likely to introduce problems.

full image, for reference

1/160 sec, VR-ON


1/500 sec, VR-ON

Sadly, this was exactly the case for me. I tested lens while handholding multiple times through a range of shutter speeds. At about 1/125-1/200 conclusion was unmistakable - I was actually getting near perfect images with VR off, and with VR engaged (both Normal and Sports modes) I could not get perfectly sharp images ever. I was assuming perhaps some images will have blur some will not - sadly this was not the case - all image were not sharp while VR was engages in mid range.


From the very beginning Nikon was silent about environmental sealing of the lens. This always drives me crazy when something that should be one of the basic specs becomes a topic of hot debate. Nikon is the most non-candid about what is the status of their lenses. It appears that Nikon 300mm PF is not environmentally sealed after all:


This appears to be the fact, and it is disappointing that gold band, $2,000 price tag and rubber around the mount is not enough to arrive at an educated guess about water resistance properties of the lens. In contrast Fuji and Pentax state in the name of the lens the status of the environmental seals.

Conclusion

At this time it is very difficult for me to give perfect marks to Nikon PF 300mm. I was very impressed with focusing performance, sharpness and color of the lens, and it goes without saying that size and weight are also something quite remarkable.

But VR performance is unacceptable, especially so many years into VR technology. While Nikon claimed that the problem with VR exists on D800/D810 bodies, it did not accept the same assessment on D750 (the body that I was testing). So I think just like with D600 shutter, Nikon will need some encouragement to deal with the problem. If Nikon can address VR issue via a firmware update - this will be one of the best lenses that I have used - I am really hoping this is the case. Until then, $2,000 lens with such major feature performing sub-optimally is something that is hard to settle for.

Not having environmental seals is also borderline unacceptable for a lens in this price category. Nikon being not clear about this is even worse.

Later notes

Preparing for my upcoming trip to Alaska, I was testing some lightweight long range options. One of them is using Nikon 300mm F4 PF lens with Nikon CX sensor camera via adapter. In this case I was using the current flagship Nikon 1 V3. 

First of all I was very impressed with the focusing performance of the coupled system. Perhaps it is not identical to Nikon D750 performance, but for 810mm equivalent lens it is pretty snappy. In fact it is more accurate and responsible than D750 with longer lenses such as Sigma 150-500mm and Tamron 200-500mm. This is pretty good for mirrorless camera.

Another thing that I was very impressed with was the image quality. Crop factor of CX is 2.7, this means that CX sensor represents about 1/7.3 of FX sensor. It is true that the CX region is on the center - the optimal spot; but nevertheless this means that to fully utilize 18MP CX sensor, FX lens needs to be able to resolve 131MP when mounted on FX camera. I am not claiming that 300mm PF out-resolves 18MP sensor, and placement is optimal, but I was expecting borderline junk results - this is not what I got. Results were actually pretty good - quite reasonable for discriminating photographer to use. Perhaps there is an issue with my math - I am sure someone will point out why this was to be expected - but I am impressed.

Nikon 300mm PF on Nikon 1 V3 camera via adapter
Finally, I did not notice VR issued that I am seeing with D750, when using V3. This is another unexpected positive surprise.

So it looks like besides reasonable 300mm, I got myself a reasonable 810mm as well.

Nikon 300mm PF on Nikon 1 V3 camera via adapter