You want short depth of field? Can’t be bothered to walk closer to your subject? Need to work on those weedy biceps? Hands shaking from a little too much of the good stuff last night? Nikon has you covered, with its new 6.4-pound, 300mm ƒ2.8 monster, a lens which packs in just about every new technology that Nikon has cooked up in the past few years.
Despite the weight, the lens is not that huge, and amazingly has just a 52mm filter thread. Inside you have a Silent Wave motor so the camera doesn’t have to shift the elements into focus and a VRII shake-reducer which adds up to four stops worth of wobble control (and has an auto-detecting tripod mode which optimizes the anti-shake for non-handheld shooting).
There is also a rather odd but possibly very useful feature: AF Memory Recall, which despite its name is not for remembering to take sharp pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger on Mars. Instead, it lets you flip instantly back to a pre-determined point of focus. We’d like to see this on some shorter lenses, too — it would be dead handy for popping to the hyper-focal distance of a lens for fast street-shooting, for example.
Otherwise, there is a range of coatings on the elements, from ED to Nano Crystal to SIC. These all help the light get through to the sensor quickly and cleanly.
The price? This is a pro level lens, and has a pro-level price of $5,900. Nikon also has a 2x teleconverter out today, with an aspherical element which is a world first in converters. That will be going for an equally painful $500.
AF-S NIKKOR 300mm ƒ2.8G ED VR II [Nikon USA]
AF-S Teleconverter TC-20E III [Nikon USA]
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