Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
This lens is designed for hand-held shooting, so pull off the collar and leave it in the box for resale. When I am on a safari with the effective focal length of 300mm to 750mm, I can easily photograph eagles, woodpeckers, small forest birds, tigers, elephants, and snakes.
When compared to the flimsy focus ring on the Sigma 150-600mm, the focus ring on the Nikkor 200-500mm VR is actually very smooth, allowing for more precise focus acquisition. Leave it ON unless you're on a very sturdy tripod, or if you're making exposures longer than a second on any kind of tripod. Autofocus: I was prepared for just about anything here, as I’ve heard a lot of conflicting assessments about this lens.
If this is about 6" (15cm) on your screen, printing the complete image at this same high magnification would result in a 50 x 75" (125 x 185 cm) print! The optical design incorporates three extra-low dispersion glass elements to reduce chromatic aberrations and distortions for increased sharpness and color accuracy. This 200-500 is as nice as the 80-400mm, except that it's bigger, heavier and doesn't focus as fast or as close.
What I like about the placement of the focus ring, is that it is located at the back of the lens, which is an advantage when hand-holding the lens, since you never actually touch the focus ring in the process. When you are in a safari or hiking, this type of great VR is good to have so you can make sharp images while hand holding the lens. For this reason, it is not recommended you use the Nikon 200-500 lens with TC-17E and TC-20E teleconverters. Normal Mode is full on VR which will try and make the image in the viewfinder and therefore at the sensor as stable as possible. Additional handling notes from John Lawson: Full zoom from one end to the other requires almost 180 degrees of rotation on the zoom ring.All three copies of the 200-500mm VR I have handled so far had very nice and smooth zoom rings, coming to abrupt stops at both 200mm and 500mm marks. Hence there are only two things which have an impact on the final image: lens low light performance and your shooting style. Unfortunately, the 200-500mm VR did not turn out to be any better than the 150-600mm competitors in terms of consistency. Although modern DSLRs do quite well with slower lenses (thanks to their superior AF systems capable of handling lenses all the way up to f/8), earlier models struggled with lenses that went past f/5. And a detachable hood and soft case ensure the lens remains free from scratches, dust, dirt, and the effects of the elements.
However, the HB-71 lens hood included with the Nikon 200-500 has some drawbacks that may affect your shooting experience.Before using the Nikon 200–500mm I would be adding tele-converters to the Sigma resulting in not watching the track and missing the action and "that shot". I've greatly exaggerated the falloff by shooting a flat gray target and presenting it against a gray background.
An electromagnetic diaphragm mechanism in the lens barrel provides highly accurate electronic diaphragm or aperture blade control when using auto exposure during continuous shooting.This is also true for the superzooms at the extreme end of its focal length but not as noticeable as the prime. constant aperture gives your shots beautifully out-of-focus backgrounds across the entire zoom range. Accuracy still seems excellent, but tracking is only fair and initial focus speed is not good enough for fast moving subjects. I was shooting the 200-500mm mostly hand held, and it’s a big, heavy lens to be doing a lot of maneuvering with. It's best to complement the Nikon 200-500mm image stabilization with a solid hand-holding technique, which is crucial to minimizing blurry images due to camera shake.
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