Ed Dozier

Oct 18

Nikkor 55-300mm f/4.5-5.6G AF-S ED VR DX Review

Believe it or not, this lens is still for sale as of this writing. This lens was introduced way back in 2010. I was given this Nikkor by my father many years ago, and I never really gave it much use or did a thorough evaluation. That’s my loss; this lens is much better than I assumed it was. This lens was designed to be used in combination with their 18-55 DX kit lens for a huge zoom range.

Having a fairly dim aperture, it’s very sluggish when mounted on my DSLRs when compared to my ‘pro’ lenses. Low lighting levels are quite problematic for accurate focus, or even focus at all. When I mounted this lens on my mirrorless Nikon Z9, however, there was a world of difference. For typical photographic subjects, it’s now more than capable (not recommended for birds flying straight at you, however).

The 55-300 is extremely light for its focal length range. Compared to my ‘pro’ telephotos, it almost feels like I forgot to mount a lens on my camera.

Keep in mind that this zoom costs about 9% of what my Nikon 500mm f/5.6 PF cost me, or roughly the sales tax. I used to think that the 500mm was pretty light, but it weighs almost triple what this zoom weighs. On my more difficult hikes, I know which one I’d rather haul along.

In DX mode, the Z9 provides a little over 19MP images with this lens. For most subjects, this is plenty. You’ll have to decide for yourself if that level of resolution is acceptable or not.

55-300 at 300mm on Nikon Z9 using the FTZ II adapter

General lens specifications

Dimensions: 76.5mm x 123mm (3” x 4.8”) at 55mm infinity focus,

184mm at 300mm while at minimum focus of 1.4m (4.59 feet).

Weight: 580 grams, 18.6 ounces.

17 elements, with 2 ED, 1 High-Refractive-Index.

Metal mount, with rubber mount seal. Otherwise unsealed lens.

9 rounded aperture blades, with f/22 to f/29 minimum aperture.

HB-57 snap-on lens hood.

58mm plastic filter threads (rotates during focus)

0.28X maximum reproduction ratio claimed (see below).

Polycarbonate lens body.

VR-II claimed 4 stops, with a tripod-sensing feature.

Irritating lens characteristics

Manual focus is only possible when lens switch is at ‘M’.

Some lens body wiggle when zoomed out (focus unaffected).

Manual-Focus ring , filters, and hood rotate during autofocus.

Very skinny manual focus ring (1/4 inch) at lens front.

Zoom ring and focus ring rotation range both only 90-degrees.

Sluggish autofocus during large focus distance changes.

Lateral chromatic aberration (purple fringing)

Ridiculously far minimum focus distance at 55mm zoom.

Lens at 55mm zoom

Lens at 300mm zoom

Vignette

Worst vignette at 55mm (left) and 300mm (right)

Vignette is generally ignorable, to my surprise. I often have to increase it with my photo editor, for aesthetic reasons.

Lateral Chromatic Aberration

Lateral chromatic aberration 55mm (left) 300mm (right)

Purple fringing is there, so you’ll need to correct this using your favorite photo editor in high-contrast shots. The worst I measured was 8.3 microns, which is (8.3/4.35)= 1.9 pixels at 300mm with this Nikon Z9 sensor. The Z9 has 4.35 micron pixels.

Lateral chromatic aberration, 55mm f/4.5

The shot above shows the uncorrected purple fringing with the tree branches over the blue sky. Not terrible, but it’s there.

Longitudinal Chromatic Aberration

LoCA at 72mm f/4.5 Red (left), Green (mid), Blue (right)

Longitudinal chromatic aberration (LoCA) hasn’t been an issue in the photos I’ve taken. I have expensive lenses that have much worse LoCA than this lens. The measurements show that red is focused farthest from the camera sensor, and green is the nearest.

Distortion

There is only a slight hint of barrel distortion at 55mm, which gradually turns into pincushion distortion at the longer focal lengths.

300mm pincushion (left), removed (right) in editor

The most severe distortion is at 300mm, and even then it’s pretty slight. As shown above, I completely removed the distortion using Lightroom with its lens profile from Adobe.

Focus

With sunny conditions, you shouldn’t have any complaints about focus. In dimmer light, focus is heavily dependent upon your camera. The AF-S motor in this lens is just plain weak, so you need to be somewhat close to the right subject distance to nail focus with a decent response time. With my DSLRs, focus-hunting is the norm in shade. With my mirrorless Z cameras, focus is quite responsive in fairly dim light as long as the subject doesn’t start out being extremely out of focus.

This is definitely not a pro lens in regards to focus speed.

As mentioned above, this lens has no manual-focus override, so you have to put the lens switch on “M” to use the focus ring. Very clunky.

Close Focus

This lens actually focuses closer than Nikon’s specifications. At 55mm, it focuses down to 1.275m (4.18 feet) instead of 1.4meters.

At 300mm, it focuses down to 1.32m or 4.33 feet from the camera sensor. At this setting, the field of view is just 3 inches (76.2mm). For a DX sensor, that means it can achieve 0.315X magnification. The working distance (from the front of the lens) is 1.14meters (without the snap-on lens hood).

Bokeh

180mm f/8 bokeh example

The bokeh shows a minor fringe around the light blob edges. It’s not great, but I’ve seen much worse than this on other lenses. 9 rounded aperture blades really help.

Focus breathing

There is almost no change in focal length as the focus distance is changed (focus breathing). It’s really common to reduce focal length as focus distance is reduced, and it’s nice to see that this lens doesn’t show this.

Actual focal length

I measured the actual focal length at 300mm to be 292mm. This is better than most zooms. My Sigma 150-600 zoom, for instance, is actually 285mm at the 300mm setting.

Parfocal

This lens is nearly parfocal, but not quite perfect. Focus changes very little as you zoom. Keep in mind that the aperture isn’t very bright, so this would somewhat mask any focus changes.

Infrared

Lenses with this many elements are supposed to be horrible with infrared. I tried out my Nikon D7000 that was converted into 590nm infrared (including an infrared anti-reflection sensor cover) by Kolari Vision. I’d say the results are pretty good. Vignetting is a little stronger in infrared light, but that’s easy to compensate for with an editor, if desired. 590nm is orange light, so orange and red are visible in addition to infrared.

The 850nm sample shot below was with an added IR filter. There’s no color left at this long IR wavelength. Illumination looks pretty even, with no dreaded central hotspot.

135mm f/5.6 590nm infrared

135mm f/8.0 850nm infrared

Resolution

I have always maintained that photos start looking ‘acceptable’ when the resolution MTF50 measurements get above about 30lp/mm. After resolving above 40lp/mm, image cropping starts to become viable.

I have been very pleased with this lens, even at its worst resolution setting of 300mm f/5.6. I have included shots in this article below that let you be the judge. Talk is cheap.

I stopped taking measurements after f/16, because diffraction totally kills the resolution. The lens edge resolution isn’t anything to write home about, but it improves when zoomed beyond about 70mm. Overall resolution is really good until about 240mm, and goes downhill from there.

I only use unsharpened raw-format files for the resolution analysis. Any form of file sharpening would falsify the results. These files were all produced with the Nikon Z9 camera in DX mode.