Juan Aragonés
06-09-2008, 09:15 AM
Hi all, just wanted to share my initial thoughts about this combo. This weekend I tried the new Nikkor 500VR lens of a friend and, after my initial series of “wow”, “nice glass”, “oh my god, I want one like this” and the like...:p, I mounted the lens on my D2X to do some photography of the famous “Bartola” (a very cooperative and tame female woodchat shrike that is the hero of the local photographers). After a few minutes working with the lens I decided to try its performance with TCs. As expected, the 1,4XTC worked really good on the 500VR and them I tested the 2XTC. The Nikkor 2X TC is famous between nikon shooters because it only works fine with the Nikkor 300 f2,8 lenses. This TC seems to work poorly with other lenses like the 500. The light conditions were not perfect because the light was really hard but the light levels were high enough so I used ISO 200.
The AF speed of the 500VR decreased very noticeably when matched with the 2X TC but the combo kept the AF and VR functions working. I took several images wide open, at f8, and a couple of images at f10.
I have to say that I am really impressed with the image quality of the combo, much better than I supposed and with very little image degradation (image degradation seems to be unnoticeable to my eyes!). I have a lot of experience using the 2XTC with the 300 VR and the image quality of both combos looks pretty similar. Oh well, this is a very subjetive opinion but is for sure that the image quality of the 500VR + 2XTC is far good than I supposed. Next step is to test the non-VR 500 performance with the 2XTC and to compare with the new 500VR. I never used the 2XTC with the old 500 because everybody told me that the performance and image quality was really bad. Instead of the fact that I have been using the 300VR for more than two years I am very impressed with the VR performance in the big 500VR lens... 1/400s on a 1500mm equivalent focal lenght! Eight frames and all sharp but one (the bird was in motion)
The attached image is a jpeg conversion from the RAW with the default settings at my camera plus a 100% crop to see the details. BTW, the bird was perched at a distance higher thatn the minimun focusing distance of the combo.
Nikon D2X (at full resolution, 12Mp) AFS Nikkor 500 VR + 2X-TC, ISO 200 f10 1/400s, VR on (Manfrotto tripod and Wimberly Head II)
The AF speed of the 500VR decreased very noticeably when matched with the 2X TC but the combo kept the AF and VR functions working. I took several images wide open, at f8, and a couple of images at f10.
I have to say that I am really impressed with the image quality of the combo, much better than I supposed and with very little image degradation (image degradation seems to be unnoticeable to my eyes!). I have a lot of experience using the 2XTC with the 300 VR and the image quality of both combos looks pretty similar. Oh well, this is a very subjetive opinion but is for sure that the image quality of the 500VR + 2XTC is far good than I supposed. Next step is to test the non-VR 500 performance with the 2XTC and to compare with the new 500VR. I never used the 2XTC with the old 500 because everybody told me that the performance and image quality was really bad. Instead of the fact that I have been using the 300VR for more than two years I am very impressed with the VR performance in the big 500VR lens... 1/400s on a 1500mm equivalent focal lenght! Eight frames and all sharp but one (the bird was in motion)
The attached image is a jpeg conversion from the RAW with the default settings at my camera plus a 100% crop to see the details. BTW, the bird was perched at a distance higher thatn the minimun focusing distance of the combo.
Nikon D2X (at full resolution, 12Mp) AFS Nikkor 500 VR + 2X-TC, ISO 200 f10 1/400s, VR on (Manfrotto tripod and Wimberly Head II)