Manual focus doesn't work very well on this 55-300mm anyway, so if you want easy access to manual focus (I do), opt for the 70-300mm VR instead. Went on a casual Sunday to a football game to try further it's responsiveness in action photography and I'm amazed with the results, in good light conditions it snaps the subjects right into focus with AF-C (Continous Focusing) mode it almost no chance of hunting for the subject.

The AF-S Nikkor 55-300mm lens may have a lot of plastic parts, but the lens mount is, thankfully, made of metal.

Most of the shots were blurry because it was hard to focus on the subject manually during the safari. The Nikon 55-300mm VR DX is a perfectly competent, light-weight, wide-range telephoto for DX cameras. DxOMark provides objective, independent, RAW-based image quality performance data for lenses and digital cameras to help you select the best equipment to meet your photographic needs.

Chromatic aberration is the lens' inability to focus on the sensor or film all colours of visible light at the same point. Without VR, it's usually impossible to get sharp hand-held shots with lenses this small and light, and with this much magnification. When shooting against other light sources in dim environments, I did not notice any considerable amount of ghosting/flare. VR lens, Nikon employed an iris diaphragm with nine rounded blades, and it has resulted in a splendid bokeh in our view.Apochromatic lenses have special lens elements (aspheric, extra-low dispersion etc) to minimize the problem, hence they usually cost more. This DX-format super-telephoto zoom lens covers the 55mm to 300mm range of focal lengths and is equipped with Nikon's latest vibration reduction mechanism, VR II, for simple and enjoyable super-telephoto photography.

Nikon was able to do this by using a high refractive index (HR) lens element (which allows using a single lens element instead of multiple elements made of standard glass), without compromising sharpness and image quality. In this article, you will find details about the lens and why it is the best for Beginner-level Nikon cameras .pincushion distortion has replaced the barrelling, which may become noticeable when straight lines are paramount.