Above: Nikon Z 70-200mm f2.8 VR S + TC-2.0x coverage on Nikon Z7 (FF/FX) body at 140mm (left) and 400mm (right) Desert Floor as Seen from Six Miles (10 km) Away, 2:22 PM, Thursday, 10 November 2022. Nikon Z7II, Nikon Z 400mm f/4.5 VR with Z TC 1.4× teleconverter (making this a 560mm lens) wide-open at f/6.3 hand-held at 1/ 640 at Auto ISO 64 ( LV15.3), Radiant Photo Software to cut through the haze. bigger or full resolution. The lens is stellar and may be the perfect telephoto if you don’t need a zoom. (After using it I was reminded that I do need a zoom). Nikon has nailed it with a perfect balance of compact size, sharpness, and relatively large aperture. You can’t get f2.8 unless you are rich and a body-builder (or only shoot from a hide or vehicle), but most people can carry this lens and get 2/3 stop faster aperture compared to an f5.6 zoom. One oddity is that it has Vibration Reduction but no switch on the lens to turn it off (done in camera menu). The TC-20E has so much magnification that, at least on a D3, there is usually some loss of sharpness wide-open. Image stabilization, auto focus, additional functions: Everything works as expected as the teleconverters don’t interfere with the functions and features of the attached lens. EXIF data for focal length and aperture are adapted and the identifier for the lens also reflects the use of TCs. Even the display of the Z 70-200mm f2.8 VR S shows the correct values for aperture and focal length. [+]

I use the names TC-20E and TC-20E II throughout the text interchangeably. They are the same product.The teleconverters do not add any appreciable vignetting to your lenses. In fact, they often improve it. Here’s an example from my tests of the Nikon Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR S: The purpose of teleconverters is to increase the focal length of lenses, in other words to get closer to subjects, and the TC-20E III is the biggest and the longest teleconverter manufactured by Nikon – it doubles the focal length of a lens. While this teleconverter works with any professional Nikon lens that can take teleconverters, it is specifically designed to work with fast prime lenses with an aperture of f/2.8 and larger. The Nikon TC-20E III is targeted at sports, wildlife and other types of telephoto photography where the photographer cannot physically approach subjects.

Compared to the 70mm test that I showed you a moment ago, the biggest difference at 200mm is that the corners are weaker with both TCs. You can trace that result directly to the bare lens at 200mm, where it has worse midframes and corners than it does at 70mm. Teleconverters tend to exaggerate issues that are already present in a lens, and this is no exception. 3. Nikon Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR S at 400mm Detailed specifications for the teleconverter can be found in our lens database. Lens Compatibility

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Technically, the TC-17E is a II model, though there are no optical or performance differences between the I and II models of TCs that I know of, so I generally make no distinction between I and II models. The TC-14E and TC-20E come in I, II, and III models, and you definitely want the III model of either of these, which have revised optical characteristics that make them far better than the previous versions. A pretty impressive difference! And if you’re wondering whether you can achieve the same results by simply cropping: Yes, you can. To achieve the same angle of view of the TC-2.0x you simply need to crop the image without TC by a factor of two. But then you’re losing 75% of pixels and end up with an 11MP photo instead of the original 45MP. Which might well be enough for the intended print or viewing size: a modern 4k Monitor only has 8MP and printing an 11MP photo at a very fine pixel-density of 240 dpi still yields a print of 17×11 in. or 44 x 29cm. Works with FTZ-adapter: NO, don’t try it! The protruding glass elements of the TCs will not fit into the FTZ-adapter and you may damage the optics. Would have been nice to use all F-mount lenses via FTZ-adapter on the new Z TCs – but no. [-]

The story is extremely similar here – both teleconverters have a negative impact on sharpness, with the 2.0x TC being a clear notch worse. But as before, the 70-200mm f/2.8 is such a sharp lens that you have room to spare. Both of these results are still completely usable, and the 1.4x result in particular is quite good. Teleconverters come in three strength settings. 1.4x is the most common: it gives a useful increase in magnification without a big penalty in usability or image quality. They increase the focal length of the lens it is used with, so a 300mm becomes a 420mm – and a 70-200mm becomes a 98-280mm zoom This Z 2× Teleconverter doubles a lens' focal length, but also doubles its maximum aperture, making it two stops slower and requiring a shutter speed four times as long, a four times higher ISO, or a combination of the two. Of course at smaller apertures it;s all the same, but with long lenses we're usually shooting at maximum aperture to stop action and/or camera shake. People worry waaaaay too much about lens sharpness. It's not 1968 anymore when lenses often weren't that sharp and there could be significant differences among them; ever since about 2010 all new lenses are all pretty much equally fantastic.I wouldn't use this with the Nikon Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR, which becomes a 140-400mm f/5.6. Instead I use the Nikon Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR all the time. This way I can get to 400mm simply by twisting the zoom ring, no converter needed, and if I need longer than 400mm, then and only then will I use this converter and get to 800mm. I haven't used 70-200mm f/2.8 lenses for a couple of decades now for this practical reason. Your teleconverter must include a U. S. A. warranty card like the one shown above from Nikon, Inc. The U. S. A. office is Nikon, Inc.; the Japanese headquarters is Nikon Corporation. The card should be inside your box. The serial number on the card must match the serial number on the bottom of your teleconverter: This is an important point. Lenses and lens mounts are far more complicated than they used to be, so you can't assume any teleconverter will fit any lens. Far from it. In fact, the list of compatible lenses is often quite short. For a more relevant real-world test, I also wanted to look at the Nikon Z 70-200mm f/2.8 at 200mm – since you’ll usually be zoomed in as far as possible when using a TC. First, here’s the bare lens: The Nikon Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR S is one of the sharpest lenses we’ve ever tested in the lab (even including prime lenses), so it makes a great test case for the two teleconverters.

Thus the many small regions of localized softness you may see are not caused by the lens, but by the heat shimmer. The lens is accurately recording it. When the TC-20E III is used with slow f/4 aperture lenses, autofocus stops working completely or becomes extremely unreliable. With the exception of the new Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G VR II, zoom lenses also start acting up in daylight with very mixed results. The Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G VR II works surprisingly well with the TC-20E III and I found the autofocus performance to be good in bright conditions, although the lens also works very well with the TC-14E II and TC-17E II teleconverters. The same cannot be said about the older 70-200mm f/2.8 lens – it is only known to work well with the TC-14E II. The above table chart outlines which lenses perform best at what aperture with the TC-20E III. When photographing sports, wildlife and other fast-action photography, you have to be extremely careful when using the TC-20E III. While these waves are usually too subtle to see with our naked eyes except in extreme cases like desert mirages, ultra-telephoto lenses (and telescopes) magnify this effect and make this very obvious when shooting at long distances. Teleconverter NIKON Z 9 + NIKKOR Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR S + Z TC-1.4x @ 560mm, ISO 320, 1/1600, f/8.0 Crop of the image above

The teleconverters come with a pouch that’s just as flimsy as the pouch of the Z lenses and has no strings to pull it close. [0] TC-800-1.25E ED comes with the 800mm f/5.6 and increases focal length by 1.25x and lowers the maximum aperture on the lens to f/7.1. It was not easy to obtain the Nikon TC-20E III because of high demand/short supply and after waiting for a few weeks, I decided to just rent it for a couple of weeks instead. My objective was to try the Nikon TC-20E III specifically with the Nikon 300mm f/2.8G VR II and with the Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G VR II to see how it truly performs in an outdoor environment when photographing nature. It is one thing to shoot test charts with a lens sitting on a tripod, and another to get out and do some real shooting.