We all know the AF-S in this Nikkkor lens relates to the fast and silent focusing system, which in the new 300mm f/4E PF ED VR is impressive. The lens’ autofocus is fast, right on the money and for following anything at speed, you can count on it. The Nikon 300mm f/4D comes with a very poorly-made tripod collar and that’s the biggest weakness of this lens. If you are planning to mount this lens on a tripod, I would highly recommend to replace the original lens collar with a more stable version from either Kirk or Really Right Stuff. I have the Kirk collar and it does a much better job in keeping the lens stable, compared to the original Nikon version. With the TC-17E II teleconverter, the new 300mm f/4E VR showed pretty impressive performance, especially when stopped down to f/8. As you can see from the above graphs, the lens does significantly better with this teleconverter combo in the center compared to the 300mm f/4D AF-S.

This is a very sharp lens even wide open with the 1.4x teleconverter. Stopping down even increase sharpness, but while Canon’s 400mm is very good at 560mm with the 1.4x converter, the 2x for the 300mm is a little too much. Nikon made many different mechanical versions of this lens from 1969 through 1998 and they all share the same very good optics. These samples are wide-open at f/4, which is superb. Many lenses get softer at macro distances wide-open; this lens stays just as sharp. As you can see from this and other samples in this review, the lens does an excellent job in rendering bokeh, even when stopped down. VignettingIn Nikon land there is not a lot of alternatives regarding prime lenses, either you pay much more for the f/2.8 versions, or get the Tamron 150-600 which is a zoom lens with different parameters. There are older Nikkor primes out there, but mostly with manual focusing like the 400mm f/3.5 or 500mm f/4 P. At Canon system there is a 400mm f/5.6 which is also a very good lens. The Nikon seems sharper (more resolution) the Canon is longer and perhaps has better contrast, both lens is excellent but different. The older Nikon 300mm f4 is also a very good lens, but not as sharp with the teleconverters, weaker against bright sunlight, and has slower autofocus. The minimal focus distance is 2.5 on the older lens. (1.45m for the newer) The even older 300mm f/4.5 Ai or Ai-s lenses are not as sharp as the newer lenses. The popular 70-300mm zooms are nowhere near compare to this lens in terms of optical quality at 300mm. The Nikon 70-200m f/2.8 lens is also very sharp even with the tele converters, but I think the prime is sharper at 420mm. The Sigma xx-500mm zooms are not in the same leage than this lens. If your main aim is bird or wildlife photography I wouldn’t advise you these Sigmas. The new Sigma 150-600 will be twice as heavy and no information about optical quality yet. The Tamron 150-600 is a very good lens, but several month or half a year waiting needed to get a copy. Very hard to compare the two lens to each other, because the Tamron is much longer, the Nikon is brighter, but most people interested in the performance of long focal lengths. At 600mm I think the Nikon left no or little advantage over the Tamron except a little brightness. On the other hand the Tamron would not be f/4, the Nikon is much lighter. The Tamron is significantly cheaper, and has an excellent stabilizer. Nikon also has some zooms like the Nikkor 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6. I would not buy it for the price, weight, and optically the prime is superior. There are two versions of this lens, the older has slow autofocus, the second is optically about on par with the Tamron 150-600, which is much cheaper. Pros Color rendition is superb – although there is no Nano coating on this lens, I love the way the 300mm f/4 reproduces colors. NIKON D3S + 300mm f/2.8 @ 300mm, ISO 720, 1/1000, f/5.0 Minimum focus distance/max. magnification: 1.4 m (4.4 ft.) / 1:4.2. I my tests I got down to 1.31 m and 1:3.8 magnification with manual focus. The 300/4.0D reaches 1.45 m / 1:3.7 on paper and 1.39 m / 1:3.4 in my test. That’s a nice magnification that you can reach at a convenient distance, and at the top of the range for 300mm fixed-focals. The lens also offers a limiter switch that reduces the MFD to 3m to speed focusing up a bit. [+] Another outstanding feature of this 300mm f/4 is its super close focussing. Any lens that focuses more closely will be a zoom which cheats and shortens its real focal length to achieve the closer focus.

The Nikkor 300mm’s f/4 aperture is common among lenses of this class and price, but the PF will throw many when looking at the specifications. The PF stands for a (in Nikon terms) Phase Fresnel lens element, the first of its kind in any Nikon optic. Lighthouses have used Fresnel lenses forever because they simply capture more of the oblique light from any light source and, thus, are able to project a strong beam over longer distances.As expected from a quality telephoto lens, distortion on the Nikon 300mm f/4D AF-S is practically non-existent (Imatest measured barrel distortion at just -0.51). Adding teleconverters does not change this behavior, so you should be safe from having to correct anything in post-production. If you use the Lens Correction feature in Lightroom, you will see that there is very little change when Lightroom attempts to fix distortion. Chromatic Aberration

Falloff of illumination towards the corners is typical for a lens of this type. At f/4 the corners are 1.85 stops darker than the image centre and visually uniform illumination is achieved with the aperture stopped down to f/6.3 or beyond.

Alternatives

Added to all this, those with a DSLR camera sporting an APS-C sensor will boost the focal length up to around 450mm without any loss of light while those with a tele-extender will lose a stop to f/5.6. (But then again, in the digital age, a boost up with the ISO will negate this slight shortcoming without any problems.) The Nikkor 300mm f/4E PF ED VR is physically just like the Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G VR, earning it “world’s lightest 300mm full-frame lens” title. Nikon was able to achieve this by using a Phase Fresnel (PF) lens element, which can effectively reduce the need to use complex lens elements for correcting chromatic aberrations and ghosting. Basically, the use of a Phase Fresnel lens element is what allowed Nikon to significantly reduce both the size and weight of the lens. The desire to make this lens so much more compact was based on the differences in characteristics from super-telephoto lenses with focal lengths of 400mm and longer. Super-telephoto lenses that use a focusing unit were developed with the assumption that tripods will be used to support their length and weight. This 300mm lens, however, needed to be designed to have as short a total length as possible so that it would offer good handling, as it was originally planned to be just small and light enough for hand-held shooting. These efforts resulted in a compact 300mm lens with a "telephoto ratio" (lens total length divided by the focal length) of approximately 0.8. II. The battle with chromatic aberration