Nikon Nikkor AF-S 70-300 mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED VR review - Vignetting

Have you rated your lenses yet?

Nikon Nikkor AF-S 70-300 mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED VR

12 March 2010

Arkadiusz Olech

8. Vignetting

According to our expectations the wide front element and the big barrel made themselves felt in a positive way when it comes to vignetting. At 70 mm the problem doesn’t exist because even wide open the light fall-off in the frame corners amounts to only 8% (-0.25 EV). The situation is similar at 135 mm because there the maximum vignetting level which we managed to measure reached 10% (-0.31 EV) – it is considered a borderline of the visibility level.

Nikon Nikkor AF-S 70-300 mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED VR - Vignetting

Results are only a tad worse at 200 mm focal length. There by f/5.3 the brightness loss in the frame corners amounts to 14% (-0.43 EV). It’s enough to stop the lens down to f/5.6 though to see the vignetting decreasing to 10%. By f/8 it is at the negligible level of 3%.

The worst situation, which is not bad at all by the way, we notice at the maximum focal length where, by f/5.6, we saw the vignetting of 20% (-0.64 EV). Fortunately on stopping down by one stop we can make the problem decrease to only 2%.

Please Support Us

If you enjoy our reviews and articles, and you want us to continue our work please, support our website by donating through PayPal. The funds are going to be used for paying our editorial team, renting servers, and equipping our testing studio; only that way we will be able to continue providing you interesting content for free.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - advertisement - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The Nikon device fared better than the Tamron and the Sigma in this category but, to our surprise, not better than the Canon 70-300 IS which reached fantastic results here as its highest vignetting level was only 11%. To sum up, we must emphasize that none of the 70-300 mm class instruments, tested here, showed vignetting that would be considered uncomfortable in daily use.