Nikon Nikkor AF-S 180-400 mm f/4E TC1.4 FL ED VR review - Autofocus

Have you rated your lenses yet?

Nikon Nikkor AF-S 180-400 mm f/4E TC1.4 FL ED VR

23 May 2018

Arkadiusz Olech

10. Autofocus

The tested Nikkor is equipped with an ultrasonic autofocus motor called SWM- small wonder it is practically noiseless. Still when it comes to speed, we are hardly impressed. Running through the whole distance range and finding the focus takes about 0.8-1.0 of a second, and it is a result for the combination of the tested lens and such a good body as the Nikon D500. It’s worth noticing that the movement of the focusing mechanism remains a bit slower when going toward the shorter distances than toward infinity. These are not values you can expect from a very expensive lens aimed at professional photographers; a lens which, additionally, was created to take photos of dynamic scenes during sport events or wildlife observations.

Of course using the focus limiter and the range from 6 meters to infinity improves the performance, shortening the focusing time by half. Still the result remains far away from records which amounted to 0.2-0.3 of a second in case of the best instruments.

We didn’t have any problems with the accuracy of the autofocus for a change. This professional lens, no matter whether attached to the D3x or to the D500, fared as it befits a top-of-the-range device, with the number of misses being practically zero. Thumbnails below also show that there was no need for any autofocus correction as we didn’t notice front or back focus tendencies with any of two camera bodies used in our test.

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