glenerrolrd
Workshop Member
Dave
The biggest issue I ve had with the 300/2.8 and the new 2x is a very ugly bokeh. I was shooting polo with the combination last week and the background sometimes went to a nervous pattern...which is definitely an issue.
This is most visible when the subject is at a distance Like the far side of a polo field.
Next week I will shoot again with the 600/4 so I will have a direct comparison.
The other issue is the 2 stop loss of speed with no gain in DOF . On a very bright day this pushed me to iso 800 @f6.3 to achieve over 1/2000. This combination works fine for baseball.
The 200-400/4 is an excellent lens at close to mid distances(like tennis) but not very good even with the 1.4x at distances.
Of course using any lens in the 400-600 range requires some real effort to achieve precise focus and avoid camera motion.
QUOTE=D&A;300004]Hi Glenn,
I'm surprised by this result. I generally dislike most teleconverters, especially any previous 2x I've tried with any lens, (since I am very particular about optical performance and degredation of image), but found the new 2x TC 20E III worked superbly with both the 300 f2.8 VRI and VRII. Used with the lens wide open (something I'd rarely do with a teleconverter), results were much more than acceptable (while being critical) and one stop down, slightly little of consequence, if anything was lost resolution wide, except lower contrast of the image. Although not 100% certain if that was Nikon's intent, but they released the new 2x along with the 300 f2.8 VRII simultaniously for the Olympics and the press to use, as sort of a matched "ideal" pair" and I was taken back in a suprisingly good way when I saw the results of my first tests with this pairing. So much so, it put on hold my other options in another longer Nikon Supertelephoto, for my partiular application. I completely agree with you, that both the 1.4x and new 2x work remarkably well on the newer 70-200 VRII zoom lens.
Dave[/QUOTE]
The biggest issue I ve had with the 300/2.8 and the new 2x is a very ugly bokeh. I was shooting polo with the combination last week and the background sometimes went to a nervous pattern...which is definitely an issue.
This is most visible when the subject is at a distance Like the far side of a polo field.
Next week I will shoot again with the 600/4 so I will have a direct comparison.
The other issue is the 2 stop loss of speed with no gain in DOF . On a very bright day this pushed me to iso 800 @f6.3 to achieve over 1/2000. This combination works fine for baseball.
The 200-400/4 is an excellent lens at close to mid distances(like tennis) but not very good even with the 1.4x at distances.
Of course using any lens in the 400-600 range requires some real effort to achieve precise focus and avoid camera motion.
QUOTE=D&A;300004]Hi Glenn,
I'm surprised by this result. I generally dislike most teleconverters, especially any previous 2x I've tried with any lens, (since I am very particular about optical performance and degredation of image), but found the new 2x TC 20E III worked superbly with both the 300 f2.8 VRI and VRII. Used with the lens wide open (something I'd rarely do with a teleconverter), results were much more than acceptable (while being critical) and one stop down, slightly little of consequence, if anything was lost resolution wide, except lower contrast of the image. Although not 100% certain if that was Nikon's intent, but they released the new 2x along with the 300 f2.8 VRII simultaniously for the Olympics and the press to use, as sort of a matched "ideal" pair" and I was taken back in a suprisingly good way when I saw the results of my first tests with this pairing. So much so, it put on hold my other options in another longer Nikon Supertelephoto, for my partiular application. I completely agree with you, that both the 1.4x and new 2x work remarkably well on the newer 70-200 VRII zoom lens.
Dave[/QUOTE]