Nikon 200-400 Review
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- Nikon 200-400mm – A perfectly versatile lens that can do just about anything you need!
- Approx Cost: $6,950-$7,100
- See Latest Prices on Amazon – Nikon 200-400
- See Latest Prices on B&H – Nikon 200-400
- Approx Cost: $6,950-$7,100
- or rent it for a while from Borrowlenses.com
- I use Borrowlenses all the time to test stuff out to make sure!
The Nikon 200-400 Lens
The full name of this lens is the Nikon 200-400mm f/4G AF-S SWM SIC ED IF VR II Nikkor Super Telephoto Zoom Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras. Who comes up with this stuff? It’s like War & Peace!
The lens is great, even though it pretty much only serves one purpose: An extreme zoom with a bit of flexibility.
Why I got it
I was going to Yellowstone and wanted to take tight photos of animals, birds, people, and other things at a great distance.
Getting close to animals is next to impossible, so it’s best to have something with some extreme zoom. The Nikon 200-400 will let you get good detail, even if the target is about a quarter mile away. That’s pretty extreme!
The lens is pretty useless if the subject is up close. The lower range of the 200mm means that your subject has to be about 20 feet away or more to be worth shooting.
Shooting Landscapes with the Nikon 200-400mm Lens
This is not thought of as a landscape lens. However, I do think if it as one that is flexible enough for certain landscape situations.
I’ve put a landscape photo below in the Sample Photos for you to see.
In landscape, sometimes there is a situation that called for “compression”. You can get this interesting “feel” to a photo with these wonderful zoom lenses. Often times, the most interesting bit of the landscape is quite small. That small bit can be lost in a wide-angle shot. The compressed view can be much more interesting and certainly makes for a unique take on the situation.
I appear to be holding this lens effortlessly. But I am not.
The Downside
It’s huge!
It’s big and heavy and difficult to carry around. I’m in pretty decent shape, and I can only hand-hold it for about 4-5 minutes before I crumple and collapse.
I used a gimbal head to mount the lens on a tripod instead. That made it all quite a bit easier and more sane. Once all that is set up, you have a serious rig in action. It’s great and very effective, but there is no such thing as “popping out of your car to get a quick shot”. It’s a small production setting it all up.
While I was taking this photo, I was aiming at the forest scene below in the Sample Photos.
How it compares to the much cheaper Nikon 70-200mm Lens
I also have a Nikon 70-200 Review, which you might want to see. There are plenty of sample photos inside there and you can visually see the difference.
The 70-200 is also good for wildlife photography, but the animals/birds need to be pretty darned close. We’re talking “zoo close”. That distance rarely happens in nature unless you are set up inside a blind or something crazy like that.
The Nikon 200-400, on the other hand, can give you a lot more range. If a bison walks up right beside your car, then it is far too close to make this lens usable. Since this usually isn’t the case, you will find the lens useful for most distance situations.
The 70-200 is also great for people-photography. At 70mm, you can take a nice tight shot of someone across the room. You won’t be using the 200-400 for much of that, although you can use it to take photos of people outside with some very nice compression. You can see a photo of Ethan playing croquet below that was shot with the Nikon 200-400.
Sample Photos from the Nikon 200-400mm Lens
Here are a few quick photos that I have had time to process. More will come in the future.
It’s almost impossible to get this kind of compression with a wide-angle lens
When shooting at f/4, subjects really pop off the page
The lens has very little vignetting, but I did add some in post-processing. Dont’ let that throw you off.
Doesn’t Ethan look like he just stepped off a Ralph Lauren catalog? Again, I added Vignetting in post.
I shot this one at f/5 from about 40 feet away.
Using this tight lens can help you re-compose scenes you stopped thinking about with the wide-angle lenses
Any questions about the nature of these reviews? Visit my Ethics Statement. It’s all quite simple!
Your first sample photo is AMAZING and the last one is a close second! Now you have me debating between a good zoom lens and a wide angle (neither of which I have). And as if I could possibly afford this lens anyway… ha. I love how you shoot great photos even when they aren’t HDRs.
Great work my friend. BTW I noticed that is not the flag of England on your coat.
dude that thing is huge! cool review.
Wicked work!
Imagine throwing that on a crop sensor body. Just a couple of questions.
Did you play with VR on and off?
Did you need to throw a ND on there for any shots at f/4?
I love the shot of the waterfall with the winding river below. It’d be awesome to compare the same shot with a wide angle just to punch the comparison between them.
good effort.
thx
Ryan – I kept the VR on in handheld. I turned it off on the tripod – I’ve read VR can cause issues ! And no ND filter
Great inspirational shots, I have the Canon 100-400mm lens and never really thought to use it for landscapes. Maybe I’ll break it out and give it a few shots!
You are making me want expensive things. I think this one will be a rental lens for me, at least for a while.
I am enjoying the 70-200. Particularly at an air show. I have to get “grooved” to the continuous focus tracking capablity for moving objects. For 400mm (Fireworks show) I simply put the old f4 manual focus and 2X teleconverter on the camera on a tripod. Same would work with the 70-200 making it a 400 f-5.6. No VR but with a tripod that is OK. For fireworks f-16 kept the sky light lower so the faster lens was no advantage. Trade: maybe $300 vs approx. $7,000. Same result. But I am banging on a “customer” to reward me with a bonus of a longer lens.
Your canyon picture was taken EXACTLY from the location where my wife (when we were first married) scooted under the guard rail to retrieve a chucnk of “Yellow-stone” while I clung to a solid support with acrophobia. Somewhere around here is a 2 1/4 inch Hasselblad slide from that location that is 44 years old.
hehe thanks zach, william, and daryl !
[...] have put up a new Nikon 200-400 Review here on the site and sprinkled many new photos inside! I rented it from Borrowlenses.com last week [...]
Great review, Trey. But here’s an alternative. Okay, maybe it’s not the same thing, but here’s how I got a 400mm f/4 that worked great for me in Kenya, and at a fraction of the cost: (1) use a 70-200mm f/2.8, (2) a DX (cropped) sensor body, and (3) a TC-14E II teleconverter. The net is the FX equivalent of a 150-420mm f/4 lens if my math is correct. Actually, I used a TC-20E II on a D90 body so I had the FX equivalent of a 210-600mm f/5.6, at a fraction of the cost of the 200-400mm monster. Other advantages: (1) you can hold it, (2) you can fit it in a mid-sized Lowepro, (3) you’ve got a 70-200mm f/2.8 when you want one.
Wow, that last shot is far and away my favorite! There are very few photos anywhere that I’d buy to hang on my wall, but that’s one of them! I shoot Canon, and I recently rented their 100-400 mm lens from BorrowLens (or maybe LensRentals, I don’t remember for sure), and loved it. It really opens your eyes to a different aspect of landscape photography, and I encourage anyone who’s remotely interested in it to rent one for a week…
Wonderful review and sample shots, Trey! Especially that last one.
I’d love to borrow some lenses, but unfortunately I don’t think they ship to Japan. Oh well. Fun reading this post, tho.
I am wondering about whether it is really better than my 80-400 VR 5.6 lens. With the D700, if I need the low light available for the F 4, I can go up a couple of film speeds and not have very much noise as long as I do not go near to the 6400. I took the 80-400 from the Med coast of France to Chamonix and the 80-400 which fit in my Thinktank rolling airport carry on with all my other lenses from the 2.8 14-24 and to my 2.8 80-200.
Did you fly on a small commuter plane? If yes, did you put the lens in overhead bin or check it? The overhead bin on small commuter plane is not very deep or tall. I am renting Nikon 500mm f/4G AF-S ED VR for Yellowstone and will fly into Jackson Hole Airport on a small commuter plane. Worried it won’t fit. Don’t want to check it. Any advice on how to take lens on plane?
That last shot just makes me drool with envy !!!! Someday…..sometime………
Thanks all!
Teresa – I rented from Borrowlenses and had them deliver it right to Bozeman… and then I sent back from there. I thought that was clever of me!
Eugene – that is a goood question… it’s always a tough choice!
[...] to take a shot. It’s not that big. It’ll fit right in your back pocket. (BTW, see my Nikon 200-400 Review for [...]