The D4 with the Nikon 800mm lens.

Nikon 800mm f/5.6E FL ED VR Lens Review

Until recently, Canon’s 800mm f/5.6 lens has been about the longest lens currently in production by one of the big manufacturers. The longest lens on the Nikon side had been the 600mm f/4, which I took out for a spin not too long ago.

Now, Nikonians have their own cannon (yes, pun intended) to play with. The Nikon 800mm f/5.6E FL ED VR lens is finally here! I took this behemoth out for a test to see just what Nikon packed into it.

My Bad Experience with the Nikon 800mm

My experience with the 800mm began poorly. I took the lens out with a Nikon D4, an Induro AT–413 tripod, and a Custom Brackets gimbal head to one of my favorite birding spots in the Redwood Shores region of the San Francisco Bay Area. Every spring, these black-and-white birds called Black Skimmers show up and make for some excellent photo opportunities.

Black Skimmer

They gather around the shoreline and fly low over bodies of water, letting their lower beaks dip into the water as they fly, trying to snap up small fish. Get lucky and you can walk away with an image of one with its beak creating a wake through water, which is what I was aiming for.

Well, things didn’t start out well. I set up everything, balanced the lens on the gimbal, and started shooting.

Immediately, I noticed that the lens was incredibly slow to focus. For static subjects, it was fine – you could zero in on them and shoot from here to kingdom come. But try and focus on moving subjects – especially fast-moving ones like birds in flight — and I was lucky if I achieved focus at all, let alone keeping it locked on a swooping Skimmer.

Missed focus on a Skimmer

Missed focus on a Skimmer.

It was an exercise in frustration. No matter how I adjusted the AF settings on the D4, I could not get the 800mm lens to focus properly. I was ending up, on average, with perhaps 30% of my shots in focus. I knew I was doing something wrong. No way Nikon would let loose such a poorly performing lens. No freaking way.

Make Sure You Update Your Firmware

As it turns out, I wasn’t doing something wrong as far as my technique goes, but I did figure out what I needed to do. These modern cameras and lenses are veritable computing machines, every bit as they are imaging machines. My D4 needed a firmware update to cope with the new lens. I was running v1.02, whereas the latest firmware was v.1.05, which specifically added support for the 800mm lens.

So, I updated the firmware on the D4, and headed back out.

The difference was night and day. Suddenly, the lens and camera were locking and tracking onto subjects moving faster than I could swing that gimbal around to keep up with them, increasing my accuracy to more than I’d hoped.

In the burst of 33 images below, there is one that’s definitely out of focus and only two more that aren’t acceptably sharp to my eyes. That little duck was hauling butt while the 800mm/D4 kept up with it – even when it crossed in front of dense foliage, which might have otherwise fooled an AF sensor.

With a firmware update, the D4/800mm combo locked and held focus beautifully.

With a firmware update, the D4/800mm combo locked and held focus beautifully.

Form Factor and Handling

At over 10 pounds, this isn’t a lens you’ll be hand-holding. I tried, once. Didn’t bother doing it again. Even with VR, you’re not gonna be getting many sharp images with it.

The 800mm is built like Nikon’s 600mm f/4 lens – lots of smooth plastic and rubberized surfaces. There are the standard AF memory buttons and switches to set VR and focus modes and distance limits. The unit ships with both a standard tripod foot that adapts well to the long plates used by gimbal heads, as well as a lower-profile foot that reduces the mounted height of the lens.

The D4 with the Nikon 800mm lens.

The D4 with the Nikon 800mm lens.

In what is definitely a departure from the norm, the 800mm also ships with a 1.25x teleconverter specially designed for this lens. As in the specific lens I’m using. If I somehow had two 800mms with me, I can’t mix up the teleconverters. They are that precise. This teleconverter, which turns the 800mm f/5.6 lens into a 1000mm f/7.1 lens, is also not meant for use with other Nikon telephoto lenses.

Performance

Once the firmware issue was resolved, the lens performed like a champ. It was every bit as snappy as the 600mm f/4, and perhaps a hair more so when it came to locking onto a subject. With the D4 driving it, it nailed focus accurately and kept it locked, even when the subject crossed in front of foliage, which can sometimes break focus.

With the teleconverter, there was a barely noticeable slowdown in focusing speed. Some really fast subjects did cause me to lose focus for a second as the lens compensated, but I soon learned to adapt to that.

The biggest issue I found was that after having gotten used to a 600mm lens, the additional reach of the 800 – to say nothing about the 1000mm reach with the teleconverter – was a bit tricky to work with. Tracking subjects is just a bit harder due to the narrower field of view, and you have to work even harder when the teleconverter is on.

The included 1.25x Teleconverter. Image courtesy Nikon.

The included 1.25x teleconverter. Image courtesy Nikon.

Even more important than the reach issue is the depth of field. At 800mm and f/5.6, it’s thin – almost razor thin. I’m glad the lens’ focus is dead-on accurate and fast; if it weren’t, that slim DoF would be a total killer. You can, of course, close down to f/8 or higher, but thankfully, unless your subject requires a deeper DoF, you don’t need to.

Since I had the lens on a gimbal head and was shooting at a reasonably high shutter speed, I turned Vibration Reduction off for the most part. However, it still came in handy when I was shooting the San Francisco skyline from Treasure Island. There, despite locking the gimbal down completely, vibrations from passing cars and the footfalls of large crowds of tourists caused a bit of shake in the setup.

Switching Vibration Reduction on to “Normal” solved this issue for me. The 800mm can detect when it’s mounted on a tripod and reduces vibration from shutter release and other minor interference, solving that problem for me.

Image quality from this lens is about as good as it gets. To my subjective eye, my shots were, perhaps, slightly sharper in general with the 800mm than they were with the 600mm f/4. That’s a subjective judgement, of course, and it could that the additional reach just helped me capture more detail, but I couldn’t find anything to fault with this lens. There’s a bit of vignetting with the aperture wide open, but that’s easily fixed in post.

Adding the teleconverter does, as I mentioned, seem to slow the focusing speed down just a hair, but it’s not all that noticeable. I was still able to lock and track reasonably fast-moving subjects. The max aperture drops by about 2/3 of a stop to f/7.1 with the teleconverter attached.

Cormorant over Redwood Shores.

Cormorant over Redwood Shores.

What surprised me is just how powerful a 1000mm f/7.1 lens can be. Take a look at the shots below. The 800mm shot is on the left, the 1000mm one on the right. These are taken from Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay and are of the very top of the Transamerica Pyramid building. As the crow flies, that’s a distance of about 2.25 miles.

The Transamerica Pyramid building, shot from Treasure Island. 800mm shot on left, 1000mm shot on right.

The Transamerica Pyramid building, shot from Treasure Island. 800mm shot on left, 1000mm shot on right.

From that distance, with a little tweaking, I can see into one of the windows at the top of the building well enough to distinguish the green glow of what looks like an exit sign, some recessed lighting, and a piece of artwork hanging on the wall.

3:1 enlargement of the building.

3:1 enlargement of the building.

Yeah. It’s that good.

Conclusion

Nikon has been missing an 800mm lens in their lineup for some time now, which is something Canonistas have been crowing about for just as long. Nikon has responded with a lens that really exceeded my expectations. The 800mm f/5.6 is a beauty of a lens and is perhaps one of the finest super-tele optics I’ve had the pleasure of shooting with. And, at a roughly $18,000 purchase price, I’m glad that we’re carrying it for rental.

I set out to capture an image of Black Skimmer just as it dipped its beak into the water, creating that cook wake. With the D4 and the 800mm lens at my disposal, I did just that.

Black Skimmer fishing.

Black Skimmer fishing.

Image Gallery with the Nikon 800mm

A sampling of the bird shots I was able to capture with the Nikon 800mm f/5.6E lens.

Black Skimmer

Images © Sohail Mamdani. All rights reserved.

Sohail Mamdani is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

18 Comments

  • mai

    The photograph of the Black Skimmer is awesome – so sharp and so real it is scary. As for the cormorant bird – just like straight of of StarTrek movie – the Klingon Warbird no less

  • Robert

    Thanks Sohail, focus tracking has been hit or miss in my experience, I’ll give your settings a try.

  • Sohail Mamdani

    Thanks Mike! Yeah, I’ve been trying to get shots of cormorants in flight forever. Against bright backgrounds, I always had to underexpose a bit to prevent the sky from blowing out the edges of the birds and would then lose detail in the wings. I finally picked a spot where I had a chance of capturing one of these birds against a darker background and relied on depth of field to separate it from the background. I’m pretty stoked about that image too 🙂

  • Sohail Mamdani

    Robert, for moving objects, I found the best combo for me was AF-C mode, using 9 central AF points, and leaving the focus tracking (Menu option A3) at either 2 or 3 at most.

  • Phil

    The sharpness doesn’t surprise me, actually.

    If you’ve ever seen the MTF curves for this lens, they are astonishing. Like a flat line at 100%. Never seen anything like it.

  • Paulo Feitosa

    Great pictures and article. Enjoy your honesty about how many frames you actually lost, etc.

  • Robert

    Please expand on what focusing mode and personal preferences you were using on the D4.
    I have had difficulty achieving sharp photos of pedestrians and cyclist with a D4 (firmware recently updated to A-1.05, B-1.03, L-1.004) using both AF-S 70-200mm 2.8 GII and AF-S 300mm 2.8 GII ED.

  • mcspeakeasy

    sweet shot at the end! Thanks for the review!

  • Willis Andrews

    Additional Info: The reason the lens worked at all in the review is that the aperture setup is the same as what is used in the PC-E perspective control lenses. The camera was trying to make sense of a very long telephoto when all it had to work with was info on wide-angle PC lenses. Also, note that this means that none of the old mechanical aperture teleconverters will work with the 800mm.

  • Willis Andrews

    There is a new Electromagnetic Aperture mechanism in the 800mm lens. There is no mechanical aperture coupling. The same issue arises with the new 1.25x teleconverter. You are correct that any camera NOT getting a firmware update cannot use this lens or converter. Likewise, the 1.25x teleconverter will not work with all other lenses, because it is expecting an electrical aperture actuation.

  • Pradipta Dutta

    @Daniel M, yes Nikon has updated firmware for D3s, D300 and D700 to update the 800/5.6 lens profile. Actually, there were many other cameras that got the updates.

  • Daniel M.

    The firmware update part makes me think… will this lens work on older bodies? I mean, sure, if you have 18 k to drop on a tele, you might as well just buy a D4. But what about back up cameras, like the D3S or even the D3/D300/D700 any of those that don’t get firmware updates anymore?

    Just wondering.

  • Mike Dougherty

    The image of the Cormorant is outstanding. Unless one has tried to photograph Cormorants with their fast moving wings and dark coloration, it’s really hard to appreciate how difficult these birds are to photograph. Auto focus typically fails on fast moving subjects and subjects without contrast. Looks like a great combo.

  • TobyTwo

    800mm, to be sure…

  • TobyTwo

    I think the bloody articles were read. So perhaps our nice friend Anon should take some care reading the article himself? Anyway, this guy first went out, had problems, and only after that he managed to find out his D4 needed a firmware update. Which essential piece of knowledge came with the 500mm lens. Idiots? Don’t think so…

  • Anon

    @silky @E.M. De Klerk, read the bloody articles you idiots. Typical internet-crawling air-heads.

    Very nice article.

  • E.M. de Klerk

    rtfm before use

  • silky

    Did you upgrade the lens profile version and the latest firmware to d4?

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