70-210mm zoom lens

I bought one on eBay ($70 w/ shipping)! Well, like 3 weeks ago (12/4). I'm a little behind on updating this blog.

It's a Nikon 70-210mm f/4-5.6 AF zoom lens. Here's Ken Rockwell's review. It's a push-pull style, which is kinda annoying if you don't have a camera bag, because then it just zooms as you walk around, and it's pretty long when it's zoomed so it bangs into things. I think the moral of this story is to get a camera bag.

Here it is on my N65, compared to a 50mm f/1.8 prime and a 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6D zoom.

So far I've used it for some hummingbird photos and throughout Hawaii. It is nice to have the long tele, but it is damn heavy compared to my other lenses. It weighs more than the camera and 50mm combined:

Item	Weight (g)
N65 camera body	400
50mm prime	150
28-80mm zoom	250
70-210mm zoom	600

My other complaints are:

1. Too slow. It's still f/4.5 at 135mm, which is adequate. But at 210mm, where you most need the speed to compensate for hand-holding (no vibration reduction/image stabilization), it's just too slow.
2. My N65 has a hard time autofocusing it. If it's really far off, it sometimes starts hunting in the opposite direction, hits the limit, and then comes back. That process is slow, loud, and battery-draining.
3. Close focus is ~1.5m, i.e. you have to be standing up to take a photo of something at your feet. Shooting at 210mm kinda makes up for that, but I miss being able to get right up to something (~.5m) like I can with the 28-80mm zoom.

But I think that's just the price you pay for a $70 telephoto zoom. Also, 210mm is long enough: according to my analysis, anything you can barely make out with the naked eye should show up quite clearly at 210mm.

Overall, I'm quite happy with it.

Update (1/4/2011): After using it for a bit, I've realized that I don't really use it down to 70mm (except when I really wish I had a 50mm but don't want to change lenses). 135mm (maybe 105mm) is the lower limit. Sometimes I wish I had more magnification, but it's already pretty hard to track a subject at 210mm. And lack of VR/IS starts to be a problem - I've got several blurry pictures at 1/90 or so (wishing now that I hadn't given up on my exposure log).