Reviews
Glossary
I really love this lens, and it rarely leaves my camera.
It is sharp across most of the range, focuses quickly, and the huge zoom range makes it easy to frame your shot.
Naturally, it's impossible to create a perfect lens with this much range - it's quite slow (3.5-5.6) and at full zoom it's pretty soft at the edges. It also has some distortion, but unless you're photographing buildings or something else with a lot of straight lines, you won't notice.
A lot of reviewers will say it's not a portrait lens, but I find it great.
It focuses very close, but due to the advanced nature of the optics, you don't actually get more magnification that out of my 70-210 at its closest focus of about 5 feet.
The Nikon VR (vibration reduction) is amazing - it gives you up to 4 stops extra for lower light shooting, but of course that doesn't help with fast-moving objects. You have to get used to letting the VR activate & settle in before shooting, and of course you need to remember to switch it off when using a tripod.