Nikon AF Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6D ED

A heron standing in marsh grass forty feet out, full afternoon sun, you on the bank with no tripod. That is the shot this lens was built to grab and the reason it stayed in so many bags through the early 2000s. Three hundred millimeters of reach in a barrel that costs less than a tank of gas now, light enough to hand-hold, and at f/8 in good light it will resolve feather detail that your 50mm will never see. People bought this lens for one reason: getting close to things they could not walk up to, cheaply.

Then they pushed it past where it wants to go. Wide open at 300mm and f/5.6 the image goes soft and low in contrast, with visible purple fringing along high-contrast edges even with the ED element doing its work. It is sharp and contrasty from 70mm out to about 200mm, then the long end falls off a cliff unless you stop down to f/8 or f/11 and feed it light. Reviewers of the era were blunt about it, and they were right. Treat 300mm wide open as an emergency setting, not a working one.

The optical design is honest consumer glass, not a Sonnar or anything exotic, with one ED element to drag the worst of the chromatic aberration out of the long focal lengths. It is a screw-drive D-type, meaning the autofocus motor lives in the camera body, so it hunts and grinds and will not focus at all on the entry-level bodies that dropped the in-body motor. There is no stabilization, which on a 300mm hand-held in anything less than bright sun is the real limiter. You will be chasing 1/500th and faster to keep things crisp at the long end.

Bokeh is fine, not special. At the wide end the out-of-focus rendering is smooth enough for a tight outdoor portrait, and the reach lets you compress a background into a soft wash. Stopped down the nine-blade aperture is unremarkable but does the job. Nobody chose this lens for its bokeh. They chose it for the focal range and the price.

Where it sits today: dirt cheap on the used market, perpetually cross-shopped against its own successor, the f/4.5-5.6 VR Nikkor, which trades a sliver of wide-end speed for stabilization and a quieter AF-S motor and is worth the small premium if you are hand-holding film in the field. People still buy this older D version for daylight wildlife and budget sideline work, accepting the soft 300mm end as the cost of entry. If you are metering through it on a sunny day, remember the variable aperture. It is f/4 at 70mm but only f/5.6 by 300mm, so set Zone Light Meter to the aperture you are actually shooting at the long end, not the bright number on the front ring, or your exposures will run a stop hot. The 62mm thread takes a cheap circular polarizer, which is the single best thing you can bolt onto this lens for cutting haze on distant subjects.