Why you don’t need a Teleconverter

A few months ago I got rid of the Amazing Nikon 70-300mm VR lens and bought a 70-200mm f2.8 VR II lens with the new Nikon TC 2x III. The only reason I got the teleconverter was to make up for the reach I lost with the new lens and shooting on a full frame instead of a crop sensor.



The Nikon TC 2x III was just released and got many good reviews with people saying it performed exceptionally well. If you are not familiar with teleconverters you won’t know that you usually lose a lot of image quality especially with the 2x converter.

So I got the teleconverter and just did a few test shots and placed it in my bag for when I had a trip to the Kruger National Park. I was very excited to try this excellent new lens and teleconverter on my D700 but after my first encounter with some Impala I immediately knew that I needed more reach. Luckily the D300 was in the bag to help me out!

Getting back home I couldn’t wait to see the results. The results were quite frankly very disappointing. The image quality loss was just unbearable in my opinion for the reach that you gain and the focus became much more sluggish than the 70-300mm VR which was also an f5.6 lens on the long end.

With these results I decided to do a test with and without the teleconverter on both the D300 and D700 to see if maybe there was some user error on my part.

I set up both cameras on a tripod and started taking pictures to compare. The first test I did with the converter and shot a Image at the 100mm setting of the lens which would effectively give you 200mm at f5.6. Next Image I removed the converter and shot an Image at 100mm again but this time at f2.8. I imported both these images into photoshop and enlarged the photo taken without the converter to 200%. Both images now showed the target I shot at the exact same size for easy comparison.

I was startled by the results when comparing the Images. Both Images were equally sharp! What makes matters worse is that the photo taken with the Teleconverter had horrible looking bokeh.

Conclusion:
If you need more reach just get a longer lens. I really had high hopes for this new teleconverter on the excellent Nikon 70-700mm f2.8 VR II but in the end you are better off just cropping and upsizing you photo after it has been taken. The focus also takes a performance hit and slows down considerably. The new Nikon TC 2x III is an unnecessary tool to have in your camera bag.

Pros

• None

Cons

• Price
• Sluggish auto focus
• Takes up space in your bag

Happy Shooting!