Nikon D300S

Sharpness

The sharpest measurement was in the center of the lens at its widest 16mm setting, with the aperture open wide (1618 lw/ph), but there really isn’t that much sharpness variation when shooting at the widest zoom and the midpoint of the range. Only at full telephoto does the sharpness start to fall off, and even here you’d be hard pressed to find a flaw when viewed at normal enlargement sizes. More on how we test sharpness.

Image Sharpness and Chromatic Aberration

Focal Length:

16.0mm

50.0mm

85.0mm

Click blue squares to change sample crops below
f/5 f/13 f/32
f/13 f/13 f/32
5.6 f/14 f/36

Image Stabilization (9.77)

The VR lens offered a substantial improvement in a key category of our image stabilization testing: compensating for the kind of typical low-intensity horizontal movement encountered in handheld shooting, and this effect holds true at every tested shutter speed. When the camera was moved vertically, though, the VR effect was negligible, and when the level of shake was intense, the system produced lower-resolution results at faster shutter speeds.

We test image stabilization by mounting the camera in a custom computer-controlled rig that produces consistent movement patterns, and shoot at two different levels of shake, with and without the image stabilization system. By comparing the two sets of results, we can analyze the effect of IS on image resolution.

At the low shake setting, the VR lens offered a major sharpness boost when the camera was moving horizontally, though it proved ineffective against vertical shake.

Here again, vertical shake was basically unaffected by the VR system. Against aggressive horizontal shake, though, the camera did better with the VR system turned off at shutter speeds above 1/60 second.

The Canon 7D produced a smaller improvement against low-intensity horizontal shake than the Nikon D300S, but the IS system was more effective overall in providing some enhancement under all shooting conditions, producing a higher score.

The following same-size crops offer a visual indication of the variation when found when shooting across the range of shutter speeds, with the camera moving horizontally.

Image Stabilization Comparison Table			Expand
	Low Shake IS Off	Low Shake IS On	High Shake IS Off	High Shake IS On
1/500
1/250
1/125
1/60
1/30
1/15
1/8