I've had no choice but to radically alter my review. (Reader comments below as of today (1/28/10), apply to the first (three star) version of the review, and the caution that one must be aware of sample variability is as important as ever). I've decided to re-write my review based solely on the performance of my second sample, under the assumption that the second sample is representative and the first not.
The lens still has some "handling" issues that stem from its nature as a consumer-oriented lens, and it is still a "slow" lens, with a maximum aperture of f/4.5 - f/5.6 - although f/5.6 at 300mm still implies a light-transmissive opening of about 54mm, nearly as large as that of an 85mm f/1.4 (61mm). There is simply no way the lens could be faster without also making it larger, heavier and much more expensive - and such lenses already exist.
Build quality is good consumer-grade, meaning metal where necessary, plastic elsewhere, likely little or no weather-sealing and not designed to endure rough handling. That's fine - another design choice that has benefits for size, weight and cost. Not quite so fine is the still-sticky zoom ring, which takes just enough effort to turn that near 300mm your subject will tend to jump around, maybe right out of the frame, as the hand holding the lens works in opposition to the hand holding the camera. Even worse in my opinion is the lack of a smooth, front-mounted focus ring, which I find fairly important in a long zoom. Notice that all the professional lenses have the focus ring in front of the zoom ring and usually larger than the zoom ring, so that small tweaks to focus are done easily and naturally with the photographer's hands in the shooting position. The small, hidden focus ring on the 70-300 is unlikely to be used except when setting up shots of still subjects on a tripod, and that's a shame because the lens is actually even better suited to other uses.
Those deficiencies are tolerable, though, because the 70-300 VR just about re-writes the book on image quality for consumer zooms in its range. It's not just a matter of acuity, although acuity is excellent: like many of Nikon's best lenses, the 70-300VR's images exceed the level of quality implied by formal tests of it. These formal tests, and most reviews, independently consider the various easily-measurable aspects of lens performance - acuity, aberrations of various types, perhaps (though usually cursorily) color rendition; and then attempt to grade the lens based on some rational summation of its good and bad qualities. What is usually missed is that the perception of sharpness and of image quality relies on a much less linear and not easily definable combination of a lens' optical qualities. The real performance of a lens can be more than the simple sum of its parts, or it can be less - and the perception of quality and sharpness in different lenses' images can vary quite a bit between lenses that have similar measurable capabilities.
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