55-200mm f/4-5.6G ED IF AF-S DX VR [Vibration Reduction] Nikkor Zoom Lens Bulk packaging (White box, New)

I've been using this lens on my Nikon D40. Truth be told, I wasn't too thrilled with the basic kit that only came with the 18-55 lens. I'd been using my Canon SI3 as my preferred camera for sporting events, travel, and school activities. I'd had my eye on this lens for a while but just couldn't justify the price until I found a reasonably priced refurbished lens. The icing on the cake for me is that I get incredible compositions with a very modest investment (my lens was half the retail price of a new one at Circuit City). I couldn't be more pleased. Low lighting and shadows do limit some shots that include action or rapid movement. On the other hand, most lenses and cameras have this limitation. But if your subject is relatively still, you'll have no problem letting in more light at a slower shutter speed to get great photos. Like any lens, your best shots will be in good daylight or strong indoor lighting. You won't be disappointed. Because it's a zoom lens, you won't be able to stand too close to your subject. One of the downsides of 55 mm. But I compensate for this by just waiting until my subject is at least 4 feet away so that I can get the best focusing opportunity. If you take advantage of the fast shutter technology from your camera, you'll greatly appreciate the wonderful results and impressive boket that makes your work look like a trained professional. Nothing takes your breath away more than a photo of your child who is in crisp focus while the background blurs in the distance. It's one of the best features of digital photography that you can simply delete out photos and only keep the very best ones. You may find that changing to 800 ISO and activating the noise reduction feature in the D40 gives you just what you need - fast shutter speeds that stop the action without degrading the photo. While it will add some size to your camera, the light weight allows you to hold the kit for as long as you want without wearing you out. To take advantage of this lens to its fullest, I recommend using a high resolution (quality set to Fine, size set to Large). Avoid throwing out shots via the camera delete function when in playback. Instead - wait until you can download all the photos to your computer and look around for interesting sections of your composition. Then use your photo editing software to crop and keep the unexpected gems you may have missed while trying to make decisions on the viewfinder. I found interesting facial expressions or live action scenes that would have been deleted. For example, while aiming at a fountain, a small bird was in mid flight with wings extended off center. I just cropped so that the bird was centered in the resulting output and it looks like I had aimed at him all along. Thanks to the high resolution setting, I still had enough pixels available for a good looking printed photo. This is a very cool, must have accessory for your Nikon. Whether you buy new or refurbished, you won't regret your decision once you've mounted it onto your camera

I just purchased this lens a week ago to compliment my also recently purchased D3100. I was enticed by the deal currently running through the end of September which gives you $100 off the price, and I have to say, even at full price, this lens is great! The zoom range means that you can do everything from basic portraiture to capturing subjects from a moderate distance. I took my D3100 and the 55-200 to a wedding this weekend, where I shot about 300 photos, 169 of which ended up being "good enough" to "incredible" (by which I'm giving my subjective interpretation of my shooting ability, not necessarily an objective review of the lens' quality). Outdoors during the ceremony, the lens focused fairly fast, and I was able to get decent shallow depth of field at full zoom so that I got some great candid portraits from afar of the couple (approximately 40 feet away), with pleasingly (though not amazingly) blurred foreground and background, and a few turned out well enough that I feel they could be printed and framed and while not professional level, would definitely be eye catching. During the evening, and inside the banquet hall where the lighting was not so great, the lens had some trouble with moving subjects too far away to light up with the built in flash. However, portraits of people who weren't moving much, and action shots within range of the on board flash, came out just fine. The lens does give decently sharp images across the frame, I'm sure there are better lenses out there but for the money I'd say this one is a solid buy. The auto-focus is decently fast and quiet, the zoom range makes it great for anything from portraits to capturing subjects from afar, and the construction is decent enough that you don't feel like it'll break just from normal use. Overall, I'd buy this lens again (and again, and again...). Oh, and as an added bonus, 55mm on this lens has max. aperture of 1/4.0, which is twice as big as on the 18-55 kit lens (which has max. aperture of 1/5.6 at full telephoto). What that means is that you get a bit more light through the lens to the sensor with the zoom lens, if I understand optics correctly. That *should* make this lens better suited for portraiture and moderate lighting situations at that focal length, than the kit lens. Sorry, not the most technical review, but I have to admit, for $150 this lens let me capture some amazing moments at a dear friend's wedding, and you can't really put a price on that!!!

Okay hold on, there is a story to this purchase. I bought this lens because I volunteer with a group of HS girls basketball players. These girls, while amazing, are still girls and have insecurities. I got to learn what angles they like with this camera and I also had them give it a try. This camera captured the best moments, and it meant the world to the seniors and their parents. While this school does hire professional photographers, all the girls annd parents agreed that my pictures were so much better because of this lense. It was so affordable, amazing quality, the autofocus on it was out of this world. It was fast. Great look and clarity to all the photos. I even trusted them to take their own pictures. This functionality this lense provide gave these girls amazing photos. For weeks after the season was over they posted these photos to all their social medias and the parents did too. This isn’t just a camera lense, it’s a memory frozen in time so that they can look back and enjoy for the rest of their life. This lens brought out the photographer in a lot of these basketball girls and captured the most wonderful senior night photos. If you’re contemplating getting it, just do it. The price is great, but overall the memories are priceless.

The 55-200 VR is a remarkably light, inexpensive, and GOOD lens. It really has everything needed to get excellent images within its range, and I have seen some truly extraordinary photos taken with these. Even so, there are good reasons to consider getting something else, probably depending on your budget. The good news is that if your budget encourages you to stay with the 55-200, you give up little in terms of the image quality you can produce. One problem a lot of people are going to have with this lens is its feeling of cheapness. It is very light and feels insubstantial and, for a Nikkor, cheaply made. It is a high quality item - the quality of the plastics used is good, and it is put together well enough to function as well as it does, after all, which is not to be taken for granted - but it is not a good "feeling" lens. The zoom ring has a light feel combined with a bit of static friction, the combination of which makes it easy to overshoot your intended framing when adjusting, and often you will need to go back and forth several times to get exactly the framing you want, which takes extra time and effort - and which, for me at least, reminds me of the lens' cheapness each time it happens. The focus ring is hard to find and too fast for fine control, and it doesn't have any range markings or depth of field markings at all. In addition, you have to flip a switch to go between manual and auto focus, unlike most other AF-S lenses. Other reviewers have concluded that the lens just wasn't really intended to be used much as a manual-focus lens, and I tend to agree. It is workable, but not intuitive and slower than it would be with most lenses. Since manual focus is necessary for many types of telephoto shots, this is a real factor for some buyers. By the way, the light weight of the lens is not always a positive factor, and it is not a negative factor only due to build and perceived quality issues. When tripod-mounted, the sharpness of any camera/lens setup is limited by vibration, and a heavier lens damps vibration more effectively. This is not a minor point. The difference between a heavy lens and a light lens is easily visible as blur, especially with shutter speeds in the range of a second to a small fraction of a second. Using this lens will require a heavier tripod, better technique, or that more attention be paid to avoiding these shutter speeds. VR does not help when the lens is used on a tripod, and should be turned off. Image quality has been said by other reviewers to be very good, but just a shade short of Nikon's very best lenses. Again I agree. My sample was not quite good enough to be sharp at all apertures, having some abberations that caused mottled fuzziness at certain settings at wider apertures. This would not be immediately apparent in a normal print, but could show up as areas of less detail, somewhat randomly, that might be noticeable when they happen to coincide with a point of interest in a photo. These are caused by imperfectly aligned or imperfectly manufactured lens elements and tend to move around as the lens is focused and zoomed. Most lenses do this to some extent, but many of Nikon's better lenses, if you get a good sample, seem completely free of it. My wonderful 16-85mm zoom has not a trace. The good news is that they tend to go away as a lens is stopped down, as the lens is then seeing through a smaller area of glass nearer its central axis, which is less sensitive to alignment. Other than this, the lens doesn't really need to be stopped down - sharpness over most of the image field is nearly as good wide open as at f/8 or f/11. This is actually pretty common for today's ordinary zooms, as they don't go to wide apertures - spherical abberations, which are what cause a loss of sharpness wide open, are much more important for "fast" f/2.8 lenses and primes. Contrast is very good at pretty much all apertures, in fact I would say that the 55-200 is very close to as contrasty as any lens I've used, and for a lot of people that is going to be much more important than sharpness. Contrast makes images look striking no matter the size they are displayed at, whereas minor sharpness issues are only really important for large reproductions, if at all. These are most of the major points. A few other miscellaneous items of note: - VR is excellent. If you are only going to have one telephoto lens, make sure it has VR. It is indispensable unless you use a tripod all the time. It is really remarkable, for somebody like me who started with film cameras in the '80's, to be able to hand-hold a lens at 100-300mm-equivalent focal lengths and not worry about shutter speeds. It really works, very well, and you will get shots with it that you would never have a chance of getting without it. - This lens has a plastic mount. I don't worry about that at all. It actually gives the lens a very nice, frictionless feel as it is mounted and unmounted, and if anything it ensures that the camera's own metal mount will stay free of wear indefinitely. I can't imagine the plastic mount would ever wear out, and since the lens is so light, a metal mount is simply not needed. The only concern would be if you were to mount the lens to a very heavy camera, and then pick the camera up using the lens. You can get away with that with a metal-on-metal mount, but not with a plastic one. Probably not a problem with anything smaller than a full-on professional-sized DSLR. - Vs. Nikon's 70-300mm VR: The look of these lens' images, and the feel, is also similar. The 70-300 shares the 55-200's cheap, sticky zoom, but the 70-300mm lens has enough of an edge in every important performance category to move it from the "very competent" category to the rather sparse category of truly superlative lenses. It adds quicker and better manual focusing, with a distance scale (but no depth-of-field scale) and immediate manual-focus over-ride; much faster AF; and better VR. It dwarfs the 55-200, being considerably longer, bigger around and heavier, but is still far more manageable than any of the pro telephoto zooms. Overall, it is a better lens - but the 55-200 holds up surprisingly well. It costs about twice as much as the 55-200, used or new. Conclusions: I would buy this lens again in a heartbeat if I didn't feel as though I could justify more money for one of Nikon's more expensive telephoto zooms. Even if I did, this and an 80-200 f/2.8 would be a fine combination: one for hand-held, one for tripod use. Nikon doesn't really offer any telephoto zooms that have the whole package of desirable features, which in my view includes reasonable weight, VR, good sharpness across their range, and good focus performance. Even the very expensive lenses give up MORE than one of these qualities. I would not even consider a lens without VR in this range, unless as a second lens for tripod-only use, which limits the choices to only a few, unfortunately imperfect, lenses. There might be comparable third-party lenses: I think Tamron makes something along the lines of a 28-300 or so that tends to get mixed reviews and that has their equivalent of VR. I don't have any experience with it. My thinking is that any lens will tend to get good reviews most of the time, so I'd tend to pay extra attention to the poor ones and try to figure out what they mean. Quite possibly the 55-200 is actually the better lens. For many photographers it may be the best of all even without factoring in its low price.

Short version of my review: this is a superb Nikkor lens at a ridiculously low price - buy it. Slightly longer version of my review: When I bought my D3100 9 months ago, I tried a 55-200 in the camera store. The demo lens was not impressive as it creaked nonstop on the camera body and I was not thrilled with a plastic lens mount on a relatively large lens, so I decided to get a Tamron 70-300 instead. The Tamron is a fine lens for the money, had a metal mount and is fully capable of hand-held shooting at 70mm, but there is no way I can take a sharp image at 200mm or 300mm without a tripod or monopod. So I decided it would be nice to have another tele lens that I could actually use handheld. When I saw that Amazon was selling the 55-200 VR for $149 with a free UV filter and free shipping, I decided that for such little money, I would take a chance on this lens and buy myself a Xmas present, so I got the Nikkor. To my pleasant surprise, the lens I received does not creak at all. It is sharp, has fast autofocus and I can take sharp, beautiful handheld images with ease at 200mm with this lens. VR is for real! The quality of construction is better than I remembered on the demo lens and the plastic lens mount, while certainly not my first choice, is acceptable for the ridiculously low price I paid. I treat all my camera equipment with great care - but the occasional accident does happen. I recently dropped my Panasonic LX-3 from a height of 4 feet on to a cement floor. Luckily, it was in its case and sustained zero damage. I doubt that dropping a DSLR with this lens from the same distance would result in no damage. I highly recommend this lens at the current price of $149 - it really is an incredible deal at that price point! Update: Now that I have been shooting with this lens for close to 6 months, I am even more impressed with it now than initially. It works very well for portraits and close-up photography, so I keep it on my D3100 most of the time now. I even won a photography contest using this lens to shoot cherry blossoms. This lens is the best bang for the buck of any lens I have ever purchased: I paid less for this lens than my friend paid in sales tax on the last lens he purchased! Highly recommended.

There are faster, longer, and higher-quality lenses on the market. That's a no-brainer. You can find lenses that beat the humble 55-200mm f/4-5.6G in every possible respect. But that doesn't make this lens any less valuable in a startling lineup of lenses. It's an excellent performer all around at rock-bottom prices. It makes an amazing second lens for a beginning DSLR user, with no two doubts about it. Here's the breakdown. PROS + It's thoroughly manageable to carry. This lens is ridiculously light and reasonably compact for a telephoto zoom. If you get a chance to handle its bulkier cousins, the 55-300mm and the 70-300mm (or third party equivalents), you'll appreciate just how little the plastic 55-200mm weighs. It also takes up next to no space in just about any gear bag, whether you bought it or improvised. You know what they say about the best camera, right? Same goes with lenses-- if you didn't carry it with you, it's not doing you any good! Even with the hood, it's compact. + Versatile zoom range. The 55-200mm reach gives you the ability to take shots while walking around without trouble. The wide end (55mm) is a medium telephoto in DX terms, but you can still be reasonably close in before having trouble fitting something in the frame. 200mm isn't going to get you near exotic wildlife, but you'd be surprised at how well you can grab birds or other small creatures with "just" 200mm. With the increasingly high-resolution sensors DSLRs are fitted with, you're also likely able to crop inwards a bit further if needbe. + Quiet. Focusing and vibration reduction are both very discreet, enough so that I'm more than comfortable using this lens during events. Audible? Sure, but not enough to bug anyone more than your standard shutter. Speaking of vibration reduction though... + Vibration reduction. It works. And it's completely worth it. You must remember that you're still going to get subject blur at lower shutter speeds, but for all intents and purposes I've been able to forget about handheld shake for daily shooting with this lens. It's really quite remarkable. On the other hand, don't think you're going to be doing much shooting during a car chase or anything. + Image quality is excellent. The lens is sharp with no particularly nasty characteristics, and no distortion that can't be fixed by your average post-processing RAW developer (or indeed, in-camera JPEG correction). + Beautiful compliment to the 18-55mm kit. Its aperture at the wide end (f/4) handily beats the kit lens' f/5.6, which can give you a little more breathing room if you need it without overlapping enough to make the kit lens superfluous. + Precise build and functional, tactile controls. The zoom ring is well damped, not prone to creeping, and turns with a great degree of precision for such a cheap lens. Sure, the manual focusing ring is tiny, but if you do need to use it I've found it works just fine (although a bit on the looser side). Infinitely better than the kit 18-55mm's ring, in my opinion. + Internal focusing. The lens doesn't extend unless you want it to, and the filter ring doesn't mess about if you're into polarizers or graduated ND filters. + 52mm filter size. This makes it a great companion to the kit lens (you can swap filters), and it's a common size that's easy to provide for. + Autofocus doesn't mess around. The lens isn't any more prone to hunting than you'd expect, and usually locks on quickly and silently. CONS - Focusing ring is a bit slim. If you do really want to take advantage of manual focus, you'd be better served by a lens that's ergonomically designed for it. In a similar fashion, - Dedicated manual/autofocus modes. Nikon's more expensive lenses (or their newer primes) generally have a M/A mode which allows you to override the autofocus by simply grabbing the focus ring and turning. This lens requires that you switch the lens into manual before you make such adjustments (at the risk of damaging the lens otherwise). - 200mm maximum reach means that more distant subjects may leave you wishing for "just a little more." That said, take this with a grain of salt-- I upgraded to a 300mm lens recently, and while I appreciate the additional range it's hardly a revolutionary change. - Slower speeds. It's an f/4-5.6 lens, so it's not going to be pretty if you're shooting indoors or at night. Your camera will need to have a solid higher ISO performance if you want these kinds of shots; even with vibration reduction, you'll either hit the VR system's limits or run into subject blur unless you can shoot at at least ISO 800/1600. This lens was my second, and while I've moved on since I will miss it dearly. Amazing lens and a wonderful, wonderful place to start with photography.

Obviously, I did not give a rating of 5 because this lens is the best lens ever, but because it's quite a deal for its price. If I could, I'd give it a 4.5. If you bought a Nikon D40/40x/60 with an 18-55mm lens, this should logically be your next choice. First, here are the cons: 1. Painfully slow (aperture of 4) 2. Slow AF - it takes just a slight but noticeable second longer to auto focus compared to an average lens (55-200 is not exactly ideal for shooting sports, especially if you're using it with D40/D40x/D60). 3. Build quality - the first impression of this lens is that it feels and weighs super cheap... probably because it is. Light weight is not necessarily a bad thing, though it does take away the enthusiasm when you wait a week for your lens to come to find out that it feels and looks cheap. But on the bright side, with all else being equal, lighter is (almost always) better and convenient. The only real annoying problem out of the three is the aperture, so my advise: get a flash. This obviously isn't a complete "solution" but hey, if you don't have one, you need one anyways. If you have one, then you shouldn't have problems exposing the pictures correctly despite the low aperture. If you have a problem with slow AF and cheap build quality, just live with it. AF isn't all that slow. Besides from these problems, everything else is great - I really didn't expect such a great quality from a 200 dollar lens. Barrel distortion is negligible, pictures are sharp (especially around the center), bokeh is beautiful, and I haven't noticed much chromatic aberrations or vignetting. It's got Vibration reduction that allows me to shoot about 2 stops lower (may be add another 1/3 more), it's got IF which is somewhat useless but cool to have because the size of the lens doesn't change as you focus. I mean, for 200 dollars, what more do you want? If you want to look for other options, you're probably looking at 18-200mm VR (about $650). Now, in my opinion, 18-200mm isn't all that great because it has a lot of distortion at 18mm, it's not very sharp around the edges and you may become annoyed with the lack of friction as you carry it around. Although there's no way to beat the convenience of 18-200mm, I would argue that the quality of 55-200 is better, at about 1/3 the cost ($210). If you're lazy or if you want to backpack in Europe with minimal equipment, then 18-200 would be your choice. But if you you want better pictures at lower cost, 55-200mm is the way to go. If you have money to burn? then well, you're a lucky bastard. 70-200mm is in a league that is completely different than 55-200, so it's not even worth mentioning. The 70-300mm VR ($479) seems like a good choice, especially if you bought the 18-70mm ($310)lens to begin with. But since I have yet to use a 70-300mm, I shall not compare it to the 55-200mm. CONCLUSION: great, great lens for its price. It's even better if you just bought an 18-55mm and you're looking for your first zoom lens.

I purchased and used this lens right away on a vacation where we took a few hundred pictures in several different lighting and action environments. In short, I love this lens. It works well as a standard zoom lens. The 55-200mm rating is equivalent to about a 300mm zoom for those familiar with 35mm film lenses, because the imaging area of the Nikon SLRs is about 65% the size of a 35mm negative. Thus, the ~11x zoom is quite impressive. Zooming in all the way, it is tricky to get sharp focus 100% of the time, as it would be for any zoom lens, but with VR (vibration reduction) turned on, this is helped and with enough lighting, vibration isn't an issue. VR isn't a miracle cure, especially in lower lighting conditions, so the more you can do to steady the camera, the better. I think the VR does help significantly, but you'll still need to be mindful of doing what you can to steady the camera. Another nice use of this lens is for portrait-type work. When used for candid or portrait shots, the zoom makes beautifully rendered shallow depth-of-field shots (where the subject is in perfect focus, but the background is blurry.) Manual focus on this lens isn't perfect, but for the price, you can't expect too much. The focus ring is fairly loose, not stiff, so you can focus quickly, but it can be difficult to manually focus with great precision. Also, there are no markers or anything to tell you where you're focused, so you'll have to do it all visually. Generally, though, auto-focus works well in most scenarios. Lastly, if money were no object, I may select the 18mm-200mm lens. We have the 18-55mm and with this 55-200mm, you do have your ranges covered, but there were times we wish we didn't have to change the lens for wide angle shots. But at 2x the cost for the full-range lens, I'll stick with this lens and having to switch between the two, as money is an object for most of us and this is still a very fine lens. I'm looking forward to many more beautiful images from this lens.