Introduction

Another game to start. Recently purchased D7200 looks promising from the specs. I had the D7100 before and annoying thing was the 24MPix sensor together with the telezooms and the buffer 0f 6 pictures which is ridiculous for shooting wildlife. The D7200 offers up to 18 pictures buffer with 12-Bit colour depth. That does look much better. Other specs should be similar except the ISO which can now natively go up to 25600. Probably not useable but that’s another story.

Main purpose for buying are wildlife bird pictures, so another round for testing the three telezoom lenses in a similar manner as before…

Testchart and setup is like in the earlier tests, however today there’s some sunshine which does make the results look nicer. Setup is:

  • Berlebach UNI-16c with Arca Swiss D4
  • Testchart on Feisol CT3442 and Arca Swiss B1

As there is currently no Lightroom profile available for the camera, I changed the model in the exif to D5300 which does have working profile.

The full pictures

The camera was set to 100 ISO, it’s native ISO setting. All pictures taken with an aperture of f6.3 for the Sigma and Tamron. The Nikkor went with f4 into this series.

First example showing the Nikkor without TC.

Nikkor 200-400 @ 400mm

Now the Tamron which was not performing good in the last tests done.

Tamron 150-600 @ 400mm

Last one is the Sigma which was doing absolutely fantastic in the first tests. Here it does not do as well.

Sigma 150-600 @ 400mm

The details

Shooting distance was approximately 12.5 meters. Order is always Nikkor, Tamron, Sigma.

Comparing the horizontal lines of the testchart.

Next compare is the vertical lines of the testchart.

Looking at the plastic puppet for the thin synthetic hair.

Last compare is on the dream-catcher to have a closer look at the feathers and the thin grid inside the ring.

Conclusion

I did several comparisons using the iMac Retina in Lightroom. Looking at 1:1 crops but also 2:1 crops, so at 200%. My ranking is:

  1. Tamron and Nikkor without TC
  2. Sigma

Testpictures

Download of Lightroom DNGs for Nikkor, Sigma and Tamron. Rightclick on the link and choose “Save as…” to store to disk.