Nikon Announces Monster 800mm Lens

You could easily bludgeon somebody to death with this lens.

Nikon has gone all Microsoft on us and pre-announced a piece of hardware ahead of this year’s Photokina show. The kit in question is a huge monster of a lens, the 800mm ƒ5.6, which will take the place of the current 600mm ƒ4 as the longest autofocus lens in Nikon’s lineup.

As befits a Microsoftian “launch,” the lens’s specs have yet to be finalized, but you can be sure that it will have various flavors of VR (vibration reduction, Nikon’s name for image stabilization) for tripod and handheld work.

ƒ5.6 isn’t particularly fast, but at this kind of focal length it’s pretty good. The lens is designed to work with FX (full-frame) bodies, which means edge-to-edge sharpness and no vignetting. And for those sports and wildlife photographers who are using crop-sensor bodies, this thing will work as a roughly 1200mm ƒ5.6 on your cameras. Amazing.

Price, along with with those elusive specs, is as yet unannounced, but you can be that it won’t be cheap. More news when Photokina rolls around.

• Source Photography Bay

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