Tag: test

VR Test Part 2

Having checked out the results of the first test, I decided to run tests at a higher shutter speed, and with longer test series.

As before, these are 100% size crops out of the center, including the focus point. For this series, I had to go to ISO 800 to get the shutter speed I wanted.

VR off, 1/30:










Scarily, 1, 6, and 9 are sharp, hand-held free-standing at 1/30 sec. with a 200mm lens. That’s 3 out of 10, a 30% success rate. This is not supposed to happen.










What I see in the VR on group is a much higher percentage of not fully sharp images. Only two and three are fully sharp, about the same as without VR! But 5, 7, 9, and 10 are quite close to sharp.

This exactly matches my subjective impression—VR rarely produces a fully satisfactory image for me, but often helps to get a usable one. It’s certainly no substitute for a tripod!

Either that or the VR in my Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 isn’t working right.

VR Test

“Vibration Reduction”; Nikon’s tradename for optical image stabilization. The camera and lens sense the degree of camera motion, and deflect elements in the lens to cause counter-vailing motions, resulting (if it all works right) in a sharper image. They claim about a 3-stop improvement (in terms of lower shutter speeds usable hand-held).

The rule of thumb is that you can safely hand-hold the camera down to a shutter speed of 1/(focal length).  This is a 35mm rule of thumb, and it’s the 35mm-equivalent focal length that matters here.  So for a 200mm lens on a full-frame DSLR, the safe shutter speed (by rule of thumb) is 1/200 sec. Or, with VR, about 1/30.

The following test photos are small crops from the center of the frame, containing the focus point. They were all shot hand-held, free-standing (I wasn’t leaning against anything).

1/15 VR on
1/15 VR on
1/15 VR on
1/15 VR on
1/15 VR on
1/15 VR on
1/20 VR on
1/20 VR on
1/15 VR on
1/15 VR on
1/15 VR on
1/15 VR on
1/15 VR on
1/15 VR on

I score that as 1 and 2 acceptably sharp, the rest not.

And now some examples shot with VR off.

1/15 VR off
1/15 VR off
1/15 VR off
1/15 VR off
1/13 VR off
1/13 VR off
1/13 VR off
1/13 VR off
1/13 VR off
1/13 VR off
1/20 VR off
1/20 VR off
1/15 VR off
1/15 VR off
1/20 VR off
1/20 VR off

None of the VR off examples are acceptably sharp.

So; the VR off case certainly works as expected, no hope. The VR case produced two acceptably sharp photos a full 4 stops below where it should have been okay by rule of thumb. And a lot of failures, but I was seriously pushing the limits here.

Next post will be another run, a bit more careful, with 10 shots of the same test subject for each series. But this is getting long enough and ugly enough as it is.