Funny you should mention that.

I just completed a lens shoot-out of all the lenses, new and old, in my collection, using a real life scene and a test chart, through a D600 on a very sturdy (large format) tripod, mirror locked up, and a 2 sec shutter delay.

I went through all the common focal lengths (8, 16, 24, 28, 35, 50, 70, 85 ,105, 135, 180, 200, 300) and found the sweetest spots in every lens at those lengths. Then I went through all of the sweet spot shots of each focal length and marked down the best of them (by sharpest usually, but sometimes it was best color/contrast between two equally sharp lenses).

At 70mm, 135, 180, and 200mm, one of my 70-210's (I have two, they're so cheap these days) won the batch. The surprising one was 70mm, shot against a 24-85G, a 28-70/2.8 gold ring, a 24-120 (not surprising here - I had a very sharp 24-120G before that probably would have won, but sold that one long ago). The old 70-210 clearly won at this length. The won again, by enough to raise eyebrows, at the rest of the tested focal lengths mentioned above too.


It wasn't particularly fast - I think the sweet spot was around f/7 to f/9 or so - but then the winners of the 85mm and the 105mm were both older Nikon primes, at around f/8 as well, even though common doctrine suggests diffraction at those apertures.

Before I bought my 300/4, which is a very sharp lens, I used the 70-210 for sports as well. While its performance wide open fell short of the 300's wide open, used at its sweet spot of f/7 it made me enough work to buy my 300mm in the first place, so that's saying something. (Of course, used at the 300mm's sweet spot of f/8, the 300mm will go toe to toe with anything else 300mm out there).

Yes, I do have an 18-200 and an 18-300 both DX lenses, but since I have no DX camera (I use them for video only, usually), any comparison would be unfair.

So just so's you know, I still possess lenses from the 80s. My 85, 105, 70-210 were all bought new. And all my three lenses are holding the line superbly, and remain at the top of my pile, even in this digital age.

JM2C, YMMV etc