Tokina 300mm f/2.8 AT-X The size of the Tokina 300/2.8 compared to a film box.
The Tokina 300/2.8 is a very useful lens.
It's fast maximum aperture of 2.8 ensures a bright viewfinder image and the relatively small size of the lens (compared to the fast 400mm lenses) makes it easy to carry around when mounted on the camera.

At 2.4 kg the lens does not fall into the "superlight" category but it could definitely have been worse.
Bright, long focal length telephoto lenses are generally not small and lightweight.

Autofocus feel fast and effective on this lens as you would expect for a lens in this class whereas manual focusing is rather difficult as the focusing ring turns with too little friction for my taste.
Also it seems that I often miss perfect focus when focusing the lens manually - something that rarely causes me any problems with my other lenses.

The balance when coupled with the Fujifilm Finepix S2 Pro camera is very good and when used with an extension tube or a teleconverter it is nearly perfect.

 300 mm focal length is also a very useful range for landscape photography when you want to compress landscape features or 'zero in' on a special feature.
This image was taken late in the evening in light rain at 1/15 second at 1600 ISO. This is where you the 300/2.8 is a gift from heaven.

 The details of this lens also adds tremendously to the usability of the lens usability:

Extremely long lens hood which is reversible for protection of the lens during transportation, drop-in filter holder, rotating tripod collar with click-stops for horizontal and vertical framing and a low and very useful tripod "foot".

Optically I have a hard time figuring out this lens.
Most of the time it will enable me to take pictures with excellent detail and contrast but when we speak high-contrast scenes I always fear the worst as I have seen some rather disappointing results under these conditions.

I have added a small crop from one of my "less than successful" backlit images taken with the lens.

As I mentioned before this does not happen every time there is a high contrast scene - far from it!
It does however make working with this lens difficult as you never know when that shot you had so high hopes for turns out not to be like you would like it to because of colour fringing.
Enough about the problems...
When this lens works as you would expect it really does deliver some outstanding images.

When it comes to using the Tokina coupled with a teleconverter I find this lens to be in the middle ground:
I get usable results when coupled with the Kenko Pro 300 1.4x but rarely so when used with my Sigma EX 2x (which is not claimed anywhere to be a good match anyway).

I particularly find the out of focus areas in pictures taken with this lens to be very nice (that may sound a bit strange but I feel it really adds to an image when the out of focus areas look like they are a natural part of the image).

Also when stopped down a bit this lens is as sharp as they come!

So to sum it up: If you want a super bright telephoto lens and you have a budget to consider you really should take a look at the Tokina - the price is half that of a "brand lens" in the same class.

Most of the time this lens performs splendidly and that is enough for me at least.

Time to look at the test shots:

I made test images at F:2.8, F:4, F:5.6, F:8, F:11, F:16, F:22, and F:32 and cropped out a small portion (see at the end of the review the size of the crops).
I then proceded to blow up the size of the crops to 25x normal size to be able to study the quality closely.

Please note that the exposure was dialed down compared to the test images for the Nikkor 400mm and Sigma 400mm reviews because I felt it was easier to see the details this way.
The results should still be comparable however.

Test shot at F:2.8 - Center Test shot at F:2.8 - Edge
F:2.8 - Center F:2.8 - Edge
Test shot at F:4 - Center Test shot at F:4 - Edge
F:4 - Center F:4 - Edge
Test shot at F:5.6 - Center Test shot at F:5.6 - Edge
F:5.6 - Center F:5.6 - Edge
Test shot at F:8 - Center Test shot at F:8 - Edge
F:8 - Center F:8 - Edge
Test shot at F:11 - Center Test shot at F:11 - Edge
F:11 - Center F:11 - Edge
Test shot at F:16 - Center Test shot at F:16 - Edge
F:16 - Center F:16 - Edge
Test shot at F:22 - Center Test shot at F:22 - Edge
F:22 - Center F:22 - Edge
Test shot at F:32 - Center Test shot at F:32 - Edge
F:32 - Center F:32 - Edge
Test shots of a flash manual taken near the minimum focusing distance at F:2.8, F:4, F:5.6, F:8, F:11, F:16, F:22, and F:32.
All images are blown up to 25x normal resolution using "nearest neighbour" in Photoshop (please refer to the full test picture for the size of the crops in the full image).
No sharpening was applied before or after resizing.

The size of the areas cropped out for the test relative to the full image.


Compared to the Nikkor 400/3.5 this lens is quite soft wide open.
Sharpness increases markedly up to around f:8 where the lens it at it's best performance.

At f:8 this lens seems to resolve as much detail as the Nikkor 400/3.5.
The Sigma 400/5.6 looks softer at all apertures except f:32.


A detail at 100% of the black head of a starling against the blue sky. Not something I normally would assume would be a tricky scene.

This is where the Tokina does NOT shine; high-contrast situations sometimes yields less than satisfactory results.
Whether this is due to blooming (camera sensor problem) or chromatic abberation I do not know but it sure does not look good!

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