Today I went hiking exclusively for nature/birds and came back with 3GB or RAW data! The lens at 300mm focuses fast enough (3x3 at CAF) and in general works great for BIF if you acknowledge that 300mm is short for birds and you will need to crop afterwards.There were some misfocus cases depending on the subject, maybe 2 or 3 out of 10 but nothing that made the experience bad.In terms of IQ at 300mm the lens is VERY sharp even at f5.6, but it does have some very light vignetting which can easily be corrected (and a lot of the times you wont notice if you crop).All images below are pp in LR to my liking and a lot of them are quite heavy crops (less than 1/3 of original photo!!)CAF works great, but expect some increased sky noise as at 300mm you will need to crop a lot Heavy crop and increased noise, but photo is still sharp In my eyes this lens is very sharp at 300mm... Perfect for nature and close ups Apart from the 60/2.4, I am not sure if I have ever seen such detail from my XT3 before Personally I am very happy with this new lens from Fuji and cant wait to test it with a 1.4x extender.

Today I had the chance to shoot the same bird with three different setups:Cropped to around 2MP from original 26!! Cropped to around 4,4MP from original 26MP with the aid of Olympus C180. There is a very noticeable drop in sharpness and available light. An unedited RAW file from Nikon P950. Yes IQ is the best, but only in good lighting and still subjects. And still the 70-300 image is not that far away. Same file pp in DXO

Yannis1976 wrote:Today I had the chance to shoot the same bird with three different setups:Cropped to around 2MP from original 26!!Cropped to around 4,4MP from original 26MP with the aid of Olympus C180. There is a very noticeable drop in sharpness and available light.An unedited RAW file from Nikon P950. Yes IQ is the best, but only in good lighting and still subjects. And still the 70-300 image is not that far away.Same file pp in DXOI got a copy of the lens recently and took it out yesterday to try some wildlife shots, which I have very little experience with. I was very pleased with the results.

Yes! So far my experience is also very positive with this lens. I will post some more later from macro too.

Not much of importance, but In terms of center sharpness at 80/f5.6, the 70-300 and 16-80 are very close, with very maybe the 70-300 just a tiny bit sharper.In terms of macro/close ups, the 70-300 can very useful, but I wasn't that impressive with the OIS. Maybe I am asking too much or my skills are bad but even at 1/40 I reckoned some blur movement.

I usually bring my camera when I go biking, so I bought the XF 70-300 to decrease the amount of weight I was carrying. Paired with the X-S10, it makes for a relatively small package, and is much easier to handle than the XF 100-400.Here's a heavily cropped image of a red-winged blackbird taken earlier today. (The image was processed in Fujifilm X-Raw Studio.) I also carry the XF 1.4X, and find that works very well with the XF 70-300.Overall, I'm really pleased with the new lens.Howard