Thoughts and speculations about teleconverter performance

As i stated in my previous post, i had bought second hand the Nikkor TC-200 teleconverter for my Nikkor 300mm F4 lens. In this post i will speculate about the performance of this combination by summing up my personal opinion and combining it to reviews and recommendations from respected authors of different websites. Main idea is to achieve a conclusion of what kind of performance is to be expected before the actual test.

From numerous sources: articles, blogs and forums there's very active but unfortunately also very unprecise discussion, mostly rumors and statements without any proof about performance about this teleconverter. This leads me to believe that this teleconverter is minorily used by photographers around the world. This is expectable, since the common opinion about teleconverters is that they will dramatically degrade image quality and increase the light needed to take those much sought for beautiful, sharp and revealing shots about wildlife. Optical fact is that they will double the minimum aperture of the setup, but im not ready to believe that the much discussed degrading of image quality is always the issue, especially on the crop format SLR bodies (since the image degrading is often reported due the corner falloff and corner softnes.) This is something that i will discover when the TC-200 arrives and i get to test it on the 300 f4. It would be very interesting to test the converter with numerous different lenses to see how it acts on different setups. It's also worth noticing that TC-200 is intended for use on lenses of focal length maximum of 200 mm. Due to the quite greasy price of TC-300 and the very thin availibitily summed up with the very rare dim of light from photographers reporting great results on TC-200 with longer lenses than 200mm, im very confident, maybe even overconfident of the results achievable. One more aspect is the Nikon's strange approach to teleconverters for AF(not AF-S) type lenses: they dont support autofocus.

Im not naive, i'm not expecting achieving same results as for example Nikon Nikkor 600mm f/4D but if i can achieve even nearly as good images on the planned setup i would be very glad just because the money saved (as if i would have the cash for that monster.) If everything goes as planned, i would still be able to get great results in ligthy and propably even dim conditions on f8 (c'mon people, f8 isnt THAT slow on a tripod)