In the 1993 motion picture, "The Pelican Brief" (Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts), Washington attempts to identify a potential source by staking out the pay telephone booth from where the source calls Washington. Washington photographs the man in the phone booth using a Nikon camera with telephoto lens. I have not seen such a lens with as large an objective lens that was not used from a tripod. Please identify the lens.

Lenses with really large objectives are usually ED lenses. This has something to do with the kind of glass used. I'm a bit of a Nikon guy, but can't remember what ED means. Something to do with "dispersion," I think. Time to consult Google...

ED (Extra-low Dispersion) Glass: 1975

"Extra-low Dispersion glass." Nikon started using this only in their super speed super teles in the late 1960s. These lenses say "ED" on and have a gold band around the barrel. All ED lenses say so.

Since only the most expensive lenses used or needed this glass it acquired a cachet. Therefore Nikon started using the moniker on cheaper lenses, and today it seems everything says ED on it. Short and normal lenses have no need of this glass; it's benefit is reducing secondary chromatic aberration, which is green/magenta color fringes that used to plague lenses of 300mm and up.

ED glass is an improvement over the fluorite used by other makers at the time because it is hard enough to use for outside elements, unlike the soft fluorite.

ED glass helps eliminate secondary chromatic aberration (green-magenta color fringes) which is what previously prevented the design of practical super speed, super sharp super teles.

Discount brands now purport to use this glass. Ignore all these claims; they may or may not use this glass, but there are far more important factors in lens design than just what sort of glass was used. See the reviews for specific performance tests.

ED glass is less stable with temperature than conventional glass, and so the focal lengths of these lenses change slightly with temperature. Therefore there is no hard infinity focus stop on ED lenses because the point of infinity focus will change a bit with extremes of temperature.

ED glass also has a lower index of refraction so it requires more deeply curved elements for the same focal length.

The whole point of owning a Nikon is to use these super tele lenses, so don't be a bone head and waste your time with non-Nikon super telephoto lenses. You will find that when you go to sell a Nikon super telephoto that you will sell it for what you paid for it, so it's sort of free. If you have a discount lens (Tokina, Tamron, Spooginar, Sigma, etc.) you will have to sell it for far less than you paid, so the discount lenses actually cost MORE to own.

Hmmm. I might be wrong about that glass thing...

Bird watchers are big on ED lenses in their spotting scopes.

i have a leica 400 f2.8 ,heavy lens and seldom seen in the field , i,m sure it falls into the catagorie of the nikon ...paul