Now that I’ve picked up my AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D and 70-300mm f/4-5.6G lenses, how are they I hear you ask?
The simple answer? Surprisingly good. I paid only $179 AUD for the 70-300mm and $189 AUD for the 50mm, and for the price, they’re an amazingly good deal. I took them to the Melbourne Zoo on the weekend to see how they perform:
Bokeh is quite nice, and the 70-300mm is actually a decent macro lens. Not great, but decent. The reach on a 300mm telephoto on a digital SLR ends up being around 450mm, which is great for closeups. It’s not the sharpest lens around, and it does suffer from chromatic aberration, but honestly, for the price, it’s impossible to find anything even close to it. I’d love to get the 70-300mm VR version, or even better a 2.8 lens, but they’re at least five to twenty times more expensive. It really does work well only in good light though - I found my camera regularly ramping up to ISO 1600 in most situations, trying to maintain the 1/1000 shutter speed I was shooting at. So, a lot of the shots ended up being quite noisy. Honestly though, I don’t really care - I got the shots, which is far more important to me than a bit of noise.
The biggest downside with the zoom is that it’s just too darn slow to focus a lot of the time. That’s fine if you’re shooting a stationary object, but it’s really hard to lock onto something in flight. You need to plan your shot in advance, because if you don’t, you’ll miss it. Either that or use the manual focus - the shots of the lion were all manually focused through quite a dense a cage (the camera only wanted to focus on the mesh, not the lion):
Butterflies really are beautiful:
The 50mm has crazy depth of field and it’s fast to focus - shooting indoors isn’t a problem, as long as you’re willing to play with depth of field:
Overall, they’re both well worth buying. They’re a very cheap extension to the kit lens and have the advantage of covering a wide variety of additional shooting situations and compositions. The 70-300mm is easily outclassed by other zooms, but on the other hand, there’s nothing in the price range that’s even close from a functional perspective. I’m having fun, and that’s the important thing. 
Just for the hell of it, here’s a shot from a moving car through the window of the moon:
Now tell me that isn’t fun.