What is 70-300mm lens the equivilent of?

I'm buying a Nikkor 70-300mm lens for my Nikon D5000 soon, and i know its about focal length but what's the 300mm the equivalent zoom.
So how many X zoom would it be on a compact or bridge camera?

It matters where the mm starts and ends. On my Olympus FE-240, the lens is a 6.4-32mm (or so it says on it's lens) 32/6.4= 5x zoom

your eyes are about 50mm, therefore the 300mm will be 6x zoom to your eyes. The zoom itself is about a 4x zoom (300/70= ~4.3x)

Well first of all you can throw out any thought of any "X" zoom factor. I have two 2x zoom lenses. One is a 12-24 mm super wide angle and the other is a 200-400 mm super telephoto zoom. Both are 2x, but have nothing in common but that they can be used on my Nikon cameras

A 70-300 mm lens is a medium to long telephoto lens, that when equated to a 35 mm camera is 1.5x those focal lengths or 105-450 mm (if such a lens existed)

So, what do you need your D5000 to do? The standard zoom sold with it is a 18-55 mm lens or a lens that can shoot landscapes, group shots and head and shoulder portraits. The 70-300 mm can be used to shoot portraits to wildlife, sports and action.

In the world of P&S cameras, that would equate to about a 16x optical zoom (300/18 = 16), but wait. A P&S camera is limited to that one lens. A dSLR like the D5000 can use interchangeable lenses from super wide angle zooms to extreme telephoto lenses as well as specialty lenses like macro, fisheye and perspective control.

Of course for some reason we have left out the most important part. The size of the cameras sensor. A dSLR like the D5000 has a sensor that is over 15 times larger than a P&S camera, so you can expect a lot higher quality images

Zoom multipliers are an inaccurate measurement for lenses on compact cameras. They are used because the target market is not expected to understand focal length. They calculate zoom by dividing the big number by the little number, in this case 300/70 = 4.3x, but if you look at a 17-70mm lens, you get a zoom of 4.1x. Now do you see the problem with zoom multipliers? It tells you nothing useful about the lens you put on.

I you attached a 800mm f5.6 (a lens that doesn't zoom at all) you will see far further than a 70-300mm lens. So I urge you, forget about zoom multipliers, and learn about focal length - it's so fundamental.

It's still not the zoom X's that you compare. X's don't mean anything aside from providing a ratio of the shortest and the longest focal lengths of a lens. You don't compare that to another lens. The starting and ending focal lengths will most likely vary. There's no point of comparison.

To compare lenses from a compact or bridge camera, get their equivalent focal lengths. For your D5000, multiply your lens focal length by 1.5. Now that you have all the equivalent values (with respect to 35mm film) you can now make more accurate comparisons between lenses.

Rather more than 6x, more like 9x or 10x, since the 50mm referred to in a previous answer is for full frame. Your 'equivalent' to 50mm full-frame on your D5000 is about 32 or 30mm on your camera - divide 300 by 30 and you get 10 times, that is a good comparison wih a compact or bridge camera.