minimal design

You can easily spend hours online reading dozens of reviews about lenses when trying to decide on the “perfect” setup. But what It boils down to is: how much you want to spend, how good you want your RAWs to be, and how much weight you’re willing to carry on your shoulders…

Like many others, the idea of a good quality “jack of all trades” lens like the Nikkor 18-200mm sounded very appealing to me. Most reviews I read seemed to indicate that the tread off quality/convenience was worth it.

If you’re in the same situation, wondering wether or not this lens is for you, this shots might help you decide for yourself. The 3 images are slices of the same shot exported at 100% from the RAW file, no post processing whatsoever (Nikon D-200 @ 200mm, manual mode F8/250). Mouse over the images to see the Nikkor 80-200mm version. The default is from the 18-200mm.

This is not a scientific test whatsoever, I didn’t even put the camera on a tripod, and due to the light conditions there’s a significant amount of chromatic aberrations with both lenses. The point was not to conduct a perfectly controlled test, but more of real life sample using the same person, same body, and same light conditions.

Note: I realize it’s not “fair” to compare the 2 lenses. The point here is not to compare the lenses, but to help people decide wether or not the quality/convenience trade off is worth it for them.

Center of image, focus on bigger branch (80-200mm version on roll over)

Lower left corner of image (80-200mm version on roll over)

Upper Right corner of image (80-200mm version on roll over)