Nikon 18-200 mm Lens Review

One of the things that first had me considering a switch to Nikon from Canon ages ago was the Nikon 18-200mm VR lens. I do a lot of “photo walking” – well, not so much in the sense of the group event that term has come to encapsulate – more just going out for long walks with my camera and taking pictures of what ever I see a long the way. I always liked the idea of being able to go out with one lens. There have been super-zooms around for ages, but the Nikon 18-200 VR was in a class of its own until recently. Many respectable and renowned photographers have raved about it. For me it was Scott Kelby’s glowing endorsements that got me interested in the lens. While Canon have recently come out with a similar lens, I wanted to get the fabled Nikon one for my D90 (the canon one wouldn’t go on my 5D anyway) as it would make the ideal walking around combination of a light camera and a relatively lightweight all round lens.

So just over a week ago I finally took the plunge and got a nice shiny new (well, ok, matte) Nikon 18-200 VR. It did not disappoint. Let me make one thing clear before I go on though. this is not a pro quality lens. It’s not perfect by any means, nor would you expect it to be. However, for a lens of this range of focal lengths, it’s pretty damn good.

Rather than go into a bunch of charts and technical specifications like most reviews (and there are plenty of them out there about this lens if you want the tech talk) I’m just going to give you my impressions after using it for a week. First there’s the obvious – the range it covers. At 18mm on the D90 it’s equivalent to 27mm on a 35mm frame. This goes all the way to 200mm which given Nikon’s 1.5 crop gives you the equivalent of 30mm on a full frame camera. This is pretty impressive. And it is incredibly useful. I was taking some shots around the city here and It was so great to have the flexibility to use the wide angle in close situations and be able to pick out detail without having to change lenses. The VR on this lens is superb too, albeit a little noisy. There is an audible click as it goes into action and then another click when it disengages. At first I thought I had a dud lens, but a check on google confirmed that this is normal operation. The VR is very very good. I could shoot 18mm at 1/8th of a second and it was pin sharp. I’ve gotten sharp results at 200mm as low as 1/40th of a second.

In terms of quality, as I said, don’t expect miracles. It’s perfectly useable though. At maximum aperture, 200mm is very soft. And I mean VERY soft. However stop it down to f8 and you get reasonably sharp results in the center of frame. There is some slight fall off towards the edge of frame which can still be soft. Yo may have an issue trying to get shots accepted into iStock or similar sites, but for printing and general work it’s perfectly fine. The shot below was taken at 200mm and is sharp enough to be more than useable.

Wide angle, again is fairly sharp wide open, but there is a fai bit of chromatic aberration. Stop down a couple of stops and it’s pretty good. It’s not a pin sharp as the superb 18-105 VR that comes with the camera but tis still pretty good. One of the things that I was pleasantly surprised by was the lenses close focussing distance. At 200mm you can get pretty close to your subject giving the lens an almost macro ability.

Overall I am more than happy with my purchase. It’s a very useful thing to have on the front of your camera when you are just going out shooting without a specific task at hand. It’s not going to replace a good set of primes, or some high end zooms, but with the D90 it makes a great walking around combination. Kudos to Nikon for making such a great lens.

Here are a few more shots taken with this great lens…

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