18-200 mm AF-S G VR Nikkor (version I)

It’s taken me a long time to get to this review, and honestly, I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to write it.  Why is that?  Mainly because I have a love / hate relationship with this Nikkor lens.

Why do I have a love / have relationship with the 18-200?  It’s not what you think.  It’s not that there is anything about it that I really HATE.  It’s more like I WANTED to hate it - because of what the lens traditionally stands for:  compromise.   Compromise is what this type of lens is supposed to be about, and I am used to compromise - all of my “standard” lenses, both prime and zoom are “consumer” lenses, and after all,  “consumer” lenses ARE, by design, about compromise.  An 18-200 should be an extreme in terms of compromise, right?

In the end, I was very cautious about adopting this lens, because of these issues.  I knew that this would be ideal for my wife, so I started by buying her one.   We went on a fall trip to Moab Utah and the surrounding canyon country and I was a bit jealous of the versatility of her new lens.  I did not have much of a chance to peruse her images during the trip, but held on to “knowing” that the image quality would be compromised by having a zoom of this range.  I reveled in the fact that the horizon in the images of the Canyonlands taken from Islands in The Sky were all viciously curved due to this lenses barrel distortion on the wide end (it’s significantly worse than my standard, the 18-70 AF-S, which is no prize in that area).   This was not the type of compromise I wanted in a lens.

Then we went home.  After some more shooting and more time studying the images at 100% on my computer screen (generally in Nikon Capture NX I), I slowly started gaining respect for this piece of gear.  Most of the images were amazingly sharp, much sharper than they OUGHT to have been for an 11x zoom.  In most of the images the curved horizon wasn’t even visible.  Vignetting wasn’t significantly or noticeably worse than my 18-70.  The lens actually has a better magnification ratio close up than the 18-70.  And then there’s the zoom range!  Having a 200 mm long end always available provided an opportunity that I had not expected.  It was now possible to achieve perspectives I had not been able to get before, to isolate people in a group, as well as take landscape images.  I found that my wife had truly gotten a real Swiss Army Knife of a lens.

I started getting a little jealous!

Finally, nearly six months later, we took a family cruise to the Eastern Caribbean, and we walked in to a photo shop on St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands.  They happened to have several of these lenses in stock, and my wonderful wife asked me if I wanted one.  I was really afraid of spending the money, but she insisted and I walked out with a shiny new gold colored box.

This was in February, 2008.  I have since that time shot several thousand images with this lens and found it to be reliable and the image quality to be solid.  My lens is not perfect, so let’s start with the not so good.

My copy of this lens has a centering defect.  This is not evident at all apertures, nor at all focal lengths, however, sharpness in all corners is not always the same.

Take a look at the image below.  This is an image taken at Meyer Mountain Farm.  The image depicts Brad Meyer’s beautiful fields and tasty Black Angus cows.

Now, this image looks o.k. at web size, but it is not the quality that I would print - ever.  I’m pretty picky.  First, there is not enough depth of field (and I don’t like the composition), but it’s also not sharp enough to print - in my view.  Here are the 100 % crops.  Notice the difference between the sharpness grasses on the lower left and those on the lower right (not that either is great - in part due to depth of field issues.)

Both of these images were taken with the Nikon D300.  Now, you might think that these images were affected by being taken hand held at 65 mm at 1/100 sec.  I suppose that’s always possible, but then why the difference between the two sides?

Taking the photograph with a slightly different point of view and with a smaller aperture yields this image below.  The image was taken at f/16 at 32 mm, also hand held.

Now, this image - at a wider field of view and smaller aperture is acceptably sharp in the center and in all four corners.  I’ll just show one sample, here because the corners are pretty much the same, but notice the difference in sharpness (I feel this is likely both a depth of field and lens sharpness difference).  Here’s the lower left (which was the worst side before.)

Wow - what a difference!!!  My conclusion is twofold - this lens is much sharper on the short end than it is in the middle range, and stopping down gains significantly in terms of sharpness, even though on the Nikon D300 diffraction should already have set in at f/16.  This image prints JUST FINE at 13×19 inches or even a little larger.

Just as we can see in these two images above, my overall experience with this lens has shown me that it is not much of a compromise AT ALL at wider angles - angles that I usually shoot at for landscape images.  The image below was taken at 18mm, all the way zoomed out.

Once again, this image was taken at f/16 to maximize depth of field.  I will not show you a crop from this image, but I will say this.  This image has lots of detail.  With proper processing (Nikon Capture NX, then upresing with Genuine Fractals Photoshop Plugin) this image prints to 17×25 inches with little effort.  Photographer friends have examined this print (which is hanging in my living room) and marveled at the level of detail that this image has - in the center as well as in the corners.  Would my 18-70 have been sharper?  Maybe, but even at my maximum print size (w/o cropping) this image makes a print that would be nearly indistinguishable from one taken with that lens.

So, you say, what’s the advantage then if the midrange focal lengths “aren’t that sharp”?  Well, the versatility of this lens is pretty neat.  Here is a grab shot from the school for troubled teens at which I work.  The image was taken by one of my photo students, Jessica.  It was taken with my D200 at 200 mm, 1/100 sec and f/18.  Note that the conditions for hand holding were not ideal, and still we end up with a usable image.  Note that our staff member, Tom, was pretty far away from Jessica when she shot the image, and he was pretty high off the ground as well.

Even though we have diffraction limited resolution and probably some camera shake, this definitely yields a usable image.  This would not have been possible with my 18-70.

Here’s the 100% crop.

Note that there’s still some detail in the zipper of Tom’s jacket.  Is this as good as my 70-200 VR?  No, but the 70-200 wasn’t handy, and what if there’s no time to change lenses?

Now this is all good, but let’s take a look at the distortion I was complaining about.  If you are taking landscape images with a straight horizon line you WILL need to correct for the distortion that this lens produces, especially at the wide end.  Here is a distortion uncorrected image from Chimney Bluffs, near Sodus Point, New York (Lake Ontario).  It’s pretty bad at 18 mm.

Correcting this in Nikon Capture NX or Photoshop is not very difficult, but it does take an extra step in the post processing work flow.  The corrected image is shown below.  Distortion correction f +33 was applied in Nikon Capture NX.

Now that’s pretty much the worst of it.  The next major disadvantage is that the “wide open” aperture on this lens is f/5.6 on the long end, and that the maximum aperture decreases pretty rapidly with focal length (the 18-70 has a maximum aperture of f/4.5 at 70 mm, the 18-200 is already above f/5 at that point.)  The vibration reduction does make a difference here, and this is especially so for landscape shots where depth of field needs to be optimized anyway.  Here is a shot from this afternoon, the first real snow of the season on Nevin’s Pond.

This image was taken with a focal length of 35 mm at 1/15 sec and f/8, ISO 1250.  It was getting pretty dark, and I was too lazy to get the tripod!  These are the situations where the VR can definitely be of use.

So, what’s my conclusion?  Well, the fact that I hardly ever use my 18-70 lens anymore probably answers that question.  The 18-200 us a jack of all trades lens that disappoints significantly less than some purists might lead you to believe.  I still wish I currently had the cash for Nikon’s excellent 17-55 DX and 24-70 G AF-S lenses, especially because their wide open f/2.8 apertures would sometimes come in handy.  Would they be a bit sharper from corner to corner for my landscape images?  Probably, but I can tell you that those that have pooh-poohed this lens either had a worse copy than mine, or they never made a print like the ones hanging on my wall.  Most people will never scrutinize their images like I do, nor like these purists appear to.  The 18-200 is a winner.  I can highly recommend this lens as an all around walk around, especially if the user is inclined to USE it for real photography, rather than sit at their computer pixel peeping their images at 100% magnification.