The Bottom Line: Its huge and useful zoom range, consistent and very good optical performance throughout that range, amazing close-up ability, fairly decent build and handling characteristics make this a good value.
Occasionally, everything you read on the Internet about a product turns out to be true. This is not one of those occasions. On the subject of the Nikon AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IF-ED, not only is half of what your read anywhere close to the truth about this lens but simply writing the full title of the lens qualifies for most of Epinions’ “minimum word” review requirement.
This zoom may be the most praised, most despised, most loved, most hated, highest performing, lowest performing, best handling, worst handling lens you’ll ever read about on the World Wide Web and elsewhere. Yes, Virginia, there is an elsewhere and that’s where at least I do all my shooting and that’s the world about which I base this review. Where many others have tried to regard this lens in a context inconsistent with its purpose and compare it with specialized optics, I will let you know my thoughts and results when using this zoom with the intent to which it was designed and built.
What the Nikon 18-200mm VR lens is
Notice how I’ve contracted the name of the lens? You’re welcome. The 18-200 (shrunken again!) has more than an 11X focal length range and is part of a much-maligned league of lenses called “super-zooms.” Granted, a lot of the criticism has been deserved because a not insignificant number of do-it-all zooms have been junky in all senses of the word. Back in the day, no serious shooter would twist any of these jack-of-all-focal-lengths on his or her SLR simply because the resulting images were no where near the quality of primes and limited range zooms. Moreover, it’s an SLR for crying out loud, you’re supposed to carry a set of lenses, right? Super-zooms have traditionally been dismissed even when Canon and other major camera makers came out with their own versions. Today, it seems, that attitude continues although grounds for the attitude may not. In reality, however, today has access to better, cheaper and faster computer based optical design solutions; superior and cheaper optical elements; faster, more precise and cheaper manufacturing techniques. Notice how I mentioned “cheaper” in all those descriptions and the lens making business, after all, is business. The technology and affordability of lens making allows an ability to create decent wide-range zooms. The market is opening up to welcome such zooms.
In Nikon’s case, the camera maker seemed to test the waters by releasing a number of zooms with larger and larger ranges from the 18-70mm release with the D70 digital SLR in 2004 and then the 18-135, a kit lens often supplied along with the D80 and then the subject of this review in 2006 released with the D200. (Nikon also makes an 18-55mm which I have no experience using.) It seemed the strategy worked for the 18-200. Frothy-mouthed shutterbugs started forming lines, if only virtually, to get one of these lenses even as others bad-mouthed it. Many of the detractors hadn’t even seen or touched the lens before publicly discounting it. The Internet is full of so-called “experts” who, at best, conjecture dubiously and at worse, are just blowing smoke out of a vacuum.
Technically, and what is not debatable, is the 18-200mm is one of the widest range lenses Nikon has ever made with a zoom-ratio of 11.1X. It is a variable aperture design with the largest aperture ranging from f/3.5 at 18mm to f/5.6 at the long end. The 16 elements in 12 groups including an “ED” (Nikon’s term for low dispersion formulated lens that mitigates chromatic aberration on the telephoto end) element suggest a high degree of optical correction. Such a degree is required for such a zoom range. The lens is equipped with Nikon’s integrated “VR” or Vibration Reduction capability that reduces camera movement induced blur by sensing motion and moving a group of elements to counteract the motion. Nikon claims up to four stops of mitigation. More on that later. The lens auto-focuses using Nikon’s AF-S, “Silent Wave” technology that incorporates the focusing motor within the lens rather than the drive mechanism in some of Nikon’s auto-focusing camera bodies. Therefore, AF-S lenses including this one will work on most contemporary and all current Nikon AF digital SLR bodies including the latest Nikon’s FX (full-frame) D700 (where, with this lens mounted, it works as a 5 mega-pixel camera).
What the Nikon 18-200mm VR lens is not
You will read elsewhere that “this lens isn’t fast enough for professional, low-light use” or “this lens doesn’t have the optical brilliance of the such-and-such prime or the 3X yada-yada zoom” or “this lens is not constructed as solidly as the Battlax Titanio 28mm f/4.5 that Jerry Windfinger used to shoot the Battle of Britain in WWII.” Indeed, a Dodge Caravan isn’t a Chevy Corvette and the Porsche Carrera isn’t worth beans because it can’t hold nearly as much cargo as the Ford Expedition. Why do folks insist on writing such nonsense? This lens is not intended to replace your macro or primes. It’s not intended to be a substitute for your wildlife tele or your architecture image moneymaker. Comparing this lens to those others is like comparing the Caravan to the Corvette, -- futile and silly.
Who it’s for
This zoom is intended for the travel and event photographer who puts a premium on speed of selecting a wide range of focal lengths. Certainly the range of focal lengths can be matched with a number of faster primes and specialized limited range zooms but a quick zoom beats a lens change any day and might mean the difference between getting the shot and cursing a lost opportunity. Every wedding photographer has all kinds of stories of the ones that got away. And if they have a few drinks and have you cornered, they’ll tell you most every one of them. That’s why you want to keep your wedding shooter away from the punch bowl. That tip alone is worth a “Very Helpful” review rating right there. Here’s where some of you wax indignant and think, “Dave’s such a dork. He doesn’t know that I’ve hired a wedding photographer whose religion prohibits his drinking.” Here’s where I read your mind and respond, “Well, exCUSE me, but most photographers don’t need the benefit of alcohol to help conjure up tales of missed shots.” “Oh, and who you calling a ‘dork’?” Having a kit with but one camera and one lens is a liberating experience for shooters like me who, at certain times, carry a bag with at least two bodies and four or more lenses. For many, including me, the single lens, “walk around” option may mean bringing my SLR and getting a satisfying shot or getting a so-so shot with the point-and-shoot that always goes with me.
Performance
This is the part of the review where many a reviewer go astray. I, too, am tempted to declare while sniffing all the other member’s behinds on the fan-boy forums, “Between my 12-24 wide angle zoom, my 17-35 f/2.8 zoom, my 35-70 f/2.8 standard, my 60mm macro, my 70-200 f/2.8 tele, all mounted on my 12-pound tripod, with enough setup time, I can guarantee that I can produce a superior image than any shot on the 18-200mm.” That would be absolutely true and also absolutely inane. Actually pretty dumb now that I’ve taken a moment to read what I just wrote and considered the chiropractic bills I’d be paying after hauling all that stuff. And definitely not paying with the money I made on that assignment because I’d miss most the shots just changing lenses.
I’ll jump to the bottom line right now and declare that this Nikkor is capable of shooting tremendously fine images with great detail, contrast and color fidelity and can take that capability well into the interiors of dark rooms and into the twilight’s last gleaming when other lenses have been put away or placed on tripods. Seriously, this lens is actually changing the way I shoot because it allows, no, it encourages me to go beyond my normal habit of shooting normally wide angle shots in my travels and it frees me from my tripod during the day. With its vibration reduction combined with the abilities of my Nikon D300 (see my review: http://www.epinions.com/content_433202630276) that can easily handle the low-light realm of ISO 1600, I find myself handholding a camera for the first time in light conditions where normally I’d have folded up the tripod and headed home. All the images aren’t keepers but, wow, the fact that I’m shooting off-hand at less than EV 4 is a revelation to someone who’s barely out of IE (ISO equivalent) 40 film and adheres to the 1 over focal length rule of thumb guideline for handholding. This is an underwear-changing milestone for me.
Handling
Remembering one of the classic super-zooms, the 35-350mm Canon, I find the Nikon 18-200 a huge advantage in handling. To be fair the Canon was a pro-level, solid lens, weighed about a hundred pounds (after carrying one for a couple hours), didn’t have as good a feature set as the Nikon and cost three times as much. The Canon reportedly was a fairly good performer except at the wide side. I just found it heavy. And I tend to enjoy using heavy lenses. But heavy lenses go on tripods for me. Handholding such a beast would give me muscles. Anyone who knows me would never mistake me for the governor of California. But I have been mistaken for Wally Cox. Before he died though. The Nikon, given the crop factor of 1.5X is equivalent to a focal length range of 28-300mm in the 35mm days. It weighs about 20 ounces and is hardly bigger than Nikon’s 18-70mm which I used to carry as my walk-around lens. At this level of wispiness, it doesn’t even have a “balance” effect on the D300 on which it is normally mounted. I’ve used it on a much smaller and lighter Nikon D60 and it feels just as cozy and at home as on the bigger camera. In fact, the D60 with the 18-200mm may be the best solution for a travel lens if the travel is many, many hours on foot, carrying personal gear, going uphill. I just remembered a possible trip to Switzerland where the Jungfrau is beckoning. I’m telling you, the 18-200mm is opening up possibilities all over for me.
Lately, it seems, Nikon has been more liberal in the design requirements and restrictions it levies upon its engineers in the placement of controls. Back in the old days, Nikon zooms always had the zoom ring on the camera side and the focus ring farther out. Today, Nikon zooms are like a box of chocolates – you never know which one to grab. I’m still reaching for the wrong ring to focus and zoom. The three switches on the side of the lens are from top: the manual/autofocus selector, the VR on-off switch, and the VR mode switch. It’s easy enough to switch these. Too easy for me it seems. I’m constantly doing something that turns off the VR. Therefore, I’ve taught myself to check this setting, which puts another unnecessary step in my shooting workflow. Nikon would do a favor to shooters to recess these slide switches deeper in their slides. Doing so would also mitigate a not uncommon complaint on the forums about the D300 suddenly losing its auto-focusing ability. In many cases, the problem is not with the camera body at all but with users accidentally switching off the focus state selector.
The zoom ring is fairly damped but doesn’t have the silky smooth feel as when turning the ring on Nikon’s true, pro-level lenses. Much has been written about the lens’s “zoom creep” which is the tendency for the zoom setting to change when the camera is tilted up or down. My specimen exhibits this tendency as well but only at the limits of the zooming range, only when it’s pointed directly up or down, and only when the temperature is very warm. Zoom creep is a non-issue for me. The focus ring turns through about 100 degrees from lock to lock. I prefer a shorter throw but I admit the greater the throw range, the more precisely one can manually focus. The focus ring is nicely dampened but the feel, again, is not satin smooth as what I expect and get from Nikon’s A-team lenses. A tiny amount of play in the ring doesn’t detract when focusing.
Even though the front part of the lens trombones outward almost frightenly so while zooming to its longest focal length, from just less than four inches long to seven inches long (here I’m counting a filter), the weight that’s cantilevered outwards is negligible. The front element does not rotate during zooming or focusing so I can use a polarizer and split grads without readjusting positions at every focus or focal length change. Whereas Nikon seems to do the shell game with zoom and focus controls, they’ve maintained a mostly common-to-Nikkor 72mm filter size on this lens. Thank you very much.
A window on the lens indicates focus distance but no depth-of-field indicators are shown. While I still rely on DOF indicators, the compact size of this lens allows no real estate for those helpful little lines. Pity.
Build Quality
Although the lens will never qualify for inclusion into the Nikon’s Most Ruggedly Built Lens hall of fame, it’s no cheap, throwaway piece of optic either. Its mostly plastic construction appears fairly solid and precisely molded with tight gaps. The zoom ring is rubber which is the material I’d have preferred instead of the plastic focusing ring. Even racked out to its full extension, the entire unit remains rigid and gives me confidence that the elements will remain centered. A nice touch is the weather resisting, rubber gasket that seals the mounting flange when the lens is mated to the camera. The build is commensurate with its selling price.
In the field
Among the best advantages of this lens is that it always stays on the camera. On a recent three-day weekend in the Monterey/Carmel area in northern California I “forced” myself to carry just this one lens to see how it would satisfy my shooting needs. Monterey arguably is California’s most historic city and one of its most photogenic. If not for the discovery of gold near Sacramento in the mid-1800s, Monterey would very likely have become the state’s first capital city. Monterey housed California’s only American emissary representative before, of course, California was admitted to the union. Monterey has California’s first real brick house and its first theater. Its thriving fishing and canning industry put it on the map and drew many to the area even before the gold drew others to California’s central valley and Sierra Nevada foothills in the mid to late 1800s. My wife and I walked Monterey’s Path of History taking us past many landmarks and historical buildings. We also passed through the many hidden public gardens and obscure niches that most tourists bypass on their way to more famous destinations such as Fisherman’s Wharf, the aquarium, and Cannery Row of John Steinbeck’s fame. With the 18-200 mm I was able to get the long, establishing shot and moments later zoom in on the sculptured cherub sitting atop the birdbath and contemplating his nakedness. In one of the larger gardens, I took in a number of indigenous blooms and succulents using the 18-200mm excellent close-up ability. While not a true macro, the reproduction ratio at 200mm is 1:4.5 – amazing for a zoom of this range. In practical terms, without rings or supplementary screw-on lenses, you can focus on subjects less than a foot from the front element! This is superior in performance and convenience to any of my zooms regardless of their capability. This adds much to the value of the zoom and makes it a super travel lens. Never did I want for another lens. An advantage for not having to change lenses, even if a small advantage, is the less time the camera is open to elements, the less chance of dust and dirt infiltrating and settling on the sensor plane. These nasties tend to leave a calling card in the form of specks and dark spots on each and every frame until you blow off or otherwise clean the sensor. (By the way, the new Nikon D300 and D700 have a self-cleaning sensor that helps reduce the problem.)
On the year’s longest day the sun was still fairly high in the sky over the Pacific, we decided to walk the two miles to our dinner reservation in the town of Pacific Grove. This would take us along the Monterey Bay Coastal Recreational Trail, a multi-user path that extends for 18 miles from Pacific Grove through Monterey and finally to Castroville. We would be walking its most popular section past the Fisherman’s Wharf, aside the marina, through Cannery Row, above the Monterey Aquarium, through Lover’s Point and to the beach a few blocks below downtown Pacific Grove. Along the way I zoomed in and out, got close in, got the big view and was truly getting into the grove of just shooting without the hassles of lens changing and tripod setup. As importantly, I wasn’t holding up my strolling partner who was as beautiful as any sight I’d seen all day and was the subject of many shots.
It’s hard to go wrong with a dining venue in Pacific Grove and dinner was a relaxed and savory one. As we left, we decided to walk the length of Lighthouse Avenue, which serves as Pacific Grove’s downtown. The sun was now casting long shadows in the wide street that was lined with trees and other strollers taking in the end of the solstice evening. We eventually worked our way to the water’s edge where I shot gulls in flight and cormorants diving for a meal of their own. The lens’s fast AF-S focusing acquired and kept up with the birds as they swooped and swirled near the shore. I’ve never really had a big need for fast focusing before as I tend to shoot fixed objects. The speed of focus on this lens does encourage shooting subjects in motion and I was satisfied with the performance.
As we approached Monterey after sunset the path was still full of walkers, bicyclists, skateboarders and skaters. I snapped a few more shots of my fellow path users. The shutter speed had slowed so the quicker of them blurred. However, the background remained sharp giving the impression of speed in the resulting image. Again, no tripod involved. I stopped to capture the reflections of the lights on the wharf dancing on the bay water. I not only captured them but the subtle pastel colors of the buildings on the wharf as well. This lens plays nicely with the D300 in low-light levels. On the wharf itself, I turned the lens towards the many illuminated exteriors, mostly the many restaurants and was still thrilled at the VR ability to give me useable images even shooting down to 1/25th of a second. This does approach Nikon’s claim of four stops of camera shake improvement. I am most excited at the prospect of using this lens in future trips.
Image Quality
A zoom lens of this range and at this price shouldn’t perform as well as it does. While I’ve made some test shots using the usual tripod setup and shooting targets in my backyard and neighborhood park and they’ve all met my expectations, the real test for this zoom is using it in the field the way it was intended to be used in the conditions and environments for which it was designed. In this manner, I’m absolutely delighted.
Sharpness near the center f/stops in the whole zoom range is more than capable of producing excellent 11X14s and bigger prints. I tend to dwell around f/8 and f/11 for optimum sharpness when it counts and remember, the VR capability and my camera’s higher ISO capability allow me to do so more often than not. Sharpness towards the corners falls off especially when using large aperture settings yet the performance remains high enough for prints up to 11X14. Bokeh, out-of-focus highlights, is rendered moderately good. Looking critically, the blurred highlights in the corners tend to be asymmetrical in appearance with one center sided edge being more blurry than the outer side. I tend to be forgiving with bokeh on most shots and where I would truly need to control it, I’d shoot with another lens.
Distortion is fairly tame considering the zoom range. Actually the distortion is remarkably controlled. The usual barrel at the short end and pin-cushion is mild, simple and, if needed can be adjusted quick enough in post. Here is the odd warning in super-zoom lens review where the writer warns architectural photographers about the distortion characteristics. I'll say if a true architectural photographer needs to be warned against super-zooms, he or she isn't a real architectural photographer. I'm betting no true pro is going to eschew the swings and tilts of his or her 4X5 or the perspective control lenses for the SLR. Being sensitive to distortion, I am impressed in how well controlled the distortion is and find it not irksome even at the extreme ranges of zoom. I just keep straight horizontals and verticals away from the frame edges and you can fool some of the people all of the time.
If there were one criterion in which to fault this lens, it would be light falloff (vignetting) performance. It creeps up in the extreme ranges of zoom. It’s apparent from 18mm to about 24mm and again rears its corner dimming head from about 100mm to 200mm. Light falloff is something that normally doesn’t bother me and is something that can always be addressed in post processing. However, it is sufficiently persistent to be annoying and sometimes forces me to consider it in my composition. Stopping down reduces but never eliminates it.
Summary
Despite that fact that this lens excels in no single criterion, its huge and useful zoom range, consistent and very good optical performance throughout that range, amazing close-up ability, fairly decent build and handling characteristics at its $680 street price make it a great value and compelling buy for the travel and event photographer. As a kit lens on Nikon’s D300, D60, D40x and D40, the camera/lens set results in the lens selling for about $300 making it a no-brainer bargain and creates a combo that may be unbeatable by any other set of camera and lenses for the on-the-go shooter. Again, after you’ve acquired the Nikon 18-200mm VR DX zoom, you won’t and shouldn’t replace any existing lens in your quiver. You just may find you’re not using them as much.
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