Nikon 18-200 Review – Stuck in Customs

Nikon 18-200 Review

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The Nikon 18-200mm a perfectly versatile lens that can do just about anything you need!

The Nikon 18-200 Lens

I have only just received mine and only used it a bit.

Why I bought it

I wanted to try a light and flexible lens…

The 18-200 lens fully retracted at 18mm on the body of a Nikon D3X

The Nikon 18-200 lens extended, zooming in on some delicious detail

The 18-200 Nikon Lens

It is extremely light, flexible, and sharp. These are three great things! The only “bad” thing about is that the image area is cropped, and this is frustrating on my full-frame camera. When I look through my viewfinder, I see the outer 30% or so in a dark-grey cropping window… how frustrating! But, after taking a few shots at 18mm, it’s still not quite so bad. I think I am just simply used to having full access to everything. The other bad thing is that I won’t get a full 24 megapixel image on my D3X. Again, this is not the end of the world, since half that is still more than enough to get incredible resolution. I think I’m just spoiled.

So what you lose in megapixels and full frame, you make up for in an extremely flexible, sharp, and light lens. I can certainly see it, for the average photographer, being the only lens you need for wide shots and zoom shots. I understand why many of my friends have this lens on almost all the time.

HDR Photo

Here we are, fully zoomed out at 18 mm. You can see that I had no trouble getting an extremely wide-angle view. It was a little tighter than my 14-24 from the same location, but the difference was minimal for all practical purposes.

HDR Photo

And here is the fully zoomed in version at 200mm. Pretty amazing, eh?

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