| fewpics |
Aug 2, 2007 6:25 PM |
I bought a D80 Kit with the 18-135mm lens and although it is a good all-round lens, I will point out that it suffers from barreling and pincushioning (barreling = looking likeyour pictureexploded outwards from the middle,,, pincushining = looking like it is sucking inwards from the outer edgestowards the centre of the picture)..The barreling is most noticable at 18mm up to about 25mm and the pincushioning can be noticed as the zoom moves up to the higher focul lengths. While some people like this effect, I hate it. In wide open scenes, you will never notice these effects but where you have lots of straight edges, vertical and horizontal, like in a city, you can see it quite clearly and its annoying to me, BUT, as I said - some people like this wide angle type of effect...
My brother has the 18-200mm VR lens and raves about it, BUT, it toosuffers fromthe same effect, as indeed do most zoom lenses which have a minimum focullength below about 30mm andzoom up by about a scale of 3x or more (eg.. 17-55,, 24-72,, 18-200,, 18-135 etc), whichalso may suffer from this, but not always. It seems to be that about 40 - 50mm (give or take a few mm) is the point at which this barreling effect seems to stop on most average zoom lenses, although it depends on the particular camera/lens combination and many other design factors as zoom lenses are a compromise at best..For this reason I now own a 24mmfixed lens for the wider shots, a 50mm Std and 60mm Micro for normal and macro work, a Sigma 70-200mm HSM with a 1.4x teleconverter for the short/medium distance shot, andI just addedthe new Nikkor 55-200mm VR lens to my arsenal which is turning out to bea little beauty. It's all plastic, including the mount, but what a little gem this is turning out to be. The more I use it, the more I am loving it. It is my first VR type lens and once I learned how to properly take advantage of VR, I started to get some incredible results. Every now and then an El Cheapo lens happens along and you have to snap it up. For the price they were asking for the 55-200m VR, I had to ask myself "hmmm why so chaep?" but this is a budget lens with VR technology, and it works...
Anyway, the image quailty of the 18-135 lens is quite good. Colour is as good as you can expect from most Nikkor medium budget lenses and if you put aside the distortion which I talked about above, the lens is quite usable and can take quite a good series of focul length pictures. The 18-200mm VR is more or less much the same in results only as the zoom goes up towards 150+mm the shaprness may drop of a little, according to what I have read, but my brothers shots reveal some nice still (thanks to VR) shots at all lengths, and if the shots lose a bit of sharpness, it's hard to notice and Photoshop can easily fix it.
If price is a part of your final decision, you may want to look at,, rather than a D40 with an 18-200VR,, a D80 with an 18-135mm as the price difference between the 18-135mm and the 18-200mm VR is about enough to make you think of putting it to better use, to get you off the ground. This way you can add lenses at a later date and have a slightly better camera, although they tell us that the D40 is no slouch. If you have made up your mind on the D40, and you can afford the 18-200VR, then this would be the better choice simply for the "VR" - it DOES work, and well too...
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