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Reviews (1)
25 September 2018
You might never know it's a kit lens.
1 of 1 found this helpful Using this on a Nikon D3300.
Pros: for a lens this price it's surprisingly sharp. Chromatic aberration is not an issue, it's well within acceptable levels. Lightweight and compact, you can use it all day long. The VR-2 system works great. You can focus down to less than a foot!
Cons: The auto focus often has a tough time, sometimes taking several attempts to gain focus. Sometimes, in fact, it never gets focus at all and you must go to manual focus. Don't use this lens on continuous focus for moving objects.
The zoom ring isn't the smoothest, feeling a bit raspy through the range. The focusing ring is nice and smooth, but it's all the way out near the tip of the lens which makes it awkward to use if you have a rotating polarizing filter - it's easy to mistake one for the other. The lens is rather prone to flare below 24mm. A lens hood helps a lot with that, you have to be careful if you're all the way at 18mm as it can bring the edge of the hood into the shot. F/3.5 - 5.6 is not gonna give you a really creamy background or great bokeh if you're into that.
Verdict: If you see one for under a hundred dollars and you need a zoom lens with this kind of range, grab it. For that kind of money you probably won't find better. A lot of people get this as a bundled kit lens and assume it's junk, so they sell it off quickly and cheaply. Their loss will be your gain. It produces excellent pictures. If you're looking to do landscape photography this range is tailor made for it. Yeah, it's got some downsides - especially the auto focus quirk - but they're easy enough to deal with. And once you do, you'll be rewarded with a light comfortable lens you can use for a variety of situations, and one that produces surprising sharp results.