Nikon has made two new lenses available for your photographic delectation. One is a dim superzoom for DX (crop-sensor) cameras — the 18-300mm ƒ3.5-5.6G ED — and the other is an equally dim short zoom for full-frame bodies, the 24-85mm ƒ3.5-4.5G ED VR.
I was put off zooms years ago, because while they’re undoubtedly convenient, they’re also dark. All that glass inside means that you start off from somewhere like ƒ3.5 and things get worse from there. Modern zooms certainly don’t have the image quality problems of those in the past, but for throwing backgrounds out of focus or just shooting in low light, primes are still the way to go.
There are zooms which stick at, say, ƒ2.8 throughout the range, but they’re uniformly huge and expensive.
And these new chunks of glass from Nikon aren’t so cheap, either. The 18-300 is a whopping $1,000 (available June), and the 24-85mm is $600 (late July).
If you’re interested, here’s my lineup (although I currently lack a Nikon body to hang them on). A 24mm ƒ2.8, a 50mm ƒ1.8, an 85mm ƒ1.8 and an old 28-105mm which I use so seldom I don’t even remember the aperture range — it’s something like ƒ3.5-5.6.
Source: NIKKOR 20mm
Source: NIKKOR 24-85mm
Thanks: Geoff!
