Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsNot bad, but actually only an 18-240mm lens!
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2022
Every photographer’s dream lens achieves all possible focal lengths and is simultaneously infinitely sharp with no aberrations at all of them. Of course, neither is possible, even individually, and, worse, the trade-off between the two is unforgiving. So, the reviews for a lens like this, which claims to be close to achieving the former, are all over the map, depending on the user’s priorities. Beginners love it for its range and aren’t overly concerned with its image quality, while professionals (and professional-wannabes) hate it for its less than sharp images and are accustomed to having to carry multiple lenses as a result.
So, in anticipation of an upcoming trip to an exotic location, I thought I’d give this lens a try and see if it could replace two or three of my current lenses, so I wouldn’t have to change lenses on my Nikon d7500.
Oh, and I suppose that I should mention that I’m a physicist, specializing in optics, and have taught a semester course on optics more than twenty times. So, I bring some helpful skills to the issue.
First, the professionals are right to avoid this lens if they plan to significantly enlarge their photographs. But, with commonly available inexpensive and easy-to-use software, it’s possible to correct for most of the problems of this lens, allowing it to yield printable pictures up to about 16” x 24” with more than sufficient resolution. I’ve actually done this with my Nikon 18-140mm and 55-300mm lenses with excellent results. So, unless professional-wannabes are displaying their photographs on 65” 4K displays, their photographic snobbishness should probably be ignored. Indeed, I’ve known several such folks, who own a dozen or more high-quality prime (non-zoom) lenses each, but whose equipment is too heavy and bulky to carry with them. Worse, they’ve spent all their money on these expensive lenses and so can’t afford to pay an assistant to carry them all for them or even travel to places worth photographing in the first place. One of them has never actually taken a photograph.
So, ultrazooms are not really as bad as some snobs make them out to be.
Okay, so what about this lens? Well, it has another much less forgivable problem. A homework problem I assign to my class is to find a simple formula relating the angular view of a lens to its focal length and the camera’s sensor size. Using it, I made some measurements and found that this lens’s maximum focal length is NOT 300mm and instead is only approximately 240mm! In other words, its range is significantly less than claimed! And it’s also much less than Nikon’s own alternative 55-300mm telephoto zoom, which, interestingly, achieves approximately 330mm according to my measurements. So, Nikon’s marketing department is exaggerating the range of this lens (others have observed and commented on this problem, also, but less quantitatively). This value is unlikely to vary between individual lenses, so save your money, unless you’re happy with an 18-240mm lens, which is what this lens actually is. By the way, for Nikon APS-C cameras, in terms of full-frame language, this lens only corresponds to 27-360mm, not 27-450mm, as would implied be implied by its 18-300mm claimed range.
Now, I should also mention that photographs taken using the iPhone 14 are easily as good as those taken by my Nikon d7500 with this lens for the iPhone’s focal length range of 13 to 77mm (in full-frame terms), so the wide-angle portion of the photographic spectrum is covered well, even in low-light conditions, by the iPhone 14, which has many additional clever photographic advantages. And, as the less expensive Nikon 55-300mm zoom corresponds to about 80-500mm (full-frame), the combination of it and the iPhone covers more than the range of the so-called 18-300mm lens on both sides.
So there you have it, a single zoom lens—the Nikon 55-300mm lens—covers the entire desired range of telephoto focal lengths, eliminating the need to change lenses, as long as the iPhone 14 is along for the ride, too.
Finally, I also considered the much heavier Nikon 28-300 zoom but stopped short of buying it because reviewers of it also noted its less-than-claimed zoom range at the telephoto end. And I also considered the even heavier Tamron 18-400mm zoom lens, which has similar issues, but is even worse; see my review of it if you like.
So that was a week of my life wasted due to unscrupulous marketing tactics by these lens manufacturers.
