One of my favourite lenses over the past 18 months or so has been the AF-S DX Nikkor 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR, rather a mouthful of a name, but a relatively compact lens for DX format cameras. If you like to see detailed test results, you should go to Photozone.de, and they do make interesting reading in some respects.
No lens is perfect, but the faults in optical performance of this one – mainly some distortion and chromatic aberration – are largely easily and automatically corrected in software such as Lightroom, leaving you with images with some impressively good resolution. It’s a very good lens even wide open, and down a stop or so, truly excellent. Subjectively certainly the results are better than the previous Nikkors and Sigma lenses I’ve used covering similar focal lengths, some costing more than three times as much. And perhaps even more importantly, autofocus is faster than the others.
But it is a ‘consumer’ lens and not a ‘professional’ one, and I’m someone who does tend to be rather hard on equipment. Ten days ago, rushing along in a crowded street I collided with a rubbish bin. The UV filter on my Nikon 16-35 mm took it head on, the glass shattering to pieces. I was obviously worried about the lens itself (it cost almost six times as much as the 18-105), but it seems to be working perfectly – and now has a new UV filter. I’m thinking of taking out a standing order for these. Fortunately from Hong Kong they only cost around £3 rather than the £37.95 at my local camera shop. And you can also buy lens hoods for most Nikon lenses that are better made than the genuine article for a fraction of the cost.
It also rains fairly frequently in London, and the difference between consumer and professional lenses also shows. Of course both get drops of rain on the UV filter, and I wipe it with a microfibre cloth before almost every exposure. Lens hoods help a little, but are pretty ineffectual with wide angles. But while the 16-35 is pretty watertight and keeps on working in the rain, the 18-105 is very definitely not, and soon becomes unusable until I can dry it out.
While the 16-35 survived a major impact, the 18-105 has now jammed and is unusable. It happened while I was sitting on a train and reading a book with the camera on a strap around my neck. Perhaps I might have turned over a page hurriedly, but there were no other incidents that I noticed. The lens that had been working perfectly when I got on the train was jammed solid when I walked out of my station.
I’m left wondering what to do with the 18-105. I do have other lenses that will do most of what it did, though not quite as well. Most lens repairs that I’ve had done have cost around two thirds of the cost of the 18-105, so is it worth repairing? Should I simply buy a new 18-105, or get a larger and heavier pro lens?
At the moment the lens is sitting on my desk and will probably stay there for some time. Like many other Nikon users I’m waiting for Nikon to bring out the next round of DSLR cameras, replacements for the D700 and D300s. My D300 is definitely showing signs of age, and the shutter in particular is probably well past its design life, and as I noted in an earlier post, not working at its higher speeds. Will its replacement be a FX or a DX camera – or perhaps some other manufacturer than Nikon will come up with a smaller and lighter system that really delivers similar quality?