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Home >> Photography >> Digital Photography Nikon
18-55mm f3.5-5.6G AF-S DX Testing wide-angle lenses can be tricky in needing to use a subject matter close enough yet detailed enough to allow for picking out the qualitative differences. Using the same industrial tesr scene as the 55-200 lens is useless even when viewing 100-percent crops. Thus, I set up some subjects (Chinese tea cups) at home which afforded me comfort, convenience and stable lighting during daytime to conduct the comparison testing. I placed one cup in the center of the frame and another one at the left edge of the frame. RAW files were converted through Nikon Capture 4.x with only same sharpening and white balance correction applied . The 18-55 lens was mostly compared to the 18-35mm f3.5-4.5 lens, which is the closest match I have to the kit lens. A 50mm f1.8 prime was used for the telephoto comparison. Based on the test shots below, the 18-55 lens starts of weaker at the wide end and gets better as you zoom out, with it matching the 18-35 and 50 prime at the respective aperture settings. However, curiously, the lens does not seem to improve much when stopping down two-stops from wide open at the various focal lengths. The edge of the frame improves, but the center seems about the same, which seems to indicate, as far as center resolution is concerned, the 18-55 lens is optimized for wide or near wide-open apertures. The 18-35 lens follows the traditional two or three stops down from maximum aperture rule of thumb for best resolution. What's very clear is that the 18-35 lens produces better results, which is to be expected given that the lens is more than twice as expensive and is meant for full frame coverage, so you're only using the sweet center of coverage. But it's also a larger lens using more expensive 77mm filters and it doesn't go as long as the 18-55 DX lens.
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