2 replies to this topic

[Bsmith933]

New member here, with a possibly dumb question. I've used an 18-200 for years and have had great success with it. Mostly landscape. Would a more dedicated wide angle, e.g. 18-35 f/3.5-4.5, give me better results at 18mm? I guess another way to ask this is are there tradeoffs in any 18-200 that would reduce photo quality at 18mm compared to the same shot taken at 18mm with, say, an 18-35 lens? Hope I'm getting my point across. Ultimately wondering if adding an 18-35, or 10-20, to my bag would give me better quality landscape shots, or essentially the same as my 18-200? Thanks for any adive.

[Merco_61]

The 18-35 will give the same moderately wide field of view as your 18-200 on a DX body. It has very low distortion and is *very* sharp and contrasty at the wide end, though. If I remember correctly, the 18-200 is a bit soft when using the widest couple of millimetres compared to its excellent performance in the midrange. Do you see an FX body in your future? If so, the 18-35 is a good first step on the way. If you intend to stay with DX, something wider would make more sense.

 

You mention the 10-20, what body do you have? The 7200 can't control the VR in the AF-P lenses, so this lens will not work well for landscape work on a D7200 as you can't shut the VR off on a tripod.

[Jerry_]

When looking at zoomlenses a number of factors may play, but in general two are widely valid:
- the larger the zoom range, the higher the technical compromise that was done on how optics have to be designed and aligned with a negative impact on the image quality, especially on not-so-expensive lenses.
The 18-200 has a ratio of 11 (200/18) while the 35/18 has a ratio of 2 (35/18)
- most of the time zoom lenses (therefore) perform better in the middle range of its focal length than on the min/max zoomed focal lengths

As Peter already mentioned, the 18-35 would perform much better on the wider end than the 18-200.

As you are looking for even shorter focal lenghts (the 10-20) one point to pay a special attention to is the fact that one extra available millimeter in focal length on the wider end has a much bigger impact on the field of view (ie what will be on your picture) than one (or even ten, comparing to the 200mm zoom) milimeters on the longer end.
In figures (on a DX sensor) zooming out by 20mm from 200 to 180 has an impact of roughly 10% on the diagonal, on the other end zooming out by only 3mm from 18 to 15 has an impact of roughly 15% on the diagonal!

As the field-of-view gets wider, my feeling is that VR gets less relevant (even so this is for everyone to decide for himself)

My wide uses the AF-P 10-20 on her D7200 and is quite happy with it as she is mostly shooting handheld, but you may also have a look for third party lenses (fi the Sigma 10-20/3.5 which will work well with the D7200 too)