This article finally got me to put the new lens through a semi-scientific test. I pretty much did as the article describes. I'm not going to post a million different shots, instead I'll just post the results.

Things to note: this is an excellent travel/all-in-one lens. You can take great travel shots at just about any aperture/focal length combo. But if you happen upon a magical scene and think you'll want to print at a large size later, you'll want to know where the sweet spots are. That was the reason I went through this process. The green values are the sweet spots. The gray values are pretty much unusable at full size (lots of edge blur for example).



I forgot to try the smaller apertures while testing 200mm. Oops.

It was really enlightening. I hadn't gone through this rigorous of a test with any other lens before. Doing it now with the nifty fifty. Will do it again with the 18-135 when I get that back from Nikon (auto-focus borked).

One comment I'll make about the gray areas ... the larger apertures (small number) were much worse than the smaller ones. For example, @35mm, 4.8 was worse than 27. There isn't equivalent crapiness on either side of the sweet spots. It was always slightly better with smaller apertures.

Originally Posted by subimatt

and..

I'm not about to take the time to crop 3 sections each of 50+ photos. That's Ben's job

I was just teasing about you doing it

Whether it took me 2 minutes or 2 hours, I wasn't going to bother cropping and posting 150+ photos. I posted the results in case folks were interested. Period. If the numbers look weird and anybody wants to question the retardation of the tester, just go through the process yourself.

If I get around to doing an comparison of the 18-200 and 18-135, then I'll post images. But this thread was just to post what I found to be the sweetspots for the 18-200. Take it as you may.

Make an action in Photoshop and you can automate the entire process. But yeah, I know what you mean, it's tedious work.

Originally Posted by jacobsen1

Ohhhh, that's a great idea... I wonder how that would work... I'm good with actions for a single image (or opening something to copy a specific part, then closing it) but I wonder if I could get a stacker action working where you just open the images, press a button and it does the whole thing for you...

That's be pretty sweet, especially if I could work in labeling the apertures on the layers...

Hmm, I'm not sure how to do it in Windows, but it sounds doable in Linux.

Create a shell script in linux to extract the EXIF info and grab the exposure info and put into a text file. Get ImageMagick to crop and also read text file and add it as a text layer on top of the image.

I picked up the Nikkor 18-200 just 2 weeks ago, and love the lens for daytime walking around, etc... My only gripe is that at 18 on my D40X it is too long for the built in flash and I get a shadow at the bottom of my pics (see below for example).



Zoom in to 24 and the shadow goes away