The 18-200 VR has an impressive 20-inch foot minimum focusing distance from the sensor plane, meaning that it is one of the world's closest-focusing superzooms. Compare this minimum focusing distance to that of the new 70-300 VR-G lens, which is around 4.5 feet. Ken Rockwell has about 50 review pages on the 18-200 VR lens, located here:
Nikon 18-200mm
There are a LOT of people who continually tell you how poor this lens is. My suggestion: look at actual photos made with the lens--they are really, quite GOOD. Hey, I have a big lens collection that spans four decades...and I can tell you a few things about lenses. First off, this is a Nikkor zoom lens, not a Sigma, not a Tokina, not a Rokinon: the design is as good as it can be made at its price point, and this is not a "cheap" lens. It's designed with a modern, computer-aided design, decent materials, and it is designed for digital camera use: it is NOT an old "film" design from the 1980's or the 1990's or the early 2000's, and that fact alone can make a HUGE difference in the way a zoom lens performs on a d-slr. The second thing is that a person loses MORE shots due to futzing around and mounting the "right" lens than he does simply bringing the camera up to the eye, zooming, and then focusing and shooting the picture. Carrying ONE lens on ONE body means you can take a d-slr with you and have it READY at ALL times; changing lenses means that the camera is optimized for a "specific" type of shot or use, and is therefore poorly suited for some other uses. For example: You're shooting a group shot at 18mm, and then zoom right in to the mother and child units, from one position, before the group disperses. You can do that with the 18-200. In seconds! You can shoot a wide-establishing shot as the ferry boat leaves the dock, the a medium shot, then a tight telephoto close-up of your family waving to send you off, all in like five seconds' time. All with d-slr capability.
And, finally, we need to cut through the total Bullchit about how "poor" the optics are on the Nikkor zooms and super-zooms: Popular Photography magazine did a test a few years back, comparing "consumer" lenses against fast, f/2.8 "pro" lenses. The actual resolution and contrast of the consumer lenses at f/8 was within 10 to 15 percent of what an expensive "pro glass" lens turned in. If one absolutely NEEDS that last, little bit of image quality, the expensive lenses are unmatched. But it is no longer 1980...some of the cheapest, POS little Nikkor zoom lenses are SURPRISINGLY good, like their old, plastic mount 28-80...just amazingly good at f/8...better than many pro lenses from the 1980's. What is happening nowadays is that Nikon has produced a new generation of vastly better lenses, designed for higher- and higher-resolution DIGITAL imaging. It's time to stop repeating the same old B.S. about how horrible the newer NIKKOR designed-for-digital superzooms actually are in real-world picture-taking scenarios. We're not talking about el-cheapo Sigma and Rokinon $279 lenses here--we're talking about lenses designed and built to a price point virtually double that of the early 1990's superzooms pioneered by Tamron with their 28-200 then their 28-300.
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