would you say this lens is sharp??

[dannylightning]

printed out a sharpness test sheet. the first photo is so you can see how much is cropped from each image, the rest of the images are cropped to see the sharpness.

would you say the sharpness is good, got out my speed light, ISO 400 on these images, 1/250, widest aperture available for that focal length deleted the first set of photos because the ISO was so high,

 

[dannylightning]

ok, round two with speed light so the iso could be low.

18mm

35mm

50mm

70mm

200mm, could not get far enough away to do the test at 200 so its got a tighter crop on the image.

 

[tecboy]

Look pretty sharp on my iPhone.

 

[dannylightning]

looks good to me too but it does not look perfect, maybe just because its cropped so much. as far as how good the sharpness on this lens is, i figure some people would know better than me about just how good that is. i assume that is actually pretty good.

 

[jaomul]

Real photos will tell you if a lens is sharp or not. Graphs are for lab conditions. Use it, if it's not right focus in live view and see how that is. Micro adj if necessary

 

[weepete]

Difficult to say properly without a comparison with a lens that you know is sharp under the same conditions. Saying that it does look sharp enough to use, I'd probably rate it as good from these shots. I agree with Jaomul though, a real scene would be easier to assess as that's what most of us are used to looking at

 

[Dave442]

I would also try each setting while stopping down one and two stops. That can help compare and gives you information you can use while out shooting with this lens.

For the exposure with white paper probably need to add a stop or two to compensate for what the meter is showing.

The 18mm looks the least sharp to me, but that would also be a at larger aperture than the other images.

 

[dannylightning]

trying to decide if i want to keep this lens or not and yesterday was a boring rainy day, figured i would try and do something with my camera so i was working on doing the micro adjusting thing, got the lens to where it looked good on the little target with the ruler, but was not sure how far away to get, i remember reading 25x the focal length but heck that just seems to far away the size do the target in the photo was super small. by the time you zoom in to see it its all crappy looing from zooming in so much. i tried it at a few different lengths from the target and i was getting different readings at different differences,

than i found a site saying how to use this chart and had a link to print it out.and about how far you want to be away for the MM of lens you are using and that seemed to be just fine. .

here are 2 photos i took of something and did a huge crop on, these look pretty darn good to me.. gonna go out and take some more around 18mm and see how they turn out, the lens seems the softest between 18-35mm

 

[dannylightning]

shots at 18mm and heavily cropped, looks like you got to get back a little farther at 18mm and the images come out pretty sharp. i think before i just a little too close to the test chart to get a proper focus at 18mm, the closer i get at 18mm the worse the photo gets. get far enough away that the lens can focus and well, i seem to be getting nice images out of it.

allot of people say this Nikon 18-200 is a lousy lens, i do not see it as a bad lens at all. really i am trying to figure out if i should keep this lens or sell it.

all of the shot posted so far have been wide open aperture including these ones.. if i shoot around f/8 i am not seeing much difference at all as far as sharpness goes, there is a slight improvement but not much.

 

[dannylightning]

same things shot with my 35mm prime lens and than cropped.

...

 

[SCraig]

It looks a lot better than the 35 prime in my opinion. To me the 35 looks soft overall and exhibits some chromatic aberration in couple of shots.

 

[Derrel]

Gotta agree with SCraig...the zoom lens seems to be producing sharper, crisper images than the 35mm lens.

 

[dannylightning]

i agree, the zoom seems better, and for a lens that is not said to be that great i think it has been a good lens. maybe the prime needs a fine tune or maybe i already did not and screwed it up, ill have to check it. i got some awesome hot rod and muscle car images out of that prime that came out amazing.

ok i had a bad fine tune on the lens,

did it again and got good results. as far as the chromatic aberration the prime did seem to have some of that going on and the zoom does not.

here is a new shot from the prime after a good fine tune. the sharpness is definitely better that it was earlier but the chromatic aberration still seems to be a issue. any way to fix that? i am guessing not