A nice walkaround zoom lens, but far from perfect

First impressions

I was looking for a light and unobtrusive walkaround lens for my D70 with a slightly more reach at the tele end than the kit lens (18-70 DX). My local camera shop had the 24-120 VR in store and it seemed to fit the bill perfectly, so I picked it up on a 14 day return basis.

The first thing I checked was the serial number. I have read somewhere that this number should be higher than 221xxx to avoid early production problem samples. Mine was 223xxx which means that in theory it should be OK. It appeared to have been sitting on the shelf collecting dust for some time, as more recent samples have serial numbers going from 260xxx and upwards, but this was the only lens they had in store and I really didn't feel like waiting for yet another couple of weeks.

I took a couple of quick snapshots around the shop to check out anything grossly disturbing, but found nothing alarming and only a very slight pincushion distortion in the viewfinder near the far end of the zoom.

Handling

Given the fairly long zoom range and the fact that it has 15 elements of which two are Nikons special ED low dispersion glass, I expected the 24-120VR to be heavier and bulkier, but it feels quite nice and well-balanced on my D70. It looks pretty sturdy and solid in spite of the fact that the housing is mainly made of plastic.

The filter thread size is 72 mm, which was quite a bonus for me as I already had a 72 mm polarizer with nothing to attach it to. The front of the lens never rotates while zooming or focusing, which is a good thing when using a polarizer or a graded filter. The lens comes with a flower lens hood and front and back caps, the front cap being the more recent "squeeze-type", which can easily be removed even with the lens hood in place.

On the side of the lens barrel are two switches, one for toggling between autofocus/manual focus and one switch to turn VR on or off. Two rings control the zooming and the manual focusing, and like with all AF-S lenses featuring Nikons internal silent wave motor (SWM), the autofocus can at all times be overriden by simply grabbing and turning the focus ring.

VR - Vibration Reduction

I started off by testing the VR image stabilizer feature. Shooting with the VR enabled is an interesting experience - as soon as you half-depress the shutter release button, you can hear a very slight buzzing sound from inside the unit as the VR motor is trying to counteract your involuntary camera movements and you can also clearly see the image almost being glued to the viewfinder as you move the lens. Pretty cool!

With stationary targets, hand-held shooting at full zoom with long shutter speeds, such as 1/8 sec or longer is quite possible - the difference is striking when you compare the "with VR" and "without VR" shots.

Remember that VR will only stabilize your own camera movements, not the movement of the target subject. This may seem like pointing out the bleeding obvious, but shooting a rapidly moving subject with long exposure times will inevitably result in blurred photos. The lens can however differentiate camera shake from panning, which is quite useful, although I don't know how well VR works in vertical ("portrait") shooting format.

The utilization of VR in this lens is not quite as sophisticated as in the 70-200 VR and more difficult situations, such as shooting from a moving vehicle, are a bit too much for the system to handle. Nevertheless, the VR system is quite useful for counteracting minor involuntary camera shake. VR is on the other hand not a substitute for a fast lens or short shutter speeds - but it might get you off the hook when you don't want to, or cannot use a tripod.

Optical performance

Upon close inspection of the photos, I found that the images with this lens were a bit soft wide open - and it's not just a general haziness, but a rough-edged coarseness that won't clean up completely with digital sharpening. Applying a lot of processing to sharpen up the images is not really a feasible option, as it tends to introduce other nasty side-effects, such as white halos, jagged lines, increased noise level and small-scale moiré effect.

Even though we're down to pixel-peeping and aren't talking issues that are likely to show up on small sized printouts, the images are a lot softer than what I expected and would have liked.

When stopping down to somewhere around f/8 or smaller, clarity of course gets a lot better but by then you have no chance of an even reasonably shallow depth of field. I really like sharp lenses, and the general softness of the 24-120 VR was a major disappointment for me. The 24 mm end of the lens is - just as I thought it would be - the least impressing. The center of the image is fairly coherent and decent but both the left and the right edges of the frame come out awfully soft and there is also some color fringing and nasty smearing around the edges.

On the D70 there is no vignetting whatsoever even when stacking multiple filters.

Moving up towards the middle zoom range improves things a lot - from 80 mm and upwards the lens becomes quite decent and fairly sharp, getting even better near the far end of the zoom range. Be warned however that the largest available aperture quickly drops to f/5.6, so you will need plenty of light for safe shooting near the tele end, even with VR enabled.

I found that distortion is pretty well controlled throughout the entire range, with only a slight barrel effect around the wide angle and some pincushion around the tele end, but all very manageable for most photographing situations.

Out-of-focus background (bokeh) is rendered decently, but not to die for - light dots in the background tend to be rendered as blurry rings, not as blurry circles, and the fairly small max aperture makes it a little difficult to separate the main subjects from the background.

Conclusion

The lack of sharpness and crispness throughout the entire range, perhaps except above 100 mm, was quite a bit disappointing for me but it may not necessarily be something that should hold you back from getting one of these lenses if you really like the zoom range and the VR feature. It is obvious that the optical performance had to suffer to squeeze in the VR feature into a modest budget frame, but I cannot help but feeling that I would rather have first class optical clarity than the VR.

Clearly the Nikon 24-120 VR is not intended for professionals or high-level amateurs craving absolute optical clarity, but for photographers with limited budget looking for a solid and flexible walkaround lens. As for such, the 24-120 VR does a pretty decent job, but personally I found the overall softness a bit too aggrevating and I ended up returning the lens.