A couple of days ago I bought a used AF 28-80/3.3-5.6G Nikkor - it was the first Nikon lens I ever used (on the D70 that I borrowed and which got me hooked on DSLRs) and looking at the old photos (from the JPEG days) I found the lens quite sharp... I bought it primarily because I wanted to have a "fallback" option in the form of an ultra lightweight standard zoom (OK, the focal range of 42-120mm on a 1.5x crop sensor is not exactly standard, but more like a portrait tele).
And sometimes we just have to do weird things. So I compared this (used, 50€) plastic lens (its plastic down to the lens mount, which I still find kinda scary) with my 18-200VR superzoom (used something like 400€, new "back then" about 700€) which makes me not quite as happy on the S5pro as it did on the D70/D70s - maybe that's because of the higher resolution of the Fuji, its stronger AA filter, whatever...
I made the comparison only in the focal range of the shorter lens (errrr, what else?), 28mm to 80mm. The 18-200 photos are not exactly the same focal length all the time because the zoom ring has no markers for 28mm and 80mm - I had to guess the position for these two and missed it by 1mm on the short end and 10mm on the long end - sorry.
I dated the lens test album back so it won't appear on top of my album list, but the photo dates are correct. Note: in the 1-up view, press the small loupe button in the top right corner above the image to get to a 1:1 view.
The photos are JPEGs straight out of the camera, scaled down to 6mpx, because thats what the Fuji sensor can resolve all the time. The camera was mounted on my tripod and placed about 80cm or something away from my CD rack. I used manual mirror prerelease ("M'up" mode) with about two seconds waiting before actually opening the shutter), released with cable remote - just to ensure that camera shake due to releasing the shutter and the mirror movement will be eliminated as good as possible. I only compared apertures 5.6/8/11 because everything else is not very important for me.
My personal conclusion: in the range of 28-50mm the cheap lens has more distortion, but its surprisingly sharp! At 80mm, the performance drop is quite noticable. Since 28-50mm is the zoom range that I'm most interested in (thinking of a combination of my wide angle with a yet-to-come telezoom here!), I think I'll try to leave the superzoom at home and save some weight when going on the next hiking trip. :-)
Lets close with a little trivia: Ken Rockwell writes in his article above (the link to the 28-80mm specs) that the lens was sold as a kit lens with film cameras - but here in Germany there was a short time (before the D70 was replaced by the D70s) where it was sold as a kit lens with the D70 (the black version, of course).
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