IMHO: AF-S DX Nikkor 4/12-24mm

This is the first in what could eventually become a series of articles that describe my own very personal impression of working with my lenses. That's why the post has that big "IMHO" in the title. I do not provide optical facts here, but my personal opinion. A technical review of the lens can be found on PhotoZone for example.

I bought Nikon's DX wideangle zoom about 1.5 years ago, and I use it quite often. I like playing with the extreme wide angle effect. More or less recently, Nikon has replaced it by the 10-24mm DX which offers even more wide angle. The newer one is - IMHO again - a quite desirable lens, especially because it still goes to 24mm on the long end (it does not have a constant aperture of f/4 anymore, but that's really not a big issue for me). Those are the two focal length's at which I use the lens the most: 12mm and 24mm. Much more seldom it's something in between.

The original 12-24mm DX is a "gold ring" lens, indicating some extra high quality, or something. I don't know, because I can't really say that it feels so very "extra". It's rather lightweight so the build quality feels not that impressive. The "light" impression is something that I maybe associate with the zoom ring operation - it could be a little stiffer for my taste. The lack of aperture markers on the distance to focus scale is sad but true for so many modern lenses.

The newer 10-24mm DX doesn't have the gold ring anymore - and I dare say that Nikon knows why. If there's one thing that gets on my nerves very much it is chromatic abberrations (CA), and like many other DX/consumer zoom lenses from Nikon, this one has plenty of it! And by plenty I mean that the CA are visible not just in the 1:1 view, but in the downsized version of the image when I "zoom to fit" in Lightroom.

This is a 1:1 view (click on the photo please, the actually size is 900x600 pixels), and believe me, you DO see this in the on-screen version of the full image (remember, I'm using the S5pro, so a 1:1 crop of the 12mpx raw image is not really 12mpx).


CA...(FinePix S5Pro, 1/125s @ ISO 100; f/11, 12 mm DX)

Yes, this is the extreme corner of the image (upper left), but nevertheless... for an otherwise not very color-intensive photo, this is pretty bad.

Of course, CA can be fixed in post processing, and the newer Nikons will automatically fix it for the JPEGs as good as possible. But sometimes, when you have very fine details in the corners, the corrections "overlap" and turn black twigs against a white sky into blue twigs against a white sky. That's not very desirable for me. CA get on my nerves so much because fixing them in post means fiddling around in post with two sliders, and you never can make it disappear evenly everywhere.

Conclusion: I'd test the competitors (especially the Sigma 10-20mm) more thoroughly should I ever have to make the decision for or against a wideangle zoom on DX again.