You’ll always be ready to tackle a whole host of subjects, from city shots and landscapes to family sporting events and action-packed HD movies. If you want to shoot indoors in low light and do not want to invest in fixed primes, the Sigma 17-70mm could be a good choice. They are particularly useful in correcting distortion in wide-angle lenses and help contribute to a lighter, more compact design by reducing the number of standard (spherical) elements necessary.

Two Aspherical lens elements achieve superior optical performance, giving your photos and videos rich, vibrant colors, deep contrast, minimal distortion and beautiful soft backgrounds, even in less than ideal conditions. Nikon reserves the right to change the appearance and specifications of the hardware and software described in this manual at any time and without prior notice. As with Canon's 18-55mm IS upgrade, there are rather more changes from the previous Nikon 18-55mm than at first meet the eye. Both of these have so little to no corner color fringing that you have to shoot white lawn furniture to see it, and then only on an older camera at the 18mm end.

Designed to enable more stable handheld shooting, Nikon's VR technology lets you shoot at up to four stops slower, without the image-degrading blur that can be caused by camera shake. We took to the streets for some portraits and shot a few macro photos for this first installment in our sample gallery. Even if the barrel distortion at the short end is quite heavy, correcting it via software during post-production is not very difficult in Lightroom (or any similar software). Chromatic aberration is the lens' inability to focus on the sensor or film all colours of visible light at the same point. On film, it will give black corners at focal lengths shorter than 24mm, but almost works OK at 24mm and longer on film as does the original 18-55mm II.

I've never had a problem with any of my plastic-mount lenses breaking in the ten years that I've owned them.

Nikon's new P series of NIKKOR lenses use a pulse motor (utilising stepping motors) to focus smoother and quieter than previous drive systems. Thom Hogan praised its value and optical performance, but criticized its handling, noting a diminutive focus ring that rotates during focusing, with no manual override. bigger or full-resolution file to explore on your computer (mobile devices rarely display high resolution files properly). This is a DX lens, which means it works perfectly on every DX digital camera from the D40 through the D300, and from the D100 and D1 through the D3. Around the front element, there is a thin manual focusing ring, usable both in autofocus (AF) and manual focus (MF) modes.