I am really tired of switching lenses. So I went out today and bought this Nikkor AF-S 18-200mm 1:3.5-5.6 G ED from a nice lady photographer. After a few test shots, I am very impressed by its performance. So I decided to compare its image quality against my nikkor AF 50mm f/1.8 D prime lens.
Although it's not very fair to compare a prime lens and a zoom lens, it's fun to see the results. Test images were shoot at different ISOs with the same fixed manual settings on my D200. Since I am an amateur, I forgot my prime lens wasn't DX format, and shot with 18-200mm also at 50mm. This made the image frame sizes not match exactly :( But it's good enough for an amateur.
Here are the results: 50mm definitely has much better bokeh ( isn't shown in the comparison image ), but the sharpness and details from 18-200 is as good as the prime lens. Of course in this comparison, I set the aperture of both lenses to 1:5, otherwise, the prime lens will have better image result. In general, I am very happy that I bought this lens.
