nikon AF-S nikkor 18-105 mm review

I bought this lens as a kit lens together with the nikon D90 body. It was my first nikon lens and I was pretty happy with it. As I began to read about lens online and also bought the older 180 mm prime lens I became unhappy with it. I read some good reviews about the 18-200 mm from nikon, which was described as being far better than my 18-105 mm. So I said why not have a better lens with a wider range and sold the 18-105 mm.

nikon 18-105 mm @ 18mm f3.5

I only realized how good this lens was after I started using my new 18-200 mm. On a well known site the 18-105 is described as being the fuzziest nikon lens in the corners at 18mm. Well this is not true in my opinion. It actually is far better at 18mm than the 18-200 mm.  When I used it I never noticed any problems with it, which is a good sign. On the other hand the pictures taken at wide open at 18mm with the 18-200mm where unusable. I went back and checked out some pictures I had taken in the past with the 18-105 at 18mm wide open. They were decent corner to corner. There is some fuzziness noticeable in the corners, but it is very little for an all-around kit lens. On the left you can see an image taken with this lens at 18mm wide open and below a 100% crop of its top left corner with no adjustments or any kind of post-processing.

100% crop of the top left corner

 At f8 the images all get sharp from corner to corner and you cannot find any fuzziness. There also is some distortion at the extremes of the zoom range, but it is nothing I wasn't able to cope with.

What I didn't like about the 18-105 was its plastic mount. I almost felt guilty whenever I took it off or put it onto the camera body. I also found a few such lens for sale online which had their plastic mount damaged. So it is really a shame that Nikon didn't put a metal mount on this otherwise nice lens.


The bokeh of this lens is not great, but what can one expect from a lens in the 300 $ price range.
The image stabilization (VR) also works really well. I was able to take quite a few decent pictures in low light with the hand-held camera. You can check out some of them here.
As far as focusing is concerned it focuses fast and very well. Even in low light conditions it focuses fast together with the nikon d90 body. It has its own focusing engine so that you will be able to use it with nikon bodies that don't have internal focusing engines as the nikon d40 or d60 for instance.

As a conclusion I would recommend this lens to anyone who wants a decent all-around lens. Anyone who wants sharp pictures from corner to corner with good bokeh should consider a fast prime lens.

Here are a few more images taken with this lens.