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| |  | For Everyone | Home » » Nikon 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras | | | | | | | Description: | | NIKON 18-135MM F3.5-5.6G DX (2162) | | | Features: | |
• A Nikon Extra-Low Dispersion (ED) glass element delivers superior optical performance.
• Internal Focus (IF) provides fast and quiet auto focusing without changing the length of the lens.
• Focus as close as 1.47 ft throughout entire zoom range.
• Non-Rotating front element provides for convenient use of circular polarizing filters and the Nikon Wireless Close-Up Speedlight System.
• A compact Silent Wave Motor (SWM) enables fast and quiet autofocusing, along with quick switching between autofocus and manual operation
| | | Product Details: | | | Product Length:
| 3.4 inches | | Product Width:
| 2.9 inches | | Product Height:
| 2.9 inches | | Product Weight:
| 0.85 pounds | | Package Length:
| 6.85 inches | | Package Width:
| 4.33 inches | | Package Height:
| 4.25 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.41 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 53 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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 Nikon lens reviewMay 15, 2010
I bought this lens for my grandson who was going to Italy for a month. I worked with a great seller on Amazon and he did everything he could do to make this purchase friendly and helpful. I would buy from this seller again, and definitely check with Amazon anytime I need something new.
And I think my grandson might appreciate some other options for his Nikon camera. He's already taken some great pictures with it.
 NIKON 18 to 135 lenseDec 19, 2009
Bought a new D80 it came with a 18-135mm lense. Have had problems with the lense and camera making connection. To the point when I had a one of a kind shot and the unit failed me. NOT GOOD. Today I noticed that the lense aperature is not shutting down. Took the lense off camera and can see a few fingers hanging down. I take very good care of my camera and am distressed - MAD - this is happening. I have had the camera for over 1.5 years. The lense should not fail like this.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Very sharp lens from NikonOct 09, 2009
This lens is sharp and light and provides you with 7X zoom. Excellent walk-around lens. The built quality is not great though with its plastic mount. Lacks VR. But excels in sharpness, so if you like sharp and you like the range, this is the one to get.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 SHARP 7.5X consumer zoomSep 26, 2009
I've been using this lens for about 10 months. I use it on my D60. I mostly use primes because they are so much faster (better for low light) and they are far sharper than any zoom that I can afford. So for any camera I own, I usually have one zoom that will do the job when no primes can. This lens fits that role nicely.
This lens has what many negative reviewers say: Pincushion distortion at the extreme wide end and vigneting at the extreme tele end. However, the image sharpness and color rendition is really good with this lens at every focal length and if you use NIKON Capture NX2 the distortions at all focal lengths are removed perfectly (that is the great thing about using an image editor made by your camera manufacturer...). This is consumer grade so it is SLOW. Use outdoors during the day or use the flash.
I paid $200.00 for this lens brand new...I know I got a great deal and I don't regret it at all. The construction is basic consumer grade (plastic city...)so I think a reasonable price for this lens is [...] ...TOPS. If you can find a great deal grab it. But be careful mounting and unmounting and try to avoid dropping the lens or your camera with this lens attached! You are paying for LOTS of glass here! It is difficult to make a lens sharp at every focal length on a zoom this wide but they did it really well.
Bottom line: this lens could be cheaper due to build quality but the zoom range, extreme sharpness at every focal length (for a consumer zoom), and good color rendition make it worthy of a 4 star review in my opinion.
And oh yeah, someone said something about bokeh in these reviews...Anyone who is buying this lens and is complaining about bokeh just doesn't know enough to know better. If you want bokeh get a fixed focal length lens with a wide aperature (f1.4 or f1.8). I know of no zooms under $1,000.00 that have decent bokeh. Lenses to try for better bokeh: Nikon 35MM f1.8 DXS G ($[...]), the 50mm F1.4G ($[...]), the Sigma 50mm 1.4 HSM ($[...]) or the BADASS 85mm 1.4 (BIG effin' bucks). You get what you pay for and you should be paying for GLASS to get great shots NOT cameras!
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 Impressive for a kit lens, destined to be a kit lensJun 25, 2009
It's difficult to write this review without substantial bias and background, but the best way to write this review is to speak from experience.
I got this lens with the Nikon D80, which many people have cited (somewhat accurately) as among the most notorious for soft images. (I do have objections to that, and I do say that a great prime lens such as the 50mm f/1.8 produces sharp, bright images.) The camera I received had focus problems; after fixing them, the problem was somewhat corrected, but I could have also gotten a bad copy of the lens.
While problems can vary from copy to copy, some problems are bred by design. The pincushion distortion is prominent all the way down the barrel. It's most noticeable in cityscapes and any other subject material composed of straight lines, and after five months and more than 2,500 pictures, I see the distortion in some of my nature photography, as well. The lens does perform well in spite of (and, in a few cases, because of) the distortion. But more often than not, the distortion isn't pleasing to the eye; some lenses do barrel-distort an image for aesthetic effect, but this isn't one.
Unfortunately, it's not easy to correct many of the images that suffer from the distortion. There's only so much distortion that can be corrected, and the 18-135mm lens frequently meets or surpasses that limit. The easiest pictures to correct are those in which the subject is far away, but if the images have objects in the more immediate foreground, I can't fix the image well without significantly distorting those objects.
Still, it lets you compensate to a certain degree. A feature under CS3's Filter > Distort > Lens Correction compensates for some of the distortion. For total control, I use Edit > Transform > Perspective, and I use the "Switch between free transform and warp modes" to bring up a grid that enables me to "pull" sections of the image. But there's only so much an image can be corrected without making it worse, and the lens tend to produce images that can't be fixed well.
The bokeh in this lens is an issue, as well. The lens does a poor job blurring the background; spots of light are not blurred out smoothly, and many highlights show a great amount of detail. To my eye, it's the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. My prime lens produces good bokeh, and using it as a comparison to the 18-135mm has helped me understand how critical bokeh is to a picture. Fortunately, Photoshop can compensate if I add a mask, completely blur out the background image, and paint over the parts of the image that are supposed to be sharp. But it's frustrating to have a lens that doesn't get good bokeh directly after I fire the shutter, especially since it's painstaking to correct in Photoshop.
Chromatic aberration is a minor issue with this lens, especially in low-light situations. For example, one of my lightning pictures shows a considerable blue fringing around the power pole and a lot of red fringing around the lightning strikes. But this is really splitting hairs, especially since the optics were never designed to be professional-caliber. Plus, chromatic aberration is nicely remedied by Photoshop's RAW tools, and uncorrected aberration isn't obvious when I zoom out the image, anyway.
Since I got it as a kit lens, I investigated this and other lenses a while after buying the camera. I learned most of the pros and cons just as I was shooting pictures. One of the major pros is the focal length; the low 18mm and the high 135mm zoom give you a lot of flexibility. Another major pro is the width; not many kit lenses have a 67mm diameter. The minimum focusing distance is another plus; eighteen inches on a zoom lens gets you close to small objects without much effort.
Granted, this lens has a lot of great features that look appealing on paper, but the cons can be dealbreakers. The lens works great as a kit lens and outperforms many kit lenses on the market, and if you get it as a kit lens, it'll serve you well. But if you get the camera body separately and buy a different lens, you'll likely consider the extra money well-spent.
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