Nikon 16-85 VR

[KWB]

Anyone have one of these?

I'm thinking of getting one as it looks like a decent option now the price has finally fallen to a sensible level.

[Les_Paul]

I have one and it is a very decent mid range lens. It`s not to heavy and the build quality is very good, it does have a metal mount. Wide open the IQ is very respectable, stop it down to F8 and it is razor sharp. It stays very sharp right up to the small apertures and beyond F18 it still pulls in a very good performance. At 16 mm there is some distortion but easily corrected if you use NX2, and CA is well controlled throughout.

It is the perfect walk around lens for range and performance and quality is very good and much better than the kit lenses. In a lot of cases it is not far off the pro series of lenses in the same range with the F3.5 being the only slightly limiting factor, but the VR negates this somewhat and is activated very quickly on my copy. I chopped in the very ordinary 18-200 for one of these and never regretted it. I highly doubt you would be dissapointed. Good luck.

[KWB]

Cheers for that, pretty much mirrors exactly what i've read about it. Really like the focal range and the sharpness sounds really good.

What body do you use it on?

[Les_Paul]

I use it on a D300 and an D5000. It actually lives most of the time on the D5000 as that is a smaller lightweight combo when I do not need the brute power of the D300. If you get the 70-300 VR those 2 lenses pretty much cover everything you might want to do as that lens is also a very good performer.