Just recently I bought a new Nikon D80 with a Tamron 18-200mm allround lens as an replacement for my broken Minolta DÃmage 7Hi.
I must say that I’m very impressed by the new camera. There are about 50 million settings you can change and what impressed me most was that I can shoot in RAW (what I always do) and have an JPEG saved with that shoot as well. Fantastic for having a quick look at the pictures in the hotel room or on your PocketPC. Just grand.
When I loaded the images into Lightroom and Aperture and compared them to my old 5MP cam I noticed that my old cam was damn good. There was almost no visible vignetting or chromatic abberation. Looking at the test images I shot during the last couple of days there are some downsides of the superzoom lens I bought. The good point is that there is no visible vignetting of the lens. The negative point is that at 18mm the outer parts of the image seems blurred and out of focus and there is much chromatic abberation. Highlights in the image, like reflections of chrome or glass, are bleeding and seem to be over-exposed. This has been discussed around the web and I hope that this issue may be changeable in a camera setting somewhere. As I shoot in RAW I can also just touch some images in Photoshop when needed without a major lost in quality.
All in all this is a very good alround lens. Super fast and precise focus. Wide zoom range (28-300mm equiv.).
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I’ll post some pictures in the next weeks – I’m in Paris March 30 – April 1st so expect some great shots!