A superzoom lens is rarely the best choice – these optics often sacrifice sharpness, distortion control, and a wide aperture in exchange for some width. But if you want to carry only one lens on the trip and don’t mind the disadvantages (poor ability to collect light indoors or on cloudy days, slightly blurred background, etc.), it can be a good choice.
Top choice
Contrary to the stereotypes of superzooms, this lens exhibits great central sharpness throughout its range, and its effective image stabilization makes it a strong bird lens despite its large blur coverage.
The Nikon Nikkor Z 28–400mm f/4–8 VR surpasses the reputation of superzoom lenses with excellent sharpness, beautiful colors, and effective image stabilization. It can capture everything from open spaces to portraits and sports or wildlife.
If you’re willing to live with your few shortcomings, that flexibility makes you a great companion on a backpacking trip, a day out with the family, or whatever else life throws at you.
Its image quality is surprisingly good. You won’t mistake the images from this lens for the images you’d get from Nikon’s other S-line lenses, but as consumer zoom lenses go, the 28–400mm f/4–8 VR stands near the head of the pack. Sharpness is high, especially in the center, and background blur is smooth even at long focal lengths and f/8. The images are different, and the colors are brighter.
It has a small hole at the top, but VR usually does that. The maximum aperture of this lens starts at f/4 at 28mm and jumps all the way to f/8 at 200mm. With less light coming in due to the restricted aperture, you need more ambient light to freeze the action and get clear shots.
For a lens with no image stabilization, that can mean using higher ISO settings and getting more image noise as a result, but Nikon’s Vibration Reduction (VR) offers 5 stops of stabilization, which should allow your camera to shoot at slower speeds without blur from handshake. If your camera supports Synchro VR, the interaction between the lens and body VR pushes that to 5.5.
But even with that advantage, this isn’t the ideal lens for indoor or night photography. VR may prevent blur in your moving hands, but it can’t help stop the motion of people or objects you’re photographing. Only a fast shutter speed can do that.
It is weather sealed, although it is not an S-line model. Dust and water protection is a feature that Nikon usually reserves for its high-end lenses, but the company wisely included it in this go-anywhere, do-anything lens. The 28–400mm f/4–8 VR features seals on the moving parts of the lens barrel, as well as the lens mount, providing some protection in inclement weather.
Despite its width, it is small and light. One of the advantages of this high-aperture lens is that it is compact and lighter than you might expect. The 28–400mm f/4–8 VR measures just 5.6 inches long when retracted for storage, and weighs 725 grams – slightly less than the 865 grams of our 70–180mm f/2.8 telephoto zoom selection, which includes a much smaller footprint.
Top choice
Tamron’s superzoom provides an impressive range and more than adequate image quality in most situations. It’s a great option to do everything.
The Tamron 18–300mm f/3.5–6.3 Di III-A VC VXD offers a wider zoom range than our full-frame selection — covering 27–450mm in full-frame terms — and its overall image quality is nearly as good. That’s not surprising, since our choice is the Fujifilm X-mount superzoom, and it might do even better on Nikon’s less demanding 20-megapixel APS-C sensor.
It’s very sharp at the wide end, and tapers off a bit as you zoom in. Image quality is excellent throughout the range, although the 18–300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di III-A VC VXD does better overall at the focal length than it does at the extreme telephoto. That said, no other sub-$1,000 lens available for the Nikon Z-mount allows you to shoot at an effective focal length of 450mm with this level of image quality.
We saw relatively heavy vignetting and slightly busy bokeh at 300mm with this lens, but you can fix the former with editing software, and the latter isn’t enough to bother most people.
It’s incredibly flexible. Just walking around the Santa Fe Plaza, we were able to capture a wide range of subjects with this lens, including buildings, portraits, cars, flowers, crowd scenes, and more.
While the f/3.5–6.3 aperture range is not wide by prime lens standards, it still allows for impressive bokeh and background separation of the subject, especially given the unusually short focal lengths of this lens. At 18mm, it can focus down to just 5.9 inches from the sensor, while at 300mm it can lock onto subjects as far as 39 inches away.
Autofocus is fast and confident. We expect a high level of performance from Z-mount autofocus lenses, and this Tamron lens delivers. We found focus to be reliably quick, accurate, and sticky when shooting with the Z50 II’s 3D tracking mode, which made it easy for us to capture sharp human faces, birds, and more — even when we were pointed a long way from our subject.
Image stabilization works well, if sometimes shaky. Nikon’s APS-C Z-mount cameras, such as the Z 50II with which we tested this lens, lack in-body image stabilization. That means they have to rely on lens-based optical stabilization, which the Tamron 18–300mm f/3.5–6.3 provides.
In our experience, the sharpness of this lens has been very effective, although seeing it through the viewfinder can be a bit confusing. When it works, you see the live preview freeze in place and move slowly as you move around the scene. But this is just a side effect of how stability works, and as long as the results are sharp, we doubt many people will care.
It is a great value. At its starting price of $630, the 18–300mm f/3.5–6.3 Di III-A VC VXD is a great deal. Few superzooms we’ve used offer this kind of consistent image quality throughout their range. And unlike most superzooms, this one is very light and compact at 1.4 pounds and just 5.9 inches long when folded for travel.