This lens is a competent performer, producing decent sharpness throughout its zoom range, with low falloff and CA. However it appears to be priced quite highly, and probably doesn't perform well enough to justify being a choice as an upgrade from a similar lens, like Nikon's 18-135mm lens, that is no longer available. However, if it is bundled as a kit with a camera body for a decent price in the future, it should be a choice most photographers, after a convenient zoom lens, should be happy with.

If you're looking too hard, you may see some very minor yellow-blue fringes at 18mm, and some very minor green-magenta fringes at the corners at 140mm, but I doubt anyone would notice them. The Nikon 18-140mm exhibits a fair amount of corner shading when the lens is used wide open or at wider apertures; in the worst example, 18mm at ƒ/3.5, the very corners of the image are 3/4 EV darker than the center of the image. This shading decreases as the lens is stopped down, but only really goes away if you stop down to the ƒ/8 or ƒ/11 aperture (or smaller). If I was working in nasty, dirty areas, I'd forget the cap, and use an uncoated 67mm Tiffen UV filter instead. Uncoated filters are much easier to clean, but more prone to ghosting. These are shot hand-held as BASIC ★ JPGs; no tripods, NORMAL or FINE JPG or RAW files were used or needed. The 18-140mm doesn't get quite as sharp as the lens it replaces. Another concern is distortion. It shows a lot through its range. At 18mm there's 4.2 percent barrel distortion, which gives images a rounded look, like a mild fish-eye lens. Barrel distortion gives way to pincushion distortion (which makes straight lines appear to curve in rather than out); there's about 2 percent at 35mm, 70mm, and 140mm. Nikon cameras can automatically correct for this—even when shooting in Raw format—but you'll always see the effects in the viewfinder. It's a personal preference, but we recommend enabling Auto Distortion Correction in the menu; if you choose to capture images without it, you can always correct it on a case-by-case basis in Lightroom or another editing application. The 18-140mm isn't alone in showing some distortion, the 18-105mm lens also showed some (3.5 percent barrel at 18mm, 1 percent pincushion at 35mm, and 2 percent pincushion at 70mm and 105mm).If you plan to get lenses with 77mm threads (like an ultrawide zoom) you may want get a 67mm -> 77mm step-up ring, and treat this lens as a 77mm-threaded lens from now to eternity. This will save you a lot of aggravation, unless you really do build a system around 67mm filters.

Chromatic aberrations, typically seen as blue or purple fringes along contrasty edges, were not really apparent in our test shots, only appearing in very high contrast areas. Vignetting I think it's true to say I've built up a shooting style with the 18-200mm VR that avoids the worst of its shortcomings. It'll be nice to know that I don't have to do that with the 18-140mm VR, I will be able to shoot wide open at 140mm and get a relatively shallow depth of field without completely trashing the image quality. Living up to its billing, the autofocus system is snappy and accurate for stills, and enables smooth and virtually silent transitions when shooting video. An absence of focus breathing is a further video-friendly bonus. The optical VR system also lives up to its claims, delivering 5-stop effectiveness. I have now taken thousands of pictures with this lens, all over the world. It's the most useful workhorse lens I have ever used on my D7100. I am so confident of its performance that I almost never take a second "just to be sure" shot of subjects I don't want to miss. It has held up very well, so I'm increasing the build quality rating to 9.

Introduction

High optical performance is realized with the employment of one ED glass element and one aspherical lens element

The 18-140mm isn't designed for macro work, but is holds its own with a respectable 1:4.3 reproduction ratio (0.23x magnification). Minimum close-focusing range is 45cm (almost one and a half feet) from the image sensor; from the end of the lens, you're looking at about 28cm (11 inches). This lens has outstanding macro performance; it gets super-close and there is no need to fiddle with macro settings; it just focuses from infinity all the way up to super-close. At 35mm f/4.2 lens doesn't do quite as well; its average score is 1,862 lines, with the middle third and outer third of the frame coming at 1,690 and 1,612 lines respectively. Again, at f/5.6 it's a different story; the center-weighted score is 2,309 lines with the outer edges scoring better than 2,000 lines. At f/8 it improves to 2,636 lines and even the edges manage 2,583 lines. The 18-105mm is sharper at its maximum 35mm f/4.5 aperture (2,714 lines) through f/8 (2,865 lines). Lens sharpness has nothing to do with picture sharpness; every lens made in the past 100 years is more than sharp enough to make super-sharp pictures if you know what you're doing. The only limitation to picture sharpness is your skill as a photographer. It's the least talented who spend the most time worrying about lens sharpness and blame crummy pictures on their equipment rather than themselves. Skilled photographers make great images with whatever camera is in their hands; I've made some of my best images of all time with an irreparably broken camera! Most pixels are thrown away before you see them, but camera makers don't want you to know that. A potential handling disappointment, compared with the older F-mount lens, is that auto/manual focus and VR on/off switches are omitted. You therefore need to resort to in-camera menus to make any changes, which can be relatively time-consuming and a bit of a bother. An upside shared with other budget Z-mount lenses is that the control ring nominally used for manual focusing can be assigned to various other functions when in autofocus mode. In-camera menus make a variety of options available, including control over aperture, exposure compensation and ISO setting. It’s particularly useful for applying stepless aperture changes when shooting video. Nikon Z DX 18-140mm f/3.5-6.3 VR: PERFORMANCEUsed on an FX body, the sensor will be cropped (most of the pixels are thrown away). It will look OK when shooting, but you'll notice the image sizes are much smaller than when shot with full-frame lenses on the same camera. The 18-140mm ƒ/3.5-5.6 provides very sharp results, at least as good as its recent contemporaries and better than previous designs in the same focal length range.

The Nikkor Z 28mm has a minimum focusing distance of 20cm / 0.66 ft with a maximum magnification of 0.33x. The 18-140mm is sharp wide open at all focal lengths, with a small amount of corner softness; typically, there is a large region of central sharpness (the ''sweet spot'') , and corners soften very slightly. Stopping down by just one aperture setting improves this performance; best results are obtained in the 35-50mm range, where corner softness is minimal. By ƒ/11, the lens reaches its optimal performance at all focal lengths, though for the mid-range (again, 35-50mm) the differences between ƒ/8 and ƒ/11 are negligible. Some might consider buying this lens to replace a pair of Z DX 16-50mm f/3.5-6.3 VR and Z DX 50-250mm f/4.5-6.3 VR zooms, often sold as part of a Z 50 kit. There are pros and cons. The Z DX 18-140mm doesn’t deliver a step up in image quality or all-round performance, and the build quality and handling aren’t really any better. On the plus side, the more versatile 18-140mm zoom range means you won’t need to swap the lens on your camera so often, if at all. Like that this lens has a proper metal lens mount even though I never had problems with the plastic mount on the 18-105mm. Maybe it is just a psychological thing that gives the impression of better build. The Nikon Z DX 18-140mm F3.5-6.3 VR produces quite nice sunstars when set to 18mm and stopped-down to f/22 or greater, as shown below. Flare is well controlled even when shooting directly into the sun without a lens hood fitted. MacroWhile amateurs waste time worrying about lens sharpness, pros know that lens sharpness has little to do with making sharp pictures. This said, the Nikon 18-140mm VR DX is super-sharp corner-to-corner at every setting. There are no problems here! Chromatic aberration is decently controlled, and really only shows up into clear visibility at the extremes (as in focal length and corners of the frame). All recent Nikon DSLRs correct for CA in camera for JPEG images, but they're probably not having to do a lot of correction.