Hello, my name is Connor Clemen, and I’m gonna be doing review on a 12 to 24 millimeter Nikon lens. Now, the first thing I wanna go over with this lens is its size and its build quality and price and so on and so forth. Now the first thing you’re gonna notice of course is how small this lens is. It’s a lot smaller here than the 18-200 millimeter lens right over here. And it’s also a lot lighter. It weighs just a little over one pound whereas this weighs around 1 and a fourth pounds. So this is a whole fourth pound lighter than a Nikon 18-200 millimeter lens. This is a great lens for travelling, if you want to go light, easy to carry lens. So that’s one of the things I really love about this lens. Now we’re gonna go to cost on this lens and it is a quite expensive lens, it’s worth 900 to a thousand dollars. New, I would definitely not recommend you to buy that, that price. One of the reasons I wouldn’t recommend it right now is of course for its built. It is a pro lens but it’s not built like a pro lens, it’s a plastic on the outside, its zoom rings are plastic and it doesn’t have inner gaskets and stuff. Even though it is plastic, though it is pretty well built, probably one of the best built plastic lens you’ll find. The zoom rings feel very smooth when I go back and forth, found them very easy to move. They don’t make any noise or anything like that so is the manually focusing ring. And the zoom rings do not wiggle at all or anything and they feel much, and this whole body really just feels a lot better built than for instance the Nikon 18-200 millimeter lens, which is a little wobbly in the zoom focus, ,akes some noise when it zooms in and out. Same with the manual, makes noise. This just feels a lot more solid than this would. Other than that, another advantage of having a built, a plastic built like this is of course, like I said, the light weight. With the metal body this will be a lot heavier and also probably a lot larger. Since it is a plastic build, you’re gonna be carrying much lighter and much more compact lens. Now I just wanna kinda talk about the performance of this lens and also some of the features on this lens. First things you’re gonna notice up on the side here is a little button and it’s got the manual and manual auto focus button. Switch it to manual then you manually focus with this ring. When you switch it to manual and auto focus mode, you can auto focus and manually do it to. Now I’m gonna talk about a little bit about the zooming on this lens, it’s a two time zoom lens, goes from 12 to 24 millimeter like I said. And that’s a reasonably good range. It’s not a lot considering that the 18-200 millimeter lens has an 11 point 7 times zoom range, but it’s definitely useful if you’re into the ultra wide angle photography. It’s a very useful lens for landscape photography and also nature photography. But I would definitely probably rule this lens out for architectural photography because at the 12 millimeter end, it does have some distortion. Other than that, the performance of this lens has been reasonably good. It’s not the best performing lens that I’ve ever seen in terms of wide angle. But its decently good, 18-24 millimeter range. From 18-24 millimeter range, you're gonna get amazing quality, very, very, very sharp pictures. Probably just as good as any prime lens, from about 12-18, you’re gonna get slightly less sharp pictures. Especially on the 12 millimeter lens which is kind of a pity because most people get this lens for that wide part. But it’s still very good and it performs very well at 12 as long as you don’t have it at its maximum Fstop. If you have it in Fstop around Fstop5.6 to Fstop11, then the, then it’s a lot sharper than you would have it at your maximum Fstop, which is an Fstop of 4 on this lens. Now like I was saying about the distortion of this lens, on the 12 you’re gonna have significant barrel distortion, just noticeable that rules this lens out for architectural photography. However from around 14 all the way to 24, there’s barely any distortion after that. At 12 there will be minor pin cushion distortion, but other than that, this is pretty much distortion free. And compare it to the wide end on the 18-200 millimeter lens, the wide on this lens is not very distorted. It’s very, it’s hardly noticeable at all and easily corrected in photoshop, of course. Another feature of course on this is the AFS system which is almost nycord lenses. The significance of this one is that it’s very, very fast. It’s unusually fast. It’s about twice as fast as the 18-200 millimeter lens that I have here and it’s extremely quiet, I can't hear it at all. It’s so, and it’s extremely fast. It’s too bad it’s not really useful on this lens considering that it’s a wide angle photography, you don’t really need a really fast autofocus for this lens. But I just thought I would point that out really quickly. I’m gonna put it on the Nikon D80 body here, so that you kinda get an idea what it would looks like on a Nikon body. So there you go, that’s what it kinda looks like on a Nikon D80 body, and as you can see it does look significantly small and it’s hardly noticeable at all, it’s very light. It’s easy to carry around. I carried around with me all the time, like for taking long hikes or stuff like that. It’s really useful lens, or if you’re going on a vacation, and you wanna pack light, this is an amazing lens along with the 18-200 millimeter lens. It’s probably my top recommendation. My top recommendation of course is probably the D80 body and these two lenses. They’ll cover just about everything, and it’s a good 13.5 times zoom range. And you get amazing quality with both of these lenses. Now I’m gonna go back to the downside of this lens a little bit, and that of course is the price. Like I said, it’s worth about 900 to 1000 dollars with this lens. And of course, I don’t think it’s worth the money at all, I bought this lens on ebay for 500 dollars. So I saved quite a bit of money, and have been very happy with this lens. Either I would suggest you get this lens on ebay or used from someone else. Or you can get one at the off brand ones, one of the third party brands like the Tokina or the Sigma, those are the ones I would recommend over all the others. The first, my first recommendation will probably be the Tokina 12-24 and it also has an Fstop of 4, just like the Nikon right here. And the reason I recommend that is because it’s practically the same in all performances and built quality and features as the 12-24 and it’s half the price. It’s 450 dollars. It’s also very light weight and I think it even has a metal body on the outside. So I would definitely consider the Tokina, if you don’t wanna pay up for the 12-24 Nikon lens. Now the only real difference between those lenses is that the Nikon does have better optical quality. You will get a little bit better sharpness with this lens and less distortion, but it’s, it’s not very much. And if it were me, and if I didn’t get this lens for such a great price on ebay, I would have definitely gotten a Tokina. Now the other lens I recommend is the Sigma 10-20 millimeter lens. And I recommend that lens to people who wanna need, who wanna go even wider than 12 millimeter. And that’s basically the only reason I would recommend Sigma. Its image quality is not up to performance as Nikon with the Tokina and its Fstop also increases and decreases throughout the range whereas the Nikon and the Tokina have a constant Fstop of 4. Other than that though, the Sigma 10-20 does have the best chromo aboration control. So if you’re into that type of thing, then the Sigma 10-20 just might be the lens for you. Over all in the end, this lens’ performance was pretty outstanding. It’s definitely not worth the price probably, but in terms of how well it’s performing for me, for the price I paid for it, I’ve been very happy with it. For the 12-18 range, yeah, it’s a little bit softer, but it’s still very good image quality. And from 18-24, I am absolutely astounded with the image quality. It’s so sharp, it’s, compared to I 18-200 millimeter lens. At 18-24, it just destroys this lens. It just so sharp, distortion free, chromo aboration free, everything, it’s just great. And for those of you who want this for landscape type of photography and just wide angle photography, I would either recommend this use, you buy this use or you buy one of the third party brands. And this has been a review of the Nikon 12-24 millimeter lens.