Wide-angle zooms
Go extra-wide with your viewing angles. Matthew Richards searches out the best options
Don’t miss an inch of those landscape shots with these gloriously wide lenses, with viewing angles up to a ridiculously huge 121 degrees
The 1.5x crop factor of Nikon’s DX (APS-C) format cameras is great for extending the effective reach of telephoto lenses, as reviewed in last month’s Big Test. The flip side is that you’ll need very small focal lengths for wide-angle shooting. Most DX format wide-angle zooms have a range that starts at 10mm, equating to using a 15mm lens on an FX body. This gives a really wide viewing angle of about 110 degrees, measured on the diagonal of the image frame. The Nikon and Tamron DX format lenses on test all have zoom ranges of either 10-20mm or 10-24mm, but the Sigma is unique in going wider still. Its shorter 8-16mm zoom range enables viewing angles of up to 121 degrees.
In the FX (full-frame) camp, there’s been a more wide-scale increase in
A tell-tale sign of large, bulbous front elements is that most of the FX lenses on test have a built-in lens hood
viewing angles. 16-35mm lenses used to be considered ultra-wide but have been overtaken by Nikon’s 14-24mm zoom. Tamron’s 15-30mm lens almost matches it and, again, Sigma really pushes the envelope with its 12-24mm zoom.
Some lenses deliver a 180-degree viewing angle but these are curvilinear or ‘fisheye’ optics. They’re renowned for their extreme barrel distortion. By contrast, all the lenses in this test group are rectilinear, keeping distortions to a minimum. It’s sometimes said that photographers often only use this category of lens at or near their shortest focal length. However, many of the lenses on test give almost no distortion at mid-range to long zoom settings. You can therefore enjoy much less distortion towards the long end of the zoom range, compared to a ‘standard’ zoom lens at a matching focal length.
Another interesting comparison within the test group is that all the DX format lenses have variable aperture ratings, with their widest available apertures shrinking toward the longer end of the zoom range. All the FX format lenses are constant-aperture designs, maintaining either f/2.8 or f/4 widest apertures throughout the entire range. Naturally, combining wide viewing angles with wide aperture ratings requires very large-diameter front elements, especially for FX format lenses.
A tell-tale sign of large, bulbous front elements is that all of the FX lenses on test, apart from the Nikon 16-35mm, have a built-in lens hood that can’t be removed. This gives essential physical protection to the front element, as well as shading it from unwanted light entering from extreme angles. The same arrangement is used in the ultra-wide Sigma 8-16mm DX format lens. A downside is that these designs don’t enable filters or a filter holder to be screwed into the front of the lens barrel. However, Lee Filters has the SW150 Mark II filter system with custom adaptors to fit the Nikon 14-24mm, Sigma 12-24mm and Tamron 15-30mm lenses on test, along with various other lenses.
You might need to watch out for incompatibility issues even when using Nikon lenses. AF-P VR lenses, like the 10-20mm zoom on test, are only fully compatible with the D500, D7500, D5600, D5500, D5300, D3400 and D3300, and even some of these cameras may require a firmware update. In many older cameras, neither autofocus nor manual focus is possible. Similarly Nikon ‘E-type’ lenses and the Tamron 10-24mm are incompatible with some older cameras.