50-200 first impressions

mordor_74 wrote:

I had a good offer for a 50-200 (mark I, i think, but dont care since i dont know the real difference) brand new, boxed and untouched.

Today i made a walk and start doing some test to understand if i like it or not... I made most of my test @200mm althrough it is far from my comfort zone but also not the best focal of the lens itself. I use speedmode and 1/320 so to avoid blur problem.

I was initially very disappointed with the results which this lens produced. However, thanks to Raw Jaw's 50-200mm lens appreciation thread, I started using it more frequently to find out that it's not as bad as I thought!

Few weeks ago I made a trip to the Tatra mountains and ended up with taking lots of landscape shots with 50-200mm, as I didn't have enough time to get to some scenic viewpoints:

Hawrań/Havran and neighboring peaks, Polish/Slovak border.

Had I had more time to wait for better light and weather (Overcast almost all the time - the clouds only dispersed for few minutes every couple of hours on a single day during the whole week!), the results could have been more interesting...

I also recently used it for outdoor portraiture (75mm-100mm with fill-in flash) and was quite pleased with results! I was surprised even with the look of the OOC JPEGs:

Not quite my primary subject, but it's a sharp one taken at 200mm.

1) Resolution: i think that the 20Mpix sensor outresolve the lens. At 10Mpix it seems pretty sharp but at 20Mpix, 100% magnification it becomes a bit soft. Such a pity because it limit the crop capability.

You need to stop it down (I saw best results around f/7.1) in order to see its real potential. I'd say that up to 100mm it's quite sharp, then between 100mm-150mm it becomes "reasonably sharp", and after 150mm it struggles to produce a sharp picture (but please see below). It's a usual pattern for zoom lenses, which are typically better at their "wide" end.

2) Colors: as always, best color i've found are from the 20-50. 50-200 is not on par...

I agree, this lens produces appaling, muddy colours - I can't seem to get any vibrant colours unlike from my other NX lenses. I will try it with a polariser, but I'll need to wait for summer.

3) Size: 400g is a biggy lens. I found a lot of plastic so i guess that the weight comes from a good quantity of glass... I like glass! On the good side the lens can be handled well on a nx1100, on the bad side, i dont think that such a big lens fit well in the nature of a compact camera like an NX1100. I hope that Samsung will build a more compact lens, maybe with a shorter range...

You can't cheat physics - I believe that it can't be made in a much more compact form, especially with OIS.

4) Focus: it was a good day and i did not found any problem with the Focusing of the 50-200

I noticed that at 200mm it's hit and miss - sometimes the photos get blurry with no apparent reason. I think that at longer focal lengths you just need to focus on a small, contrasty detail and keep the focus square on objetcs aligned with the focal plane. Also, you need to watch your DoF and not trust OIS. When there's plenty light, there's a fair chance that you'll get a nice shot.

5) Corner to corner sharpenss: i will say, not that bad, better than the 18-55

I didn't notice any either, just some vignetting.

Overall i think is a good lens, compared to the average of this range and this price. I think i will keep it.

In fact, there no alternative in the NX system for me. The 18mm-200mm lens is being bashed for its subpar IQ, the 50-150mm S one is too big and too expensive for me, thus I'm staying with the 50-200mm.