Nikon Nikkor AF-S DX 10-24 mm f/3.5-4.5G ED review - Distortion

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Nikon Nikkor AF-S DX 10-24 mm f/3.5-4.5G ED

8 September 2009

Arkadiusz Olech

6. Distortion

The lenses in the Nikkor 10-24 mm style use such a mapping (called rectilinear), that tries to render all straight lines in the subject as straight lines in the image; at the given focal length it narrows the field of view more than the mapping, used in a “fisheye” lens and, in the same time, makes the objects near the edges of the frame significantly "stretched". It is worth going back to a primary school geography lesson for a moment and remind yourself a map of the world, created using a gnomonic projection in which all the meridians and parallels are displayed as straight lines. While near the Equator and the tropics the continents and countries were only slightly distorted, the monstrous dimensions of Greenland, which is situated near the Pole, will offend your eyes – on a normal globe it would look totally different.

Our tests show that ultra wide angle lenses don’t have an exceptionally high distortion level. It is easier to correct that aberration as the lenses’ zoom is usually small (on the level of 2x) and always operates on wide angles. The distortion is the most problematic issue in lenses which have to work as a wide angle and a telephoto – it makes the zoom multiple bigger.

The Nikkor 10-24 mm doesn’t fare well compared to its competitors. In its case, at the shortest focal length we see a significant -3.77% barrel distortion. For comparison the Tamron 10-24 mm had the result of –2.78%, the Canon 10-22 mm reached the level of –2.4% and the Sigma 10-20 mm didn’t even exceed –1%. Against such a background the Nikkor result is very weak indeed. Only the Tamron 11-18 mm behaved worse, but we gave it a very low score anyway.

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Fortunately the distortion ceases to be a problem toward the long end. At 17 mm the distortion decreases to an unnoticeable level of 0.48% and at the maximum focal length it increases slightly to the value of 0.74%. That situation is totally different than the Tamron’s 10-24 performance, which has, after all, the same parameters – it showed barrel distortion at the level from over 1% to almost 3%.