Nikon D7000 Digital Camera Review

Chromatic Aberration

We saw a small amount of chromatic aberration at the smaller apertures that the 18-105mm lens was capable of: there was some aberration at apertures of between f/16 and f/32 in the middle of the zoom range. Chromatic Aberration is caused by the elements of the lens refracting the colors of light differently, producing a colored fringe on sharp edges. Overall there was little aberration with this lens: in the great majority of our images, the aberration that we found was barely visible.

At the 18mm zoom setting, the overall sharpness is good, with only a slight softness at the edge of the widest aperture.

Distortion

We found that the 18 – 105mm kit zoom lens sold with the D7000 introduced a lot of distortion into images, particularly at the wide end of the zoom range. In images shot at 18mm, there was about 3.5 per cent distortion, which is extremely noticeable (see the example below). But this is not unusual: we often see lots of distortion from lenses like this that cover a wide zoom range. Because you can swap out the kit lens for another, we don’t include this test in our overall score.