Great walkaround but watch your wallet

This lens may come as one of the "kit lens" options with the Nikon D70, but it's far from a starter lens and delivers in spades for all but the most exacting photographer.

With a zoom range between the wide 18mm and the telephoto 70mm, it provides an ideal "walkaround" lens. Add in the digital cropping factor (which effectively multiples your lens by 1.5) and you are looking at a 27-105mm 35mm equivilent.

In fact, it's the lens I leave on my camera all the time and in all but a few situations does exactly what I need for most photo captures.

At its wide end it is ideal for landscape shots while the higher end of the telephoto takes in your popular 50mm head and shoulders shot and close in portrait at 70mm.

And although the lens doesn't have a macro function it's minimum focus distance is just over a foot, which lets you get in fairly close to subjects.

In practical use the lens is light and for those who like their camera to look good as well as perform, I think it delivers. It certainly complements the D70 styling as well as featuring the Nikon gold badge (just to show people you have taste!).

Despite its lightness, the lens feels solidly made and the added details such as a rear, rubber gasket to keep out dust and dirt reassure you this is professional gear.

The autofocus is whisper quiet and only noticable when you listen for it. As with all DX lenses, the 18-70 has a distance indicator - which not only is useful for the photographer, but links in with the "through the lens" flash and exposure metering modes.

Autofocus is also fast through the lens and rarely misses its aim. Some D70 users have complained of slight back-focus problems (the point of sharpest focus consistently falls just behind the intended subject) with their 17-70mm kit lenses but if this problem exists (and Nikon claim it is rare) it is more likely to be a body rather than lens problem. The lens has an easily flickable manual/atuomatic selector switch on the side of the barrel.

Zoom is extremely smooth via a rubbererised ring to the front of the lens barrel and manual focus via a similar ring further to the rear. The controls fall pretty naturally under your fingers and have the right amount of play and resistance to make both functions accurate.

My one gripe is the lens doesn't provide a depth of field reference guide on the lens. Admittedly the lens will allow the use of a DOF preview button on the camera, but I find this next to useless and still prefer the old fashioned method.

Image wise I've got few complaints with the lens. Colours are vibrant and well captured at all zoom levels and aperture settings.

The real lens experts claim to be able to spot softness in corners at some settings - but claim these disappear once the aperture is into the region of f/8. I must admit I've struggled to spot this on any of my images.

As long as I've focused on the right area of the image and not been too ambitious with shallow depth of field, images have been tack sharp through this lens and stand up to 100% cropping if necessary without losing definition.

All zoom lenses suffer some sort of distortion at the extremes of their range - either barrel distortion (what should be perfectly straight lines in an image bend out slightly) or pincushion (straight lines bend in).

Either my subject matter doesn't feature enough perfectly straight lines, or the 18-70 doesn't have a serious case of distortion, as I've yet to see an image with clear examples of distortion on it (four months so far).

If you get the option of this lens bundled with your new digital Nikon - take it. If you've not been lucky enough to get it with the camera, seriously consider trading in what you did get for this lens. For some photographers it is possibly the only glass you'll need.

Undoubtedly, this lens is a "starter" in the sense keen photographers may eventually outgrow it and invest in a series of prime lenses to cover their wide, zoom and telephoto needs.

For those of us who don't have the money, or the camera bag space to lug around half a dozen lenses, the 18-70 will make do instead.

Generic manufacturers will lure you with similar lenses for a fraction of the price and sometime you just can't afford branded lenses.

However, the 18-70's £350/$300 price tag is a bargain for glass of this performance and finished off with that coveted Nikon badge.