What is a tourist head?

beginners of digital SLR (digital SLR) will find that people have many nicknames for the lens of digital SLR, such as "tourist head", "portrait head", "landscape head" and "macro head". So, what is a tourist head? What we call a "tourist head" is usually a super-large zoom lens. Let's take a closer look.

At present, the mainstream of this kind of lens is 18-2mm (11x zoom), and some new products even reach 18-25mm (14x zoom) or even 18-27mm (15x zoom). Their greatest advantage is convenience. It can not only take pictures of scenery, but also portraits. Some shots also have macro function, and it is not bad to take pictures of flowers and plants or ecology, so it is very suitable for tourism, sometimes called "walking the world with one mirror".

Because this kind of lens is usually designed for traveling, the overall size and weight are not too much, and it will not be a burden when you carry it. So, they are a very popular kind of lens now. In addition to Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax, and Tenglong, Sigma and Tuli of the vice factories all have such lenses. Users of different brands of digital SLR can easily buy lenses that suit them.

Although there are so many advantages in the super zoom lens tourist head, it is very difficult for a super zoom lens to cover everything in terms of optical quality. Wide-angle lens is mainly to prevent spherical aberration and phase difference, while telephoto lens is mainly to prevent dispersion, so it is difficult to achieve the best of both worlds. After the zoom factor is large, the moving distance inside the lens group will also increase, which also puts forward higher requirements for accuracy. Therefore, if measured by harsh eyes, the optical quality of the super-large zoom lens can only be described in general, although there are some better lenses, such as Nikon's AF-S DXV R18-2mm F/3.5-5.6g IF-ED.

Therefore, for the choice of super-large zoom tourist head, some compromises must be made in terms of ease of use and imaging quality. However, it should be noted that the "optical quality" mentioned here is relative, which does not mean that the imaging quality of digital SLR using this lens is worse than that of consumer digital cameras. In fact, because the photosensitive element of digital SLR is much larger than that of consumer digital cameras, the imaging quality of this kind of tourist head is much better than that of most consumer digital cameras.