18-200....

nikon is finally letting dealers have them again, so they should be fairly plentiful. good luck with that lens

 

I had one on order for the exact same reason and decided to cancel for the time being. Bought a used 28-200, which is an ok lens.

 

Maybe the 18-135 gives you the overlap that would suffice?

 

Nikon have been shipping this lens pretty continuously since March 2006. They aren't meeting demand, but there are definitely a LOT of them out there. I see them routinely in the field now. If serial numbers are to be believed (seems reasonable, but could be fallible), there are over 120,000 out there now.

 

I got to put my 18-200 to work last Sunday, about 200 miles north of you in TC Lisa! My son had first communion. The FL range was nice, VR helped me in the dim lit church (no flash of course). Still working on my technique, but very happy so far. I was one of the lucky 150 about 2 weeks ago when B&H had them in stock for about 2 hours. I think this is going to be a great lens for school events. I was surprised that it was about the same size as the 24-120vr I had, I figured it would be much bigger. Take care, Bill

 

You just got to learn to peform a quick draw. I'm not sure how I have done it, but I can change the 18-70 / 70-300 without even looking - just a quick glance at the white dot and i am locked and loaded. The 18-200 is a true gem, I honestly think if I had one I could leave it on all the time and be satisified, however the extra reach of the 70-300 would be hard to live without now that I own one.

 

If you lived closer, I'd lend you the 18-135 for you to see if it would suffice or not. I don't use it all that often.

I'm curious to see how the Sigma 18-200 OS pans out in reviews. The only thing I don't like is the f/6.3 at the long end but I wouldn't use it that much towards that area anyways with the 70-300VR waiting in the wings.

 

I think I learned to changes lenses quick in fear of the dust monster  

 

I ordered one yesterday from Normancamera.com for $799. They were running a promotion for free shipping. They didn't charge CA sales tax either. So it was $50 more than B&H, Ritz, Onecall (with their promotional price reduction to $749), or KEH BUT it was in stock. Just a timing thing I guess. I was checking these sites and pricegrabber.com several times a day. Stumbled across normancamera.com. I had never hard of them but resellerratings had over 200 user reviews with an avg rating of 9+. So that was good enough for me. Sometimes you wonder about places you're unfamiliar with because sometimes friends and employees post bogus reviews with fake names. But I figure this was a safe call. I tend to look for vendors on pricegrabber with over 1000 reviews and 4+ stars. Since I didn't get the fated e-mail instructing me to call back for the 'hard sell', I was ok.

It shipped today. According to the site it's a 5-year warranty lens.

P.S. I still want the AF-S 80-200/f2.8 though. Guess I'll be scouring e-bay for that one.