As part of my "kitchen inventory package" my short stay agency gave me for my cooking, there's a pan. After a couple of mistakes (cough using it to heat sauce without adding oil (as instructed!) then not cleaning the pan up immediately) and much cleaning, I can now see I ended up scratching the 'black' off my pan.

Is the pan still safe to use, or do I need to buy a new one? What could go possibly wrong if I did use it and why?


Question: Why choose an 80-200mm over an 18-200mm lens?
Answer: As a really, really broad generalization, it's easier to make a high-quality zoom lens with a smaller zoom range, rather than a larger one.  Although it's really tempting to look for one zoom that'll cover your entire range of shooting (Tamron's 18-270 comes to mind), these lenses tend to be fairly ill-behaved over portions of their range (at least), and suffer from softness and complex distortions that aren't easily fixed in post-processing.

The two lenses you indicate are really fairly different; the 80-200 is a fast lens (f/2.8), while the 18-200 is quite a bit slower.  You'd be giving up a lot of optical performance to get that extra range, which is why most people end up covering this range with two lenses, more or less.