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| 11/22 |
| 2007/8/23-27 [Consumer/Camera] UID:47723 Activity:nil |
8/23 Dear Nikon experts, can you enlighten me on the complex
compatibility issues with Nikon G/E/etc lenses? I'd like to
understand how they fit/don't fit with each other, and
what features I'd miss (AF, etc) I'd miss if I don't fit
them correctly. The whole Nikon thing's pretty
DAMN COMPLICATED, compared to Pentax. -Old Pentax expert guy
\_ http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/1224.htm
Scroll to the alphabet soup. Also look at the history:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/dslr.htm
http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/nikortek.htm
The main website's pretty good too.
\- if you arent buying/inheriting old lenses the only thing
you need to be aware of is D and G. The Nikon mounts are all
the same physically [unlike Canon]. G lenses are "cheaper" and for
digital only. The differences are for the lenses that will
with for digital sensors size only and the full frame, and some
of the cheepers digital lenses dont have an aperture control ring,
you can only control aperture form the dial on the camera body.
now once you get into the most complicated bodies [F200, F5, F6]
and the advanced metering, then you get into the super-complicated
lens by lens, but by and large if you get lenses the same vintage
as camera bodies things generally work. i assume the "problem you
are trying to solve" is something narrow and not "i am trying to
understand everything about nikon lenses and bodies".
\_ G lenses are not for digital bodies only. The F6, for example,
is a film body and it works with G lenses. DX lenses, on the
other hand, are for digital bodies only, because the image that
they project only covers the size of Nikon's "DX format"
(16mm x 24mm), i.e. the image sensor size in Nikon's current
digital SLRs. You can still use DX lenses on film bodies, but
you'll get a vignetting effect because a 35mm film frame is
24mm x 36mm. (BTW, the upcoming D3 digital body will have a
24mm x 36mm image sensor.) --- yuen
\- oh sorry, that;s right. the 3 series to concern yourself with
are D, DX and G. but best is to research hold the body to
a small set and concern yourself with a small set of lenses.
like if you dont even have a film camera, you dont haev to
researc the "partial functionality" of the DX zooms. [those
series refer to slightly different things. G refers to lens
design and D to focusing, so G lenses are D w.r.t. to metering
and such].
\_ i agree that Nikon has made their lenses a lot more complicated
than they should. They should of stuck with the gun and
be compatible with everything from AI and down. Since I
am an old school, I want two things: 1. all my lenses should be
compatible with 135 frame size (e.g. full frame" 2. I want
to be able to adjust aperature on the aperature ring on the lens
Because I want these two things, I just avoid any DX or G lens.
DX == APS frame size lens which would make lenses useless once
the frame size increases in camera (e.g. D3). G lenses doesn't
have the mechanical aperature ring, which means you need to
use camera's dial and buttons to adjust it. Nothing wrong with
that per se, just that i find it less intuitive than the good
old mechanical ring.
Then again, Pentax is not exactly easy to figure out neither.
what is the difference between K-, KA-, KAF-, KAF2 and regular
"K" mount? kngharv |
| 11/22 |
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| www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/1224.htm I don't need a tripod with this lens: digital SLRs look great at higher ISOs and these short focal lengths allow long exposures with sharp results, so all those night shots were shot hand-held while walking around! This was the first true ultra wide zoom available for any mainstream DSLR. It was announced at PMA in February 2003 and was hard to find for a year. This special lens has a much shorter range of focal lengths than other wide angle lenses in order to give really wide images on the Nikon digital SLR cameras, as well as Fuji cameras based on the Nikon DX sensor sized cameras. If I hadn't already bought and prefer the Nikon and its focusing I'd probably own the Tokina. Dead last would be the Tamron, which is a cheap-feeling lens with the smallest zoom range, slowest aperture and highest price of these three. All of these three off-brands are half the Nikon's cost at about $500. I doubt there's much optical performance difference between the Nikon and Tokina. The Tokina seems to be metal and the Nikon is good plastic. The Nikon offers much sweeter focusing with no need for switching between manual and AF, but if money is an issue I suggest getting one of these. Skip the zoom that comes with your camera and get one of these instead. The Canon is the best lens in this range with much less distortion than the Nikon, but doesn't fit my Nikon cameras. Forget the huge, bulbous and slower Sigma 12 - 24 unless you also want to run it on a film camera. Focus: Internal true Silent Wave Motor (SWM) for fast, silent focus. The front elements move inside the lens with zooming while the barrel of the lens stays put. The lens focuses with only the slight motion of a few internal elements instead of having to crank the entire lens in and out. This means the front no longer rotates as you focus, making polarizing and grad filter use easy. M/A (Manual/Automatic) mode means that even while in autofocus you may simply grab the focus ring to make manual focus adjustments. Next time you tap the shutter it returns to AF mode, and next time you grab the ring you're instantly in manual mode. It's a somewhat complex distortion so it doesn't correct completely. Some almost invisible pincushion 18 mm: very slight pincushion. Correct with -13 Use between 15 and 18mm when you need very straight lines running along the edges of the frame, otherwise don't worry about it. Only at 12 - 14mm can you really see any barrel distortion if you're a professional brick wall photographer. Watch for the fact that the falloff of the D70's flash makes the lens appear to have more distortion than it really does. TRICK: This is a digital lens so I know anything you do with it is through a computer, so correcting distortion is trivial. here how to do it), and it also can be done with a little more work in older versions of Photoshop thusly: Expand the canvas size by 50%. You may have to play around a bit with the value depending on what you shot. Same file correcting the distortion as above with Photoshop's "Spherize" tool at -10% after increasing canvas size 50%. Note how the vertical lines on extreme left and right are now almost straight, but middle right now curves in a little. At 12mm it gets a tiny bit soft at the very farthest edge, something rarely noticeable unless you shoot test charts all day. On film (Velvia) it's sharp and crisp and contrasty at every focal length and aperture. It has far more sharpness than any contemporary digital camera can exploit. Nikon is getting so good at making lenses that there are fewer and fewer flaws to write about making my job here easy. Maybe when you get a 50 MP DSLR you might start having to worry about sharpness with this lens. If you're brazen enough to dare use this lens on a film camera you'll see that the lens produces the same image which merely varies in size as the lens is zoomed. The farthest edges of this image circle, beyond the angle seen with a filter, get blurry, but inside of that area everything is great. When used with a filter the area of blurriness is cut off anyway. If the sun or other point light source is just outside the image you can get two small yellow dots towards the edge of the photo closest to the light. Use your hand to shield that light and you'll have no problem. If you use an uncoated non-Nikon brand filter you will get a small ghost near sources of light. When shooting into lights take off the filter or use a multi-coated one. Coma: I see none even wide open in the corners, excellent. Use with on-Camera Flash This lens will cast a shadow visible in the bottom of your photos when used with the built-in flash of the D70 or D100 and when zoomed to about 18mm and wider. When used purely for fill light as a small percentage of the total light this shadow may not be visible. at 12 mm on D70 at 18 mm on D70 at 24 mm on D70 TRICK FOR USE OUTSIDE THE USA: Although it is a violation of US Federal law to use this product in a manner contradictory to the manufacturer's instructions or labeling, the Nikon 12-24mm works fabulously well on film cameras so long as you don't zoom wider than 18mm with a Nikon brand filter, or as wide as 16mm with no filter. Other brands of filters tend to be thicker and will limit this even further. It vignettes (cuts off the corners) when set wider on a film camera. Avoid 16mm since the far corners have slightly lower sharpness out that far. Tricky Deduction The Nikon 12-24mm covers larger formats than DX at proportionally longer settings, each of which gives the same maximum field of view. In other words, the maximum FOV is limited by mechanical vignetting, not the actual focal length setting. The circle of illumination at the image plane varies with focal length setting. From about 12 - 18 mm the field of view for this variable image circle remains about the same as the image circle changes size. Thus if a larger format CCD Nikon camera were to be introduced you'd still get the same ultrawide view at some setting. The only thing you'd lose is the ability to zoom in to a narrower field, since the longest the lens goes of course is 24 mm. Thus all you'd lose is the effective zoom ratio at longer settings if you put this on a digital cam, like the Kodak SLR/n, with an oversized sensor or a 35mm film camera. I've been expecting Nikon to copy my idea of Digiwide manual-focus prime lenses for digital SLRs, and Nikon finally did it as a zoom. Popular Photography reviewed this 12-24mm on page 51 of their January 2005 issue. This 12-24mm and a telephoto or medium zoom are the only lenses you'll need for a DSLR. |
| www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/dslr.htm It helps me publish this site when you get yours from those links, too. INTRODUCTION This is an historical summary of Nikon DSLRs, along with my suggestions on buying them used. Click the links to individual reviews for details and comparisons. A camera introduced 2 - 1/2 years ago may as well be 62 years old. D40 for $599 can smoke any of the older Nikons, like the D1H. My 4x5" Linhof Technika and 150mm lens are 50 years old, and still in the prime of their useful life. Nikon had nothing to do with this, although Kodak may have used a Nikon lens for all I know. These and later model Kodaks were popular for some news events, but most newspapers that had them threw them away when the D1 came out in 1999. NASA had some Texans hack an F4 to fly on the STS-48 shuttle mission. It had a 1MP black-and-white sensor and recorded to a Texas-sized hard drive hacked to the bottom of the F4. It was the Texans who played Frankenstein with a stock F4 body. Nikon finally makes its first commercialized DSLR, over twenty years after America invented digital cameras. They were hacked out of Fuji bodies with Nikon electronics! Bizarre internal reduction optics helped restore the field of view, with weird effective apertures. About $20,000 and only 13 megapixels, which is why they don't count as practical cameras. It's also the first DSLR made with Nikon electronics in a Nikon body, by Nikon. For the same price you can get the greatly improved D1H or D1X, neither of which are worthwhile today either. The D1 is confined to the dumpster of history (and collectors) because its battery system is a pain, and its menu structure requires interpreting numerical custom functions. Performance was honed, a few features were added and price remained at $5,000. They both replaced the numerical menu system with easy to understand menus in English. The D1H kept the 27 MP sensor and increased speed to 5 FPS. The D1X slowed to 3 FPS, but increased resolution to 53 MP The resolution of the D1X is still decent in 2006. It used a bizarre CCD with twice the horizontal pixel density of the D1. Image quality was, and still is, extremely good because it had 4,024 horizontal pixels on the CCD. Bayer interpolation and thus has much better image quality than one would expect in its 3,008 x 2,000 pixel images. The batteries are huge, heavy Ni-MH packs which require constant babying in charging. The packs have protuberances which make them painful to carry in a pocket. Even a freshly charged battery would indicate almost dead after a few shots. Most D1, D1H and D1X users including myself lived with the viewfinder indications turning off, indicating almost dead battery, after just a few shots. Many photographers had to revert to non-TTL exposure modes because the TTL mode was so flaky. Dust was a horrible problem because the CCD cover filter was too close to the CCD. At almost any aperture you'd see dust clearly on the image. They were state of the art in their era (2001 - 2003), but that era is long gone. It was a sellout with long waiting lists for a year after its introduction. In December 2003 it dropped to $1,499 where it stayed for a year or two. Forget the D100, but snap one up if you can get a screaming deal.. The D100 required messing with a wheel and knob to make critical adjustments. The newer cameras have two years of extra wisdom in their firmware and just do everything better. The D2H was a new design with a much improved Li-Ion battery and a new flash exposure system. The D2H is a bargain used and a fantastic camera for sports. December, 2003: Nikon announced the development of the D70. Nikon had little to say other than the D70 would be cheap. Nikon made the announcement to get people to wait instead of fleeing from Nikon to Canon's inexpensive Digital Rebel. D70 at PMA It's lightweight, 6MP, 3 FPS and a groundbreaker at $999. The D70 is a huge improvement over the D100 in almost every way except having no accessory vertical grip. The D70 fixes the dust problem by moving the CCD filter further away from the CCD. This throws dust out of focus and makes it much less of an annoyance than on the D1 series cameras. Nikon was going to discontinue the D100, but instead decided to keep making the D100 because they discovered they could get a higher price than the D70 just because of the model number. People who equated price with quality kept buying D100s because they cost more. It's a minor revision of the D2H at a bargain price of $3,500. This makes a used D2H or new D2HS a great buy for sports. They are the same as the more expensive D2Xs, just faster with a few less pixels. |
| www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/nikortek.htm Introduction Nikon is the leader when it comes to compatibility among cameras and lenses of different decades. Most of today's lenses are compatible with ancient cameras, and most ancient lenses can be made to work fine on today's digital cameras. Each time they add a new lens feature they usually retain the previous lens features, so the newest lenses have long lists of letters behind them. One usually can ignore the earlier letters, even though they still apply. As we will see, today's AF lenses are still AI-s and F mount, even though they don't always list that. Some Nikon designations are mechanical, like F, AI, and AF; We'll cover that, too Other designations, like ED, are optical. Back to top of page F (also called pre-AI and non-AI): 1959 This refers to the original Nikon Bayonet lens mount and lenses introduced in 1959 for the Nikon F camera. This primitive form was used through 1977, when the completely compatible AI series was introduced. G, are still completely compatible with the very first Nikon cameras, given a little machine work in some cases. These original lenses required manual alignment of the aperture ring when mounting a lens on a camera to "index" the prong on the aperture ring to feeler from the light meter. These lenses today can mount just fine on today's cameras if you first have them converted to AI by a machine shop, although you won't get matrix metering on the FA or F4 or AF cameras. John White does great conversions and his site provides lots of background on AI lenses. Most all of these lenses had, and today all have, automatic diaphragms. The diaphragm is held open against spring pressure while you are viewing the image. When a photo is taken that lever in the camera releases this pin. The lens very quickly stops down to the aperture you have set on the lens (or set by the camera's automation), until the pin again is pushed by the camera to open the diaphragm after the photo is made. Back to top of page AI, "Automatic Indexing," 1977 This was a real advance in 1977. For once you could mount lenses with one twist, and NOT have to twiddle the aperture ring separately each time. Nikon also would convert pre-AI, also called non-AI, lenses for about $20 each so they would work with the new AI compatible cameras. John White does these conversions to update pre-1977 lenses for use on almost all of today's Nikon cameras. All AI lenses are also F mount lenses and fit onto every Nikon SLR camera ever made. The cheaper AF lose metering ability with these manual focus lenses. They are mostly the same as the newer AI-s versions made today, but you can get them less expensively. Today AI lenses can be bought very cheap, and they are often far better made mechanically than many of even the "professional" AF lenses of today. There are no different significant features available between AI and AI-s lenses. The only functional difference is if you have an FA camera, on which only AI-s lenses of 135mm and longer will automatically trigger the high-speed program. AI lenses will all work on the standard program, which I prefer anyway. All AI lenses give matrix metering only on the F4 and FA, as well as all Manual, Shutter-preferred , Aperture-preferred and Program modes on the FA. These manual focus lenses only give give center weighted and spot metering in manual and A modes on most AF cameras. Older non-AI lenses converted to AI will not give matrix metering on the FA and F4 unless one adds the special absolute aperture coupling lug to the mount, something that is not part of the usual conversion. The AI mount even includes (to this day) mechanical lugs that tell the camera the focal length of the lens. Nikon snuck that in there for future cameras that may have taken advantage of that, but none of those cameras were ever built. Today all this information is coupled electronically to the AF cameras by AF lenses. The AF cameras do not read these lugs, because it costs more to put mechanical feelers in the camera. That is the reason you can't get matrix metering with manual focus lenses on any AF camera except the F4. It's also the reason some AF cameras can't even meter with manual focus lenses. It's just because Nikon cheaped out, preferring to have you have to buy new AF lenses instead. To Nikon's credit, newer lenses usually always work with older cameras, but newer cameras don't always work with older lenses. The other two ways to identify AI-s as opposed to AI are: 1) AI-s lens' minimum aperture (usually 16 or 22) is marked in orange. The "s" means that the actuation of the diaphragm was linearized with respect to the position of the automatic diaphragm pin. This is very important for AF cameras because they have have open-loop exposure control that depends on the aperture being exactly correct or else your exposure will be off. Aperture Calibration" below) Some manual-focus, auto-exposure cameras like the FA use closed-loop exposure control. That means that they make the actual exposure measurement in the instant AFTER the lens stops down but before the mirror flips up, and means that they will automatically compensate for any inaccuracy in the lens diaphragm actuation. Adding linearization to the actuation made it possible for these cameras to work a little more quickly when you pressed the shutter. It allowed the camera to get to the intended aperture a little faster, since it could guess pretty well where the diaphragm control pin needed to be and just go there, instead of having to release that pin a little more slowly while monitoring the light through the lens to arrive at the intended aperture by successive approximation. All this happens in thousandths of a second, and I've never felt any speed difference on my FA between AI and AI-s lenses. The difference would be in the lag from when you pressed the shutter to when the film gets exposed, and it all seems pretty instantaneous to me. Today some people think that AI-s lenses are required in order to get shutter-preferred and program modes on cameras like the FA. Nikon salespeople tried to suggest this casually as a ploy to get people to replace their AI lenses with new AI-s ones, and this myth still exists today. All AI, AI-s and AI-converted lenses work fine on the FA and similar manual focus cameras from the 1980s. They all, to this very day, have detailed charts that explain exactly which features work with which lenses on your camera. Yes, you can get full program mode on the FA with a lens from 1959 that has been AI converted, even though you won't have matrix metering due to the conversion. The sales brochures always choose to ignore telling you which features you lose with certain lenses (like the fact that new AF-S lenses can't autofocus on many popular cameras like the 8008), however the actual manuals are always honest. All AI-s lenses fit on every Nikon SLR camera, including AF cameras. Some of the cheaper AF cameras will not meter with these manual focus lenses. Back to top of page P: 1988 This was a kludge invented around 1988 to allow Nikon to milk a little more life out of some of its manual focus telephoto lenses before it could develop AF supertelephotos. In 1988 the longest AF lens Nikon made was a 300mm f/28 P lenses are manual focus AI-s lenses that have had the electronic contacts of an AF lens added to them. Again, these are manual focus lenses that are unique in their ability to take advantage of exposure and metering modes usually reserved only for AF lenses on AF cameras. Rolland Elliot adds electronic contacts bought as repair parts for legitimate AF lenses and fits them as best he can to manual focus lenses. This cool trick, for which he charges $80, also should allow your old manual lenses to take advantage of Matrix metering on all AF cameras. I suspect it also may allow you to get the Program and Shutter priority exposure modes, but no one has confirmed that. Nikon also until about 1970 used letters on the front of a lens to delineate how many elements it had. Back to top of page Nikon Series E: late 1970s Up through the 1970s Nikon only made very expensive professional lenses. Normal people had to buy discount brands lenses if ... |