Not totally awful.

The early history of zoom lenses on 35mm film cameras is long and not distinguished.

It starts in 1959 with the 36-82mm f/2.8 Zoomar which mounted on the contemporary Voigtländer Bessamatic SLR. The Bessamatic used a leaf shutter inside the lens mount, a fact which made it difficult to make really wide lenses for it, but kudos to the company for retaining American Zoomar to design a zoom lens, and one with a fixed, large aperture at that.

Bessamatic with 36-82mm f/2.8 Zoomar mounted. No strap lugs on the body ….

This monster lens was an ugly duckling with styling nothing like the nicely finished factory lens range (35mm all the way through 350mm) and performance was so-so, but you could claim to be the only one on the block with this ugly duckling. Plus, the optic came with this comical depth-of-field calculator so that you could be sure of getting it right despite the multiple aberrations:

Included with every Zoomar, this DOF calculator. Reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove’s circular slide rule.

Nikon was a far better lens designer than American Zoomar, so when they first marketed their 43-86mm f/3.5 Nikkor Zoom in February, 1963 it was elegantly executed and matched, as a whole, the rest of the burgeoning Nikkor lens range:

Mark I of the 43-86mm Nikkor.

Nikon’s elegant solution to the depth-of-field riddle.

And the elegant solution to depth-of-field determination with those lovely curving, colored lines, was a first. A tad different from the Zoomar’s calculator!

Arguably one of the most beautifully executed of all Nikkors its performance was, by general agreement, the worst of any lens Nikon ever sold! Despite that, over 150,000 made it out the door at Kogaku, Tokyo. The lens was compactly sized and beautifully made, not to mention revolutionary, building on Voigtländer’s pioneering lead with something far more useable. This design comprised 9 elements in 7 groups and as Nikon’s site attests, the manufacturer was rightly proud of its achievement. The irony of the lens’s poor optical performance is that 99+% of images are now displayed on small computer or cellphone screens, for which purpose it’s perfectly adequate.

Nikon had another go at the design, releasing Mark II in November 1975, now with 11 elements in 8 groups, the description of the lens was moved from inside the filter ring to around the outside barrel, making identification easy. This was a much better optical formula and the beauty of the marketplace is that the curse of the earlier design similarly affected the market price of used Mark II lenses, meaning all are dirt cheap. Mine ran me $69 shipped, in ‘as new’ condition. Many of these have been really beaten up and I simply cannot see saving $30 on a beater when your pride and joy in a mint example can be had for little more. It probably makes sense to use a lens hood for protection as well as flare control, given how prominent the front element is, and the standard Nikon 50mm collapsible rubber hood HR-2 can be found new for under $20. Amazon lists an ‘Amazon Basics’ 52mm UV filter for further protection for under $6. I bought both.

An even greater number of the Mark II variant was manufactured with the last versions – mine – coming Ai equipped from the factory. The cut-outs in the aperture ring’s coupling claw for old Nikon Photomic metered prisms and cameras like the Nikkormats are there to throw as much light as possible on the smaller duplicate rear aperture scale which is read through the finder via a reflecting mirror in later bodies like the FM and FE. Nikon called this ADR or Aperture Direct Readout, a clunky solution to seeing the aperture in the viewfinder. It works …. in good light. As usual I will be discarding the claw after installing a CPU, which will allow the recording of EXIF data on digital bodies.

My ‘as new’ condition 43-86mm Zoom Nikkor on the Nikon FE film body.

Mounted on the small FE body the fine ergonomics of the body are nicely complemented by this compact and beautifully made zoom lens. The construction quality of the lens is exceptional as regards fit and finish, no wobbles, no rattles and the optic feels like one solid piece of glass and metal. Those are real, paint filled engravings you see, not screen printed garbage. Gorgeous.

I discuss lens correction profiles and CPU installation in Part II, along with test images.

An ancient lens made even better.

I wrote about the excellent standard 50mm Nikkor lens for film SLRs years ago here. That lens first saw the light of day on the Nikon F in 1964 and Nikon made hundreds of thousands of them, a fair reflection of this optic’s outstanding performance, small size and toughness.

The last version made in the classic scalloped, metal focus collar style came to market in late 1972 and was optically identical with the happy addition of multicoating for better performance when bright light sources were in the image.

I had given away my 50mm f/2 H to a friend when the 50mm f/1.4 came along, that lens’s greater bulk balancing far better on the large DSLR bodies.

The f/2 continued to be made in later mounts with rubberized focus collars through 1979, though the optical formula remained unchanged.

When I recently added a film era Nikon FE to my little hardware collection I found I was hankering for the original 50mm f/2 as its small size would perfectly complement the compact FE body, and managed to snap up a mint HC, factory converted to Ai no less, for all of $70. Yes, I could have bought a beater for half that but why would you want to save $35 and suffer mental anguish every time you looked at the scarred black anodized finish which is as ugly as it gets? Here it is, mounted on the FE, the satin black front ring denoting multicoating, replacing the silver one on single coated lenses:

The factory Ai ring adds a second row of aperture digits which is read by the small mirrored assembly in the base of the camera’s prism and reflected into the viewfinder. Nice – you can see shutter speed and aperture through the eyepiece.

Nikon has a remarkably honest assessment of this optic’s performance on its site here and their statement about performance accords exactly with my experience:

The very minor vignetting at full aperture along with mild barrel distortion are both easily corrected using my lens correction profile in PS or LR and, if you install a CPU in the lens then that profile can be invoked automatically when you load your images into LR. CPU installation is very easy as no machining is required and the ‘Dandelion’ CPU can be found from commie vendors on eBay – just search for ‘Dandelion chip’, all of $20. My link in this paragraph includes my installation (Part I) and programming instructions (Part II) and you will not find any better. I have installed around thirty of these and they continue working fine after many years.

Here’s how the lens’s data appear – automatically – in Lightroom, for images made with a digital camera:

I find lens EXIF data extremely useful in the image catalog for, when searching for some long forgotten image, I tend to remember the lens used more than anything else. In the example above the image was snapped on the D2x with its 1.5x crop factor.

Here’s the data on the lens correction profile – while the image was snapped on the D2x, the profile was created on the D700 and that’s what I put in the file name for the profile:

The 50mm f/2 Nikkor is recommended without reservation and can be found in any condition you like for very little. You get Leica Summicron performance for 5% of the outlay and if you drop it, heck, buy another. Plus, it’s better made than the Leica lens.

The f/1.4 is larger and heavier. The epoxy is still drying on the f/2’s CPU!

An old friend. Nikon D2x, 50mm Nikkor H at f/2.

And while I’m at it, if you want a truly unbreakable DSLR in APS-C format for well under $500, you can do a lot worse than the Nikon D2x, which is backward compatible with almost every Nikkor ever made. At 12mp it’s no pixel monster but that’s fine for up to 40″ x 60″ prints and, of course, you make those all the time, right?

Field tests:

You can judge the extent to which the lens vignettes from the sky in these two images:

Center and edge definition – note the EXIF data from Lightroom in these screenshots, conferred by the newly installed CPU:

Center definition at f/2, 48″ x 72″ print. Note the gentle rendering out-of-focus areas.

Center definition at f/4, 48″ x 72″ print.

Extreme edge definition at f/4.

Like I said, Leica Summicron optics at a fraction of the price. Comparing performance in the extreme corners with that of the 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor of like vintage, the f/2 optic shows no noticeable flare compared with the f/1.4 (probably thanks to the multi-coating in the f/2) and is one stop sharper, meaning that the f/2 is as good at f/2 as the f/1.4 is at f/2.8. That said, either lens will make fine large prints at full aperture, sharp enough to please all but the meanest pixel peepers.

Still in production.

The most remarkable thing about the Nikon Nikkor 20mm f/2.8 AiS lens is that Nikon continues to make it. It’s available new for some $650 – not cheap – and will work on just about any Nikon body, film or digital, since the groundbreaking Nikon F of the 1960s. This example belongs to a friend of the blog for whom I volunteered to create lens correction profiles for use with Lightroom or Photoshop to correct linear distortion and vignetting. As a general rule, the wider the lens the greater is the incidence of these aberrations.

My 20mm Nikkor of choice is the original and massive 20mm UD f/3.5 Nikkor which is nearly a half century old. Mint examples can be found for around $300; many are available and there is no excuse for buying a ‘beater’. It has outstanding center resolution at all apertures, with the edges catching up by f/8. You can read about it here. The current 20mm AiS is much smaller, and both lenses are manual focus only:

Where the UD adopts the early ‘all metal’ finish of the classic era, the AiS uses rubberized focus and aperture rings. Both lenses are manual focus.

Despite the high price, Nikon does not fit a CPU to the lens so the user has to manually dial in the aperture and focal length on the Nikon body if any lens profile is to be automatically recognized in LR or PS; the CPU I have fitted to the UD dispenses with this need. You can always tell LR which profile to use if you forget to dial it into the body or dial in the wrong one.

The owner of the 20mm f/2.8 AiS shown here advises that Lightroom CC (the cloud version) no longer permits profiles to be dialed in manually, but Photoshop CC does. So if you are solely a Lightroom user and need to manually input profiles, I recommend you use the stand alone Lightroom 6 desktop version, still available. Adobe really does no want you to do that, preferring to steer you to the rental model of the CC version, but follow my guide here and you can download it easily. Given that PS and LR are pretty much stalled and at the end of their development cycles, there’s little justification for buying the CC version with its purported ‘constant updates’. A disingenuous business model if ever there was one, but that’s Adobe for you.

CPU on the UD is arrowed.

Given the narrow rear flange of the AiS, installation of a CPU would be a trivial process, and I describe that here.

I created the lens profile for the AiS using Adobe Lens Profile Creator in the usual way, at f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6 and f/8. After f/8 nothing changes. Here is the profile invoked in the Develop module of Lightroom 6 – LR 3-5 will work just as well. The profile is placed in the User’s Library directory as explained in the above link. To ‘see’ the directory in Finder be sure to hit the ‘Option’ key when in Finder->Go as the fools at Apple have seen fit to hide it in recent releases of OS X.

Profile invoked in LR.

While the profile says ‘D3x’ in the title it is non-body specific and will work with any Nikon digital image, FX or DX (APS-C). In practice the profile does an outstanding job of correcting the fairly pronounced vignetting at wider apertures, as well as correcting the minor but very complex linear distortion which is of the ‘wave’ or ‘moustache’ type common in Nikkor 20mm lenses – both my UD and my (now sold) 20mm f/3.5 Ai lens exhibit it. The vignetting is slightly less pronounced – uncorrected – than in the old UD, but there is little in it between the two and after applying the respective profiles there is no difference in this regard.

The profile cannot correct for chromatic aberration and the AiS exhibits red fringing (the UD displays green fringing, by contrast):

Red fringing in the AiS at f/2.8.

A quick tweak in LR removes the fringing:

Here are the settings:

Removing the AiS’s red fringing in LR6.

How does the extreme corner definition compare with the UD? As my earlier UD review discloses, the UD is optimized for center sharpness at full aperture (f/3.5) so the corners suffer. Yet despite that the UD is clearly superior in the extreme corners as the image below shows. This would make a 72″ print and was taken in very overcast, low contrast conditions, a very challenging environment for any lens:

Extreme top left corner – AiS on the left, UD on the right. Both with lens profiles and color correction applied.

So maybe not all progress is forward. You get two thirds of the bulk and weight but lose corner resolution at full aperture with the newer lens. The UD maintains an advantage in corner resolution at all apertures, though the difference falls as the lenses are stopped down. While I do not publish them here, center resolution of the UD is 1 stop better than for the AiS through f/5.6, after which the two lenses are identical.

You can download the lens correction profile for the 20mm AiS Nikkor by looking for it here.

Here’s a far better illustration of how the ‘wave distortion’, seemingly common to 20mm Nikkors, is corrected. These were taken by the lens’s owner:

No profile – see how the lintel drops then rises – top right hand corner.

With profile. Red chromatic aberration remains to be corrected but the ‘wave’ is gone.