Category Archives: Nikon bodies

About Nikon DSLRs

Two bargain classics

Canon 5D, Nikon bodies, Photographs

From the Big Two.

Now that digital bodies seem to arrive almost quarterly from the big manufacturers – and seemingly weekly from the tedious ‘instant obsolescence’ Sony which still gets very little right – it’s interesting to look back on the early days of full frame DSLRs. I was lucky to own both of the models mentioned below and would unhesitatingly buy used ones today.

My first serious DSLR was the Canon 5D and lightly used bodies now sell for under $500. Though the modest sized 12.8mp sensor is small by modern standards it’s hard to beat the color rendering and unless you need video or truly enormous prints (of course you don’t – face it, you put your stuff out on the web) the 5D cannot be beaten when it comes to price:performance today.


The outstanding original Canon 5D.


Barn. Templeton, CA. Canon 5D, 24-105mm f/4 Canon L.

Nearly every Canon lens is excellent and of the fixed focus ones the 35mm, 50mm and outstanding 85mm f/1.8 are recommended and very inexpensive new or used.

Nikon was slow to the FF game and its first affordable body was the D700. It came with a 12.1mp Sony sensor which was exceptional in most regards but especially when it came to low noise at higher ISOs. Those large pixels helped with that and, as with the 5D, low noise prints up to 18″ x 24″ were par for the course. $800 gets you a good one but insist on a Nikon USA model (distinguishable by the small ‘USA’ sticker on the inside of the body when the battery is pulled) because that’s the only kind Nikon USA will service in the USA. Alternatively, if you have a good aftermarket Nikon service shop available, provenance is of no consequence. There is a truly vast array of Nikon lenses from 1960 on available, MF, AF, fixed focus, zoom, you name it, any price point. The superb 50mm MF f/2 Nikkor-H can be found in mint condition all day long for $60 or less and you can take it from there.


The immensely capable Nikon D700.


Baby carrier. Nikon D700, 180mm f/2.8 AFD Nikkor.

The D700 is usually reckoned to have a shutter life of 150,000 – and replacements are cheap – with lightly exercised bodies a dime a dozen. Again, as with the 5D there’s no video, and the build quality is excellent.

No one needs more than 12mp in a DSLR as no one prints any more (well, I do and 12mp is just fine; heck the iPhone6 is good for 18″ x 24″) and both these cameras’ sensors boast excellent dynamic range, low noise and outstanding color rendering.

Some architecture

Nikon lenses, Photographs

A great way to end the year.

Few things beat a crisp, sunny day in San Francisco, and the city’s propensity for preserving its old buildings means more subject matter for an itchy trigger finger.

These were all snapped today on three classic ‘metal era’ MF Nikkors from my copious inventory on the D3x – the 35mm f/2, the 85mm f/1.8 and an all time favorite, the 200mm f/4, an outstanding optic for picking out gorgeous period details.

The absence of autofocus for this type of subject matter is anything but a hindrance. If anything, the more contemplative approach required is a benefit.

Processed in LR6, some verticals straighened in PS CS5, some juice added here and there in Snapseed.

Nikkor 20mm f/2.8 AiS lens

Nikon lenses

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:


The old UD Nikkor is on the D2x at left.


The current 20mm AiS optic is on the D3x at right.

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.


Top right corner at f/2.8 – no profile.


Top right corner at f/2.8 – with profile.

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.

A tale of two sensors

Hardware, Micro Four-Thirds, Nikon bodies

‘Good enough’ is better than good enough.

A clear thinking friend of mine has a simple philosophy when it comes to consumer durable purchases, and he calls it the ‘good enough’ concept. If it’s good enough, forget spending the extra for the top of the line model, the one with the bells and whistles. The marginal return is …. marginal, the incremental cost ruinous and the depreciation far higher. (This reminds me of Lord Chesterfield on the subject of sex: “The pleasure momentary, one’s position ridiculous and the cost? Damnable.”)

And I’m here to declare that Micro Four-Thirds is more than ‘good enough’. My standard for comparison? The full frame sensor in my Nikon D3x, the MFT one being that in my Panny GX7. For all of you who prefer wasting your money see my my product review of the Leica M240. Be assured that I not only do not own two of these, I don’t even own one. Nor will that change.

Some recent sensor history. Panny started with a 12mp design in the ground breaking G1, upping it later to 16mp which my G3 enjoyed. The practical change was that whereas 13″ x 19″ nosey prints were easy with the G1, the easy size grew to 18″ x 24″ with the G3 and later bodies. Nosey? It’s when your viewer sticks his schnozzer in the print and you have to get the cotton balls out to clean the surface. In the GX7 they tweaked the software a bit and got the marketing boys to do some writing, but to all intents it’s much the same as the one in the G3 and others, which is to say very good indeed.


The fabulous Panasonic GX7 – the best street snapper ever made.

Nikon delegates sensor manufacture to Sony, claiming credit for the design (eh?) and perhaps the best full frame sensor they made for the money was the one in the D3/D700. The D3x doubled the pixels to 24mp, trading the increased resolution for more noise at higher ISOs, especially noticeable in the dark bits of the image. The D4’s sensor improved a bit more on the low pixel count one in the superb D700 and the one in the D800 blew everyone out of the water where they remain to this day. But that’s pixel peeper stuff. In the real world of large prints, it’s irrelevant.

Why do I say this? Because I constantly print my images for display in the moveable feast which is the wall displays at the old manse. Coming on a round of spring changes, I have had ample opportunity to tweak and print images at 13″ x 19″ and, better, at 18″ x 24″ from both the D3x full frame body and the GX7 MFT one. In both cases I am using my favored focal length of 35mm FFE. The exceptional Sigma 35mm f/1.4 behemoth on the no less porky D3x, and the magnificent Olympus Zuiko 17mm f/1.8 on the GX7, with AF speed which leaves FF lenses in the dust. I suppose the weight and bulk ratio is some 3:1, yet I enjoy both.

Were cameras dogs (Leica’s M would instantly qualify for inclusion in the latter species, a frou frou toy breed, fragility redefined, constantly in need of attention), then the big pro-body Nikon would be a Golden Retriever. Immensely dependable, lumbering and stolid, it will never let you down, can take a battering from the kids and still emerge with an all-weather smile on its face. And it keeps going longer than you can. The GX7 could scarcely be more different. It’s the terrier of the camera world. Small, fast, high-strung, sharp as a tack, it demands a little more care and attention in the relationship but rewards out of all proportion to its diminutive size. And it burns out (its battery) pretty fast.

Those printed images? I rattled off a handful of 18″ x 24″ on the ever dependable HP DesignJet 90 dye printer the other day and, blow me down, I simply could not tell which were taken on the Nikon compared with the Panny. We are talking nosey examination of micro detail here. Which is another way of saying that the Panny is ‘good enough’, for the Nikon is way better than almost anyone needs. And my rule of thumb has long been if it can print at 18″ x 24″ it can print at any size you want, as the viewer is forced further back as size increases, mitigating resolution loss.

Ah! you say. But no way the MFT system can match the big, fast zooms available to Nikon and Canon snappers, the classic 24-70mm and 70-200 f/2.8 fixed maximum aperture zooms and the like. Think again. Have you seen what Panny and Olympus has been up to recently? How about Panny’s 12-35mm f/2.8 zoom?

Panasonic 12-35mm f/2.8.

Or their 35-100 f/2.8?

Panasonic 35-100mm f/2.8.

Olympus has hardly been asleep, either. In addition to their wonderful 17mm and 45mm f/1.8 Zuikos which I use, there are such exciting conceptions like these:


The Zuiko 12mm f/2.


The Zuiko 75mm f/1.8.

And don’t even think of asking about size, weight and price, because that’s a losing proposition for the Big Boys.

Finally, modern MFT ‘pro’ bodies like the Olympus EM1 can offer all the framing rates and weather resistance you need, once again at a fraction of the price. And so can the tiny GX7 though no one will take you seriously. Which is possibly the best feature of all.

Do yourself a favor. Put the fun back in your snapping and pick up something which says Panasonic or Olympus on the body and whose lens detaches.

Early MF Nikkor lenses

Nikon lenses

Nikkors in a bunch.

Here is my completed ‘metal era’ user set. I have installed CPUs in each and all have been converted to Ai indexing for the modern DSLR.

The designs are much of a muchness here, sharing looks and ergonomics, with but two anomalies. The 24/2.8 uses a diamond patterned aperture ring rather than the scalloped standard, reflecting the presence of a Nikon Ai conversion kit. The 35/2 and 85/1.8 use the original factory aperture rings which came with fluted machining for some reason. Otherwise all lenses use scalloped focusing and aperture collars. The 24mm and 28mm are the only multi-coated optics here. Color rendering across the range is especially notable for its uniformity, and I have published lens correction profiles for each lens, available for free download here.

Average cost was $166 plus $30 for the CPU installed in each. The total spent would buy you one ‘pro’ grade plastic fantastic current lens and will leave you desperately searching for repair parts when the internal motors fail a few years hence.

Age in years in parentheses. Click any link for the related review.

Front row:

Rear row:

The only significant one missing from the era is the 35/1.4. I have the latest 35/1.4 Sigma which is superior to the Nikkor. Also, I have avoided the more pedestrian variants – 35/2.8, etc. – as the faster optics add optical quality and performance. I use no lens hood on the 20mm, where it is useless, or on the 55mm where it is redundant.


Data for the lenses shown.

Each is used extensively, each is a joy to hold and behold and each is wonderful in a special way. No hood on the 20mm (useless) or the 55mm (not required).

Does anyone need all of these? Of course not. Three at most will suit any particular snapping style. For me it would be the 20mm, the 35mm and the 85mm. Yet I adore what the 24 and 28mm can do, would miss the 50mm horribly, the 105mm is frequently just the ticket, as is the 135mm and who could live without that simply divine 200mm? I would, however, warn you never to get one of these, because once you do, you will sell the garbage that passes for your current set of lenses and start getting pre-Ai metal era Nikkors, from the good old days when men were men, closet doors remained firmly bolted and women were pregnant and in the kitchen.

All of these are abundantly available used – mine came from KEH and eBay over a two year period, CPU installation is easy on all but the 50mm optic, the 20mm requires that you fabricate an aperture follower, and handling, performance and build quality are the best anyone ever accomplished. None is collectible, so you will not be competing with white trash collectors for these, nor should you have any qualms about gluing on a CPU and removing the useless aperture claw from the bad old days of film. Manufacturers would have you believe that modern lens designs are specifically for the digital era and if you believe that you can drop me an email and bid on my bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

To see my snaps taken with all of these on the D700, D2x and D3x, simply enter “Nikkor”, the focal length and aperture in the Search box.