The AF Nikkor 35 mm F/2.0 D is one of my favourite lenses. Originally designed for 35 mm (film) cameras, it has gained some popularity as the "new" standard lens in the digital age. On a Nikon DSLR with its DX-size sensor, it has a field of view (44° diagonal) roughly similar to that of a 50 mm lens on a 35 mm camera. With its wide F/2.0 aperture, and the impressive performance of DSLRs at higher ISO values, it seems ideally suited to "available light" — typically meaning low light — photography. For this to work, the lens needs to perform at least acceptably at its wider aperture settings, obviously.
The (rather unexciting) test subject is the same as that used for my informal test of the Tamron SP 17-50 mm F/2.8 XR lens. The lens was manually focused on the roof of the building, at or very close to infinity according to the distance scale. The image below is a scaled-down version of the first of the test photos.
Below are lossless 100% crops of the far left edge, an area close to the centre of the image, and the lower right corner (see red boxes in the image above). There are four sets of images, taken at apertures 2.0, 2.8, 4.0 and 5.6, respectively.
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| F/2.0 | ||
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| F/2.8 | ||
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| F/4.0 | ||
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| F/5.6 | ||
It's clear that image contrast increases and optical aberrations decrease when the aperture is closed, as should be expected. At F/2.0, the image looks slightly flat, and could use a bit of post-processing to increase contrast. Apart from that, the lens appears to be usable wide open, even in terms of corner sharpness, except perhaps for critical subjects.
Paul van Soest, November 2006
Equipment/settings used: Nikon D50 with AF Nikkor 35 mm F/2.0 D on Manfrotto 724B tripod, manual focus, ISO 200, "shade" WB, JPG "normal" quality, –1/3 EV exposure compensation. The 320 by 320 pixel crops were prepared using jpegtran to avoid recompression artefacts, and are exactly identical to the corresponding parts in the original images. No post-processing has been applied.
First published November 19, 2006 / Left edge crops added and minor modifications November 24, 2006
