Nikon's 6 worst lenses: corroborate or undermine. Post yours.

All the lenses I ever let go, I did so on the basis of poor build quality, bizarre ergonomics or poor AF performance.i never came across a lens with such a bad picture quality that I had to sell it.
 
The Nikkor 43-86mm f3.5 zoom was/is terrible; throughout its range poor fine detail and soft at the edges in varying degrees according to the aperture and focal length used; no matter what combination was used it never sharpened up. Around 60mm was the best focal length and anything between f5.6 –f11 was ‘okay’ but no great shakes – and I’m being polite.

At 43mm it is soft no matter what aperture; at 86mm almost as bad. It has chromatic aberration and pronounced vignetting… I could go on. Not Nikon’s finest hour by a long way.

But I loved it.

Not for professional stuff but my own; the 43-86 and a 28 f3.5 were all I really needed when out and about… but every time I looked at the negs I asked myself: “Why am I using this piece of cr#p?”

I still wonder.
 
35mm f/2.8 AIS. Mine was so bad, it looked as if a soft focus filter was permanently attached to it.

That was sold and replaced with the 35mm f/2 AIS. This lens was actually extremely good. But, foolishly I read a lot of "truth" on the internet by Bjorn Rorslett and Ken Rockwell about how the 35mm f/1.4 AIS is the greatest of the 35mm Nikkors. So the f/2 lens was sold.

The 35mm f/1.4 AIS is an exceptionally sharp lens at f/2.8. At f/1.4 there is a lot of veiling flare. It has balls of barrel distortion. Women hated it (and me) because it made them look fat.

All have been sold and replaced with the Voigtlander 40mm f/2, which is a great lens from wide open.

As for the 45mm f/2.8 AI-P Rockwell hated its tiny size and high price. It is a sharp enough lens, being a Tessar. It has noticable vignetting until stopped down to f/5.6 in my own testing.

But, then Rockwell went on to go on a love-fest afterwards with Leica, so the man has no internal consistency.
 
When I saw the title to this thread, I had to read it to make sure that the worst Nikon lens I have ever owned was on the list. I was not disappointed -- it was first on the list.

Back in the 1970s when I was working for a newspaper, I purchased the Nikon 43-86mm f/3.5 mid-range zoom lens for the times when I only wanted to carry one camera body and one lens. This lens was a big disappointment for me.

The lens was too slow, its images were not sharp, and there were many times when 43mm was just not wide enough. In fact, the optical performance of this lens was so bad that it soured me to zoom lenses for decades. This lens shattered my opinion of the "Nikon" and "Nikkor" brand which up to that time, I thought was a guarantee of excellence.
 
narsuitus said:
The lens was too slow, its images were not sharp, and there were many times when 43mm was just not wide enough. In fact, the optical performance of this lens was so bad that it soured me to zoom lenses for decades. This lens shattered my opinion of the "Nikon" and "Nikkor" brand which up to that time, I thought was a guarantee of excellence.
Click to expand...

Well, it was only the second constant focus (varifocal lenses, where you had to refocus as you zoomed, had been around as early as 1910) normal zoom design for a photographic camera, after the Voigtländer/Zoomar 36-82. And while slower than the latter, it was not that much worse in image quality, and actually portable (while the Zoomar weighs upward of a kilogram).

Nikon eventually brought the 43-86 image quality to contemporary standards in the AI version - but by that time was too late to grow a better reputation, and its range was still too odd to be attractive, the more so as Nikon also had a 35-70.
 
And yet

And yet

kymar said:
Maybe Ken's samples which he "tested" for 5 minutes might have just been bad examples... 🙄
Click to expand...

And yet... a few minutes ago, you didn't know who he was. Do you have your skivvies on backward?

KR has saved me a lot of money by avoiding and or choosing to buy many of his recommendations. I particularly like his approach and sense of humor.

Sometimes it only takes five minutes to make a judgement!
 
Highway 61 said:
...
The Zoom-Nikkor 43~86mm f/3.5 gathers a worldwide reputation of being terrible actually, but I've never used it, nor seen photos taken with it.
Click to expand...

There are two radically different 43-86 f/3.5 lenses, 2-1/2 if you count the second optical version's IC version as being a semi-separate variant. Anyone who lumps the two major variants together as a single lens is simply exposing their ignorance of the lenses.

The original 43-86, distinguished by the engravings being on the outside of the front barrel and the front element filling the 52mm opening, is rather marginal. Given that it was the 2nd Japanese zoom for a 35mm camera, it is somewhat excusable.

The second version, which had a smaller front element and the normal "beauty ring" with the engravings inside of the 52mm filter thread, is actually a rather decent performer, far better than the original. It does exhibit some significant rectilinear distortion (barrel at 43 and pincushion at 86). The last minor tweak was to give the Nikon's IC multicoating which improved contrast, thus improving the perceived sharpness.
 
narsuitus said:
When I saw the title to this thread, I had to read it to make sure that the worst Nikon lens I have ever owned was on the list. I was not disappointed -- it was first on the list.

Back in the 1970s when I was working for a newspaper, I purchased the Nikon 43-86mm f/3.5 mid-range zoom lens for the times when I only wanted to carry one camera body and one lens. This lens was a big disappointment for me.

The lens was too slow, its images were not sharp, and there were many times when 43mm was just not wide enough. In fact, the optical performance of this lens was so bad that it soured me to zoom lenses for decades. This lens shattered my opinion of the "Nikon" and "Nikkor" brand which up to that time, I thought was a guarantee of excellence.
Click to expand...

Interesting - I used my 43-86 a lot when I was a working PJ in the late 70s and early 80s. Whatever faults it had were totally obscured once you laid a halftone screen over the print!
 
In 1981 I bought a new Zoom-Nikkor 35~70mm f/3.5 Ai. It was an exceptional lens. I sold it eventually in the mid 2000s because I wasn't using it any longer, not being a zoom person (I have a Nikkor 35mm f/2 Ai-S and a Nikkor-O 35mm f/2, several 50s and two 85mm lenses). Sometimes I regret it somehow. Yet, it was very big and very heavy. So I probably wouldn't find myself using it now anyway. I do hope that the Englishman I sold it to put that outstanding zoom at good use.
 
Ken Ford said:
Interesting - I used my 43-86 a lot when I was a working PJ in the late 70s and early 80s. Whatever faults it had were totally obscured once you laid a halftone screen over the print!
Click to expand...

Your 43-86 may have had one of the later versions. I have been told that the later versions were better.

Also, we did not lay a halftone screen over our prints. Our prints were put on a rotating drum and scanned to convert the image to a halftone plate.
 
sevo said:
... by that time was too late to grow a better reputation, and its range was still too odd to be attractive, the more so as Nikon also had a 35-70.
Click to expand...

Thirty plus years after I dumped my first zoom, the 43-86 Nikon f/3.5, I purchased my second zoom, a used Nikon 35-70mm f/2.8, in October, 2005. I still use the 35-70.


Nikon 35-70mm f/2.8 by Narsuitus, on Flickr
 
kuzano said:
And yet... a few minutes ago, you didn't know who he was. Do you have your skivvies on backward?

KR has saved me a lot of money by avoiding and or choosing to buy many of his recommendations. I particularly like his approach and sense of humor.

Sometimes it only takes five minutes to make a judgement!
Click to expand...

I do actually know who he is. He's just another guy on the internet whose opinions people hold in very high regard for some reason. I used to laugh when people would come into my shop hunting down a particular camera or lens because "Ken Rockwell says its really good". Umm. OK.
 
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