AF-S Nikkor 35mm f1.8G Review

Zoom lenses have brought a new convenience and flexibility to photography, but they’ve also brought a few other things, unfortunately, including weight, cost, restricted maximum apertures, barrel distortion and chromatic aberration.

There are going to be quite a few old-school photographers, then, who are keen to see what this new lens can do. It’s not that cheap, admittedly, but it is light, and its fast maximum aperture should be excellent in low light and for producing a bright viewfinder image generally.

The pictures, though, don’t live up to the promise. How on earth has Nikon managed to produce a fixed focal length lens which still has chromatic aberration and barrel distortion? There’s not that much of either, to be fair, but it’s a huge disappointment to find any at all.

Or is this a case of rose-tinted glasses? Were old prime lenses really that good? A quick test with an old Pentax 28mm prime on a K20D body revealed the truth: yes they were. The Pentax lens might be 30 years old, but lines run straight as a die and there is no fringing at all.

There’s more. One of the characteristics of prime lenses is that they are slightly soft at maximum aperture and need to be stopped down a little to deliver their best sharpness. This Nikon 35mm is certainly weak when used wide open, and doesn’t start turning in decent  results until you get down to about f5.6 or f8. It’s all very well having a wide maximum aperture, but if the quality’s not that good are you really any better off than using a zoom?

The build and handling are fine. This is a very simple, straightforward lens design, so there’s never going to be much to criticise. It’s lighter than an old-fashioned prime, which is good, but the manual focus ring has the ‘disconnected’ feel of a modern autofocus lens rather than the direct mechanical gearing of an old one.

You do get Nikon’s Silent Wave AF motors, which is a good thing, not only because it makes for fast and quiet autofocus, but because it’s also compatible with Nikon’s D40/x and D60 camera bodies, which don’t have autofocus motors built in.

There’s one more disappointment, though. This is a ‘G’ lens, which means it doesn’t have aperture markings or a distance scale or, therefore, any depth of field markings. It really is a pretty weak substitute for the old prime lenses it seeks to emulate.