Quick question about lenses

N

naveenmedia

Active member
I'm looking at Nikon lenses for a 35mm adapter kit (haven't decided on which adapter yet).

Some lenses are listed as being for film cameras. Others are listed as digital or film. Which type should I go with? Does it matter?

Thanks,
Naveen
 
In the case of Nikon, you'll want to avoid their "digital lenses" (the DX series) for use on an adapter. The reason is that DX lenses use a smaller image size that corresponds to DSLRs rather than full-frame 35mm cameras. When you put a film lens on a digital body, there's a crop factor (typically something like 1.5x) so a 50mm becomes a 75mm in terms of its field of view. DX lenses are designed so that, on a DSLR, a 50mm remains a 50mm and so on.

The end result of this is that you will have to zoom in further on your camera's lens to fill the image coming from the adapter. Assuming you can zoom in this far, you will lose more light, and you may have more problems with fall-off and vignetting.

Additionally, most (maybe even all, I'm not sure) DX lenses are auto-focus capable, which makes them automatically more expensive, and it's a feature you won't be able to use with the adapter. Also, because of the emphasis on AF, most of these lenses have really poor manual focus rings with only a little distance to rack from one end to the other, making focus pulls really difficult. Lastly, the DX lenses often do not have manual aperture control on the lens body, instead letting the camera body set it. It's possible to overcome this but the solution effectively means you'll always be shooting wide open, which is undesirable if you want to control your depth of field.

Bottom line, you'll save money and get better quality in general if you stick with non-DX film lenses. Above all, you want fast lenses, meaning f-stops in the neighborhood of f/1.2 to f/2.8 or thereabouts. Any Nikon lens that uses an f-mount (which is to say pretty much all of them) will work fine on any of the adapters.

Hope that helps!
 
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