Fancy Lenses Be Darned

I was really hungering for a Nikkor zoom lens. The Nikon Cadillac zoom lens for full-frame Nikon DSLRs is the 28–300 mm AF Nikkor. The 28–300 mm Nikkor is about $1000 brand new, so it’s certainly not cheap.

But then I did some searching into the archives of Nikon lenses. I knew that older lenses still worked on my D750, and they were often much cheaper because they didn’t have the fancy bells and whistles of the new lenses. I found this gem of a lens, the Nikkor 28–105 mm. This discontinued lens debuted in 2000 for $275 USD. With inflation, that translates to an almost $400 lens today.

And furthermore, I found near mint condition Nikkor 28–105 mm lenses on Amazon for less than $150. What a steal!

I bought the lens, wondering if the image quality would be sub par. The lens did not have Nikon’s famous extra-low dispersion glass, so would the image be less crisp?

I noticed some aberration in the images when I zoomed in to see pixel-level detail, but for the most part the lens produces great images. Here are some of my first shots from around Singapore.

I’ve been quite happy with the results. Old school rules!

Oh yeah, the 28–105 mm lens is 10 oz lighter than the 28–300 mm lens! You don’t get all the zoom of the heavier lens, but I don’t really need that for most of my shooting. I spend 80–90% of my time shooting in the sub 80 mm region anyway, so having super zoom abilities isn’t a must for me.