Much of my mail after this week's Nikon announced was filled with comments about the 85mm f/1.4G AF-S. The common denominator: "seems like film-era design." I would tend to agree. Indeed, all the recent new FX primes (24mm, 50mm, now 85mm) seem to be design dinosaurs. My sense is that Nikon saw all those old primes as superb performers not in need of much change. That's especially true since even the lowest body (D3100) now does chromatic aberration correction. There's definitely a bit of "if it isn't broken don't fix it" going on in these designs.
Still, one can't help but feeling a little underwhelmed that the only key addition in the prime lineup is turning out to be AF-S (and on the 50mm, not particularly fast AF-S).
Much of the discussion on the 85mm appears to be about why there isn't VR in this new lens. I've seen multiple instances of people saying that "you can't do VR for an 85mm," but that is clearly incorrect. What they should be writing (or saying) is that if you pick a particular optical design to use, you may find that you can't stick VR into that design. This appears to be exactly what happened with the 85mm. Yet Nikon themselves have designed and patented alternate designs, one of which does have VR in it. So the more appropriate question is why did Nikon choose to do a more modest update than an aggressive one?
Hints are in the Nikon marketing materials. If I read the words "portrait" and "bokeh" one more time today, I'm going to need to go out and use a wide angle lens on a scenic to get perspective back ;~). It simply appears that Nikon thinks the 85mm is mostly a studio lens, and a narrow-use one at that.
One thing that's becoming clear is that the way Nikon is updating primes, all those old manual focus AIS primes are getting more valuable ;~). Optically, the new versions really don't push the boundary very far, if at all. Having a true infinity and well defined DOF markings starts to look better and better every day.
Other quick hits:
- I don't know for sure, but I'm thinking that the AF-S on the new 55-300mm is more like that of the 55-200mm and not the 70-300mm. Slower focus motor, no manual override without using the A/M switch.
- My dealer reports that all the new lenses will be on some form of allocation to dealers initially. So much for my optimism that Nikon might have actually gotten a handle on supply versus demand. All but the 85mm should be available in September.
- Nikon learned from the 18-200mm: the initial 28-300mm has a zoom lock switch on the barrel.
- US prices: 28-300mm is US$1049, the 24-120mm is US$1299, the 85mm is US$1699, the 55-300mm is US$399. (Originally, NikonUSA had the prices for two of the lenses inverted, and thus so did I.)