Nikon 17-35mm f/2.8

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Nikon 17-35mm f/2.8 D AF-S. enlarge. I'd get it here, here or here. It helps me keep adding to this site when you get yours from those links, too.

This is a spectacular lens. It outperforms the fixed 20mm AF lens it replaces for me.

This lens takes full advantage of all the things Nikon has learned about lens design and manufacturing in the past 20 years since they last redesigned their fixed focal length wide angle lenses. It is better than any of my fixed focal length Nikkors.

It's sharp at all apertures, has great ghost resistance, less falloff than fixed lenses, only moderate distortion, is built like a tank and weighs about as much, too. It's made of solid painted metal, not the toy-store painted plastic that everything else from the Orient is today.

Being an AF-S lens means that one may grab the focus ring at any time to take immediate manual control of the focusing.

It focuses to within just a few inches of the front of the lens at all focal lengths.

If you don't mind the significant weight and price, just go get one and skip the rest of the review. All I'm going to do is find some minutiae to whine about. This lens ROCKS for film cameras. This lens is fantastic for FX Digital and film cameras like the D3. It is not a wide angle lens for DX digital cameras; for DX digital cameras get the 12-24 mm DX instead.

The finish is not "Armourlite" or "synthetic leather" or any of the other weird things I've read in the sales brochures. It's just semi-matte black paint over metal. It is more slippery than the traditional crinkle paint I would prefer. This is an easy lens to drop while handling due to the very high weight concentration and slippery finish.

It has thirteen elements in ten groups, including three aspherical elements. Two of these are molded aspherics, and one is a "composite." Composite means a piece of plastic glued to a glass substrate.

It focuses as close as 0.28m or 1 foot. This is a lot closer than you think: that distance is measured from the film plane (the back of the camera). At the one foot indicated focus distance the front of the lens is only inches away from your subject.

It's huge: 3.3" (84mm) around by 4.2" (107mm) long and it weighs 26 oz (750g), whihc is still much less than the 14-24mm AF-S.

It comes with a flashy scalloped HB-23 hood you safely can leave home. Your hand makes a better sunshade when you need it. This is the same hood as the 18-35AF.

It has an outstanding nine-bladed rounded diaphragm stopping down to f/22. It's pretty round as small as about f/8.

The 17-35 is very, very well made. Even the filter threads are metal and the focal length markings are engraved as they ought to be. If you worry about wanting your expensive lenses to feel that way, this is for you.

Feeling how heavy this pig is makes me wonder if I ought to stop whining about all the plastic on other lenses like the 80-200 AF-S. It's a pain to carry around just for fun.

As with most zoom lenses, there is a little klunking when you shake the lens. There also is a tiny bit of rotational play in the zoom ring. This is normal. There is no play in the focus ring, which is impressive. As other AF-S lenses, the focus rings turns continuously even after you hit either end of the focus range.

This is an unusually good performer. In fact, it's sharper than any fixed 20mm lens I've used and has less falloff at f/2.8, too!

It's very sharp at almost all apertures and focal lengths, although gets a little soft in the far corners at the wider settings at f/2.8 if you are into shooting brick walls. It's still sharper there than a direct comparison to my AF 20mm f/2.8. Bravo!

Oddly, the first sample I bought was soft at the 28mm setting (only) at f/2.8 due to autofocus inaccuracy. The replacement is fine.

Performance can vary shot-to-shot. There are so many groups of elements moving around that sometimes you don't get the same sharpness due to the tolerances in all the cams. If you are worried, refocus and rezoom and reshoot as insurance.

This is screwy. Sometimes you will have unsharp regions of the image if you shoot at f/5.6 and larger. It seems OK all the time at f/8 and smaller.

It usually is spectacular, however on occasion one will get an image with one corner or side soft for no particular reason at the larger apertures. I don't see this at the smaller apertures, and I have seen this oddness on different samples.

People who don't shoot much misinterpret this as permanent decentering of the lens in manufacture.

Therefore, people who shoot only a couple of rolls with this lens for a "test" may think they are seeing variation from lens to lens sample, whereas in fact I have seen no real variation between the three or four samples I've tried. I have seen variations between the exact same shots repeated from one frame to the next with the very same lens and subject. In other words, any lens you buy should be just great.

In making direct comparison shots to my 20/2.8 AF the 17-35 is usually is better, but not always. The 20AF is a little sharper at f/2.8 in the center, and the zoom is sharper throughout most of the image, especially the corners.

The only way to see any lack of sharpness is to go out of your way to shoot the lens at large apertures in the middle of the day, which only idiots do. This lens is exquisitely sharp in all real shooting.

Freedom from flare and ghosting is excellent. It is as good or better than my fixed 20mm lenses. This is quite different than reported by a Nikon spokesmodel who thought it was as awful as the 15mm f/3.5 AI-s.

Put the sun in your image? No problem. If a bright sun is just outside the image at the short end of the range you might get two tiny, bright magenta spots that you also can see through the viewfinder. Just use your hand to block the sun. I don't bother with the silly scalloped hood since it won't fit in my bag with the hood on. My hood sits in the box for whenever I give this lens away.

Some people worry about this having bad ghost performance compared to a fixed lens without ever having tried it. That's not the case here, in fact it's better than any of the fixed 20mm lenses to which I've compared it. How can this be? Simple: because this zoom uses aspherical elements it only has as many elements as a fixed ultra-wide lens. The rest is luck and the possibility that the coatings are more advanced.

The use of fewer elements overall due to the use of all the aspherical elements pays the side benefit of higher light transmission and higher contrast than you would expect for a zoom.

It outperforms all of the fixed focal length lenses against which I compared it directly, except maybe the 28mm f/1.4D AF.

There is some minor falloff at f/2.8. It's completely gone at f/4 from 20-35mm. At 17mm there is still a little falloff at f/4 and it's all gone at f/5.6.

Even at f/2.8 the falloff is invisible unless you are pathetic enough to be photographing blank walls. It's invisible when making photographs of things worth photographing.

For comparison, one needs to stop down the 20/2.8AF to between f/4 and f/5.6 to have as little falloff as the 17-35mm has at f/2.8 at 20mm!

Most pre-1990 design Nikkor fixed focal length lenses require stopping down two stops to eliminate falloff.

Even on film or an FX camera, the Nikon 17-35mm AF-S works great with no vignetting with one 77mm filter of any kind, even a rotating ND Grad or ordinary non-Nikon polarizer.

With three stacked 77mm filters you'll want to stay at 24mm or longer. This is great performance for those of us who love to use filters.

So long as you don't go out looking for it deliberately as I do, distortion is not a problem with this lens, as it can be for the less expensive Nikkor 18-35mm f/3.5-4.5D AF.

By distortion I'm referring to the lens design artifact that causes straight lines towards the outside of a photo to curve very slightly, instead of remaining straight. This has nothing to do with the usual characteristics of wide angle lenses in which the differences between near and far objects is exaggerated and people and things on the side of a photograph look fat and stretched out. Of course this and any ultra wide lens will stretch out people and flat circular objects at the sides and corners of an image.

If you insist on photographing architecture and brick walls and seaside horizons, distortion is typical barrel at the wide end, neutral at around 22-24mm, and pincushion at 35mm. This is reasonable performance, and great performance for a zoom in this range. By comparison, most other superwide zooms really are awful. If you are shooting subjects for which you need to keep the straight lines perfectly straight, just keep the lens between 22mm and 24mm and you are better off than if you used a fixed focal length lens.

Distortion seems to be the same at all distances. This is better than the fixed focal length lenses in which the distortion often gets worse at close distances. Again, 20 years of advancement in lens design shows.

17mm: Barrel
20mm: Mild Barrel
24mm: Neutral
28mm: Very mild pincushion
35mm: Mild pincushion

17mm: Barrel (same as $225 Tokina 17mm f/3.5 SL manual focus lens)
20mm: Mild Barrel, same level of distortion as Nikkor 20/2.8AF
22mm: Neutral
24mm: Neutral, (much better than Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 AI-s)
26mm: Very mild pincushion
28mm: Very mild pincushion
32mm: Mild pincushion
35mm: Pincushion

17mm: Barrel (same as $230 Tokina 17mm f/3.5 SL manual focus)
20mm: Mild Barrel
24mm: Extremely mild pincushion to neutral. (Much better than Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 AI-s)
28mm: Very mild pincushion
35mm: Mild pincushion

Even with the extremely complex multiaspheric design of the 17-35, the distortion is simple and therefore easy to correct in Photoshop using the Spherize and Pinch commands. Other lenses have complex distortion signatures that not only curve some lines, but make them wiggle. With those lenses it's a real pain to try to pull out the distortion.

For instance, to correct the distortion at 17mm as made on a digital SLR (16 x 24mm CCD) do the following:

Expand the canvas size from 2,000 x 1,312 pixels to 3,000 x 2000 pixels then, in Photoshop, do Filter > Distort > Spherize > -5%.

As with most, if not all, AF zoom lenses, the exact position of the infinity mark when focused at infinity will vary with zoom position. This is because in the design of a zoom lens one has a little slack in the exact tracking of the back focus. This is precisely why the lens can focus a little beyond the infinity mark.

The specs only mention the closest marked distances of 1 foot and 0.28 meters. Big deal, every ultra wide lens focuses this close or closer.

What the specs don't say is that the actual close focus distance is only 10-1/2" (27cm) from the film plane, which is only 4-1/2" (12cm) from the front of the lens.

The complex optics of this lens move the front nodal point (the point out of which the lens "sees") much further forward than compared to a fixed lens. Therefore one can get in far closer than one initially suspects.

At 17mm the smallest horizontal field is 13." At 35mm the smallest horizontal field is 6," a 1:4 macro ratio.

At 20mm the smallest horizontal field is 11," a tad smaller than the fixed 20mm f/2.8 AF lens that has a closer focusing. distance. How can this be? Simple, as mentioned above the front nodal point of this lens gets closer to the subject at this lens' close focus distance than the same point does on the fixed 20mm lens. This is that advantage of trying something instead of reading manufacturers' specifications.

This is one of the few lenses I've used that always can focus as close as I want it to. With most other lenses I often am limited by their close focus distances. With this lens you run out of the ability to light your subject before you run out of range on the focus ring. Bravo!

Nothing external moves when using the lens. The front group rotates and moves via a cam while zooming. The focus is entirely internal.

I've only had it out all day in temperatures as low as 30 F. It worked the same as it does at 70 F. This shows that Nikon is still using the good grease that does not turn solid at cold temperatures, as the grease in my Mamiya lenses does. Therefore I suspect the 17-35 will work great in any temperature you can work.

This lens is fantastic for FX Digital and film cameras like the D3. It is not a wide angle lens for DX digital cameras; for DX digital cameras get the 12-24 mm DX instead.

Except for the minor and occasional autofocus-error induced softness at 28mm I saw in only one out of four samples, this is a spectacular lens that outperforms Nikon's fixed-focal length lenses. How can it do that? Simple: most of those fixed lenses were designed 10 to 20 years ago for the relatively primitive manufacturing techniques available in the 1980s. This zoom benefits greatly from the manufacturing advances made in the past 20 years that allow mass production of aspheric elements. For instance, the current 20mm f/2.8D AF lens uses the same conventional spherical optics introduced in 1984 in the 20mm f/2.8 AI-s manual focus lens.

The plastic 18-35 is a better choice if weight is a concern and if you aren't photographing architecture. Go put one of these heavy 17-35s on your camera and walk around with it slung around your neck for a while. Honestly, I worry about this damaging other people's cars if it bumps into them. This is not a casual lens as the 20AF or 18-35AF is.

I get great results handheld as slow as 1/8 second. I think the heavy weight helps stabilize it against the mirror whipping of the F100.

It works great on manual-focus cameras. The focus action feels great. The focus ring continues to turn after you've reached either end of the focus range.

It's continuous close focus abilities open up new creative avenues that previously required extension tubes for bug's eye views. The biggest limitation is your ability to get light on your subject, since it focuses up to a few inches away from the front of the lens.

Most professional photojournalists and travel photographers who use 35mm cameras just carry one of these on one body, and an 80-200/2.8 on a second body. For these guys this lens is ideal.

Nikon didn't screw around here. If you need the best, don't mind the weight on your shoulders and the lightness in your wallet, this is for you.

If you find this as helpful as a book you might have had to buy or a workshop you may have had to take, feel free to help me continue helping everyone.

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