Zoom-Nikkor 3.5/43-86 - As bad as they say?

[Oldhand]

Well I'm sure that you have read the same reviews as me which give this lens a bad rap.
It has been named by some as one of the worst 10 lenses ever made by Nikon.
I acquired one yesterday by chance and thought to try it out.
It isn't too bad - certainly not the demon it is made out to be.
Here are some quick images from this morning.
Some are wide open, some are not.






It has been suggested as a portrait lens.
I haven't done any portraits as such and only took a couple of images of LOML this morning over breakfast. I am forbidden to show the whole image but here is a 100% crop of one of them.
OK, I think.
OH

[scsambrook]

Those pics look okay to me - this lens regularly gets people parroting earlier bad opinions of it, but I had a couple, one many years ago and another more recently when I had a Nikon FE2, and really the only 'fault' I ever saw with either was the linear distortion. Which version do you have? My more recent one was the Ai type but I think the one I had before that was the first version. I've read that the optics were 'improved' over time but don't know if that's correct.

[Oldhand]

[iangreenhalgh1]

The first version was crap, the later versions were fine, as your samples show.

[scsambrook]

I really don't like to see decent things labelled as 'crap' . . . even if it's partly tongue-in-cheek. What first drew me to the 43~86 was what Herbert Keppler used to say about the original version in Modern Photography (I think, or was it Popular...?), namely that despite its theoretical shorcomings it was a very useful tool that gave perfectly satisfactory 'real world' results and let you travel light.

I'm fairly sure that the first one I had was indeed a non-Ai model and therefore presumably the original optical design. It certainly bowed straight lines quite a lot and wasn't really suited to architectural photography, but for out-and-about informal picture making it did a great job. 'Horses for courses' one might say

[iangreenhalgh1]

I've never owned one but the consensus is that it was a poor lens and was largely responsible for the bad reputation of zoom lenses at that time. It was introduced in 1963, which is the stone age for zoom technology. However, it sold very well and wasn't updated from the original 9/7 design until 1976!

This is what Ken Rockwell has to say about it:

[Basilisk]

Nikon's worst lens is still going to be better than many other lenses!
It just seems a bit of an odd range, and I would much rather have a couple of much faster primes; any of the Nikon nifty fifties and an 85mm f2 will have the range covered, and not take a lot more space in the bag.

[Oldhand]

[scsambrook]

Thanks to Ian for the summary of the lens from Ken Rockwell . . . his hyperbole might make for entertaining reading but I fear this is yet another time when his colourful prose misleads the uninformed reader.

Some of what Rockwell writes about certain lenses would amount to libel if he wrote it about a person. He traduces their qualities and bemires their reputations unfairly and unreasonably; balancing positive and negative isn't something which features in his diatribes.

His observation that "When people say zooms aren't sharp, zooms flare, and zooms have a lot of distortion, it is because this horrible lens set these expectations. " is, frankly, nonsense. Those of us who are old enough to remember photography in the 1960s will (or should) recall that the early zoom lenses for 24x36 format were regarded as useful innovations and their debit points of bulk and relatively small apertures accepted as acceptable compromises. The original 43~86 Nikkor was actually seen as a major advance in lens technology because it managed to combine a useful spread of focal lengths. reasonably wide aperture, compact dimensions and satisfactory optical quality - all at an affordable price. Progress in design certainly made the original inferior to later versions, but that didn't make it into a 'bad' lens. As Basilisk and Oldhand have said, 'worst' can still be 'good'.

[hoanpham]

I have the same lens, got it for free many years back. It is not a bad lens. I have some other primes that are far worse...

[ckrook]

You should always take Ken Rockwells opinions with a big pinch of salt.

The distortion is a bit whack but its easily corrected and I personally love the flaring!

[Gerald]

The Nikon 43-86mm was used by professional that shot slides. The 43-86mm was a slow standard lens that allowed a precise framing at the very act of taking the photo. Today it is best to use instead a 50mm F1.4 or F1.8 lens and, if necessary, crop later. The 50mm is lighter, faster and sharper than the 43-86mm zoom.

About Ken Rockwell.
The picture he used to discredit the Nikon 43-86mm is a bit dishonest, technically speaking. The sun was low but still very bright. The ground was much darker than the sky, what made the sun ghosts much more apparent than usual. Probably any lens would produce strong ghosts in that situation.

Ken Rockwell is a smart guy, but beware! His site has good information contaminated with some poison: it is not to inform disinterestedly; it is to make money!

Rockwell's site is basically funded by people who buy cropped-frame Canon and Nikon DSLRs with kit zooms. Rockwell always speaks very highly of this kind of camera and lens. On the other hand, he despises any camera from Sony, Panasonic and Olympus. He also hates lenses from Sigma and Tamron, but he likes old Tokinas. Obviously Sigma and Tamron reduce Canon and Nikon lens market, but Tokina practically no longer exists as a competitor to the big boys. Do you get the logic?

[gaeger]

I've owned both versions of this lens and have to concur with Rockwell. The first version was really bad, the later version was OK, but nothing to write home about. The reason I got rid of mine is that the focal length is a little odd on an APS-C sensor D300. And as one person above pointed, there was really nothing that zoom did that a 50mm couldn't do with one step forward or one step back. And now in the age of 24mp full frames, it really doesn't have an advantage over a 50. But it is interesting to use. If you're in the market for one of these, you should also check out the Series E 36-72mm -- a little more useful wide end, but not by much!

[Gerald]

Interestingly, Nikon does not consider the first version of the 43-86mm as a bad lens. Quite the contrary, the history of this lens is one of the tales of "Nikkor - The Thousand and One Nights" series:

http://imaging.nikon.com/history/nikkor/4/index.htm

If the 43-86mm had been an embarrassment for Nikon, this lens would not have been described as one of the legendary Nikon designs, right?

The pictures shown there are decent. I suspect the bad reputation of Nikon 43-86mm lens should have been born when people began to compare their performance with that of a standard lens at F4 or F5.6. Obviously the prime lens was always much better. Remember that until then there were practically no zoom lenses in the world, so people had only fixed focal length lenses as reference. Moreover, zoom lenses are much more sensitive to decentering than primes, so the number of lemons should have been above average.

[iangreenhalgh1]

Of course Nikon won't acknowledge the lens is a dog! It was one of the earliest zoom lens designs and probably the first to sell in large numbers, so they will, of course, judge it to be a success based on those terms.

I know Ken Rockwell is very free and easy with the truth, but there is no denying there are hundreds of others who have also commented on various internet forums that the first version was not a good lens. Just read that photo.net thread I posted earlier, lots of balanced opinions there, most of them say it's a very flawed lens.

Of course it can produce decent pictures, but so can many poor lenses when you play to their strengths, how poor it is depends on what you are comparing it too - contemporary zoom lenses of the 1960s, contemporary primes or more modern zooms.

[luisalegria]

Interesting point re slide film and framing flexibility. That was a significant requirement back in the slide days.

Also notable is the fact that Nikon sales were heavily oriented to professionals. In particular press photographers. Having had a fair bit to do with a bunch of these guys back in the 70's-80's, of the "crisis junkie" sort, I can say that quibbles (beyond a certain minimum requirement) about resolution, distortion, not so good corners, etc. were secondary. Getting the picture reliably was paramount. Reproduction in newspapers and magazines was not really such a quality constraint, or at least it wasn't usually limited by the lens. It wasn't THAT different from web display requirements.

Nikon can be said to have over-designed its lenses beyond what would be acceptable for the professional requirements of most of its customers.

[Gerald]

[iangreenhalgh1]

[Gerald]

[Oldhand]

This lens continues to satisfy.
Here are some images from this afternoon.
OH

[cooltouch]

I was new to Nikon, having just switched over from Canon FD, which I'd been using with a good deal of success, for several years. I had begun to buy/sell gear at the camera shows and I would listen to the chatter amongst the other dealers. And of course, the 43-86 was often discussed, and it was almost always denigrated. We're talking about 1989 here, ok? Long before digital. During the very early years of AF, in fact.

I'll always recall one comment, which to paraphrase, went something like this: "Do you know which is Nikon's cheapest good portrait lens? The 43-86 because it's so soft!" Followed usually by laughter. I wasn't familiar with the 43-86 then and in fact, I've never owned one, pretty much because of its reputation, I guess. But I recall thinking about the meaning of this statement, and I realized that it probably had a certain amount of ironic truth to it. Why? Because often your clients don't want razor sharp portraits. They prefer a softer look that disguises all the skin blemishes and wrinkles. I knew about that from experience, after a brief and unsettling foray into portraiture using Rollei 2.8 TLRs. They were just too sharp for the "over 60" crowd. However, for them, a 43-86 may have been just about right. One of the older ones, of course.