Back to normal. Review of the Nikkor 35 1.8 DX AF-S (and comparison vs the Sigma 30 1.4 HSM)

A “normal” lens, with a focal length around 50 mm was the “kit-lens” in the 70-80s, before zooms took over. The 50 mm had many good qualities. It was fast, sharp, compact and cheap. The bright look through the viewfinder and the shallow DOF made the lens very easy to focus, and you understood from the start what depth of field was about, and how you could play with it, sliding through the focus range.
In that way it was an educational tool. The fixed focal length forced you to think about composition. World famous photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, a master of composition, used the normal lens as his main tool.
Personally, I prefered a 35 mm on a 24×36mm camera as a normal lens myself, and so did most professionals. But the 50 mm was by far the most sold focal length for decades.
Now Nikon has decided to give us a modern replacement for APS-C cameras, the 35 1.8, which gives the same FOV as the 50mm on a film SLR (or a full frame DSLR). The lens is also compact and affordable - just like a classic normal.
As a side note, the 35 2.0 AF-D, has been around for a long while. But with the 35 1.8 AF-S, with its built in focus motor, also users of Nikon D40/40x/60/5000 gets the option to use a lens from Nikon with this focal lenght (the Sigma 30 1.4 also has a focus motor, and I will compare the 35 1.8 with the Sigma later in this article.) I also suspect that the 35 1.8 is sharper wide open, and the quiet focus is an advantage vs the screw-drive focus of the 35 2.0 AF-D, at least in my view.

The expensive look - cheap
In one of the magazines I work with there was an image a couple of months ago that draw my attention. It was a shot of a man sitting beside a computer, usually a very boring image, but this had a special look. It did not seemed like a tele shot, but the depth of field was shallow, and the transition from sharp to unsharp was extremly creamy and smooth. This was obviously not a shot by an ordinary digital camera. I checked the exif info - a medium format digital back.
I believe this is what we are going to see more and more. The professional look will increasingly often contain smooth subject isolation, and shallower DOF. A trademark of full frame or medium format, and a way for professionals to put some distance behind them from the sharp but often flat images from an average digital camera, where everything is in focus. I dont mean the obvious cases like portaits, macro or tele shots, but the subtle nuances in sharpness that makes subjects stand out and injects a 3-D feeling in ordinary scenes. We lost the look when we switched fast primes for convinent but slow zooms, another stop of DOF control was lost with the smaller APS-C format, (an additional stop goes with with the 4/3 format, not to mention the mass of digital P&S cameras with their very small sensors).
However, we can get a slice of that look back with our relatively inexpensive APS-C cameras with a fast lens like the 35 1.8.

Appearance
The 35 1.8 is plain, spartan looking, with the absence of a distance scale. The barrel is plastic like on other Nikon consumer lenses. But the mount is metal and the auto focus has manual override, so it is not the cheaper AF-S found in the 18-55 and 55-200 lenses. The focusing is very smooth and silent, but average in speed (just my judgement, I have not made any tests). The weight is low - only 220 g.
I mostly used the 35 1.8 on the D90 (below):

I dont use the D40 much these days, since my son has adopted it, but the D40/35 1.8 combo feels wonderful in the hand - simple, light, (combo weighs 760 g) well balanced, quiet and powerful with the fast lens. In the background a spiritual brother from another time - Nikon EM with 50 1.8E (an even lighter combo - 635 g).

The 35 1.8 on a D300/MB-10. (In the background a Nikon F3/MD4 with 35 2.0 AI)

Sigma 30 1.4
Sigma saw the need for an APS-C normal lens a few years ago, and introduced the 30 1.4. I have used this lens before, with my D50, D40 and D200 cameras. It seems like a natural contender for a comparision with the Nikkor 35 1.8. It is a well built lens with metal barrel, clearly a notch above the Nikkor 35 1.8 in this regard. But we also have to take the difference in price in account - the Sigma costs more than twice as much (actually closer to 2.5x the price of the Nikkor).

The Sigma is larger, wider (filter thread 62 mm vs 52 mm on the Nikkor) and almost exactly twice as heavy - 440 g vs 220 g. It is also more front heavy and does not balance as well as the Nikkor 35 on the D40 or the D90.

The auto focus on the Sigma is smooth and silent, but you can feel the torque of the large elements as they turn on the light D40 body.

Comparisions
The first scene (click to expand the images). All test photos shot with D90:

100 percent crops. Top row: Nikkor 35 1.8 at F2.8 and at F8, bottom row Sigma 30 1.4 at F2.8 and at F8.

My take: the Nikkor is slightly better at F2.8, at F8 they are equal.
Corner. Top row: Nikkor 35 1.8 at F2.8 and at F8, bottom row Sigma 30 1.4 at F2.8 and at F8.

Small differences. Maybe the Nikkor is slightly sharper at 2.8.
Next scene:

100 percent crops. Both lenses at F8. Top row: Nikkor 35 NEF/RAW, Nikkor 35 jpeg. Bottom row: Sigma 30 NEF/RAW, Sigma 30 jpeg.

Both very sharp, no difference to speak about.

Wide open
First I must mention that I have rewritten this part. In my first comparision the Sigma did not look good at the largest apertures in the first scene, and I made a disclaimer about focus issues, since I had got good results earlier in practical shooting. Then I got comments from among others the signature eNo which showed a link where the Sigma looked much better (see the link further in the text).
I made a new try with the D300 instead of the D90 but with same results as before. Then I tried to establish if it was a front or back focus issue, but eventually I decided to reshot this scene with manual focusing, using Live View on the D90 with maximum enlargement on the back LCD. The scene:

100 percent crops, Sigma at 1.4 to the left, Nikkor at 1.8 to the right.

As you can see the Nikkor 35 1.8 DX looks sharper here. For balance, you might want to check out a similar comparision from signature eNo (which I understand has a carefully calibrated sample of the Sigma 30 1.4). Link here. Scroll down to the images with the Peanuts-book, shot at F 1.8 with both lenses. The center sharpeness is very good on both. However, there is a sharpness falloff at the corner with the Sigma, the Nikkor is clearly sharper there (see the textbox below Charlie Brown).

Another scene, more “3-D” like:

Top row Nikkor at F 1.8 and 2.8. Below Sigma at F1.4 and 2.8.

Both looks good to me.

Another test at longer distance. A summer night scene (ISO 200, shot with tripod, RAW/NEF).

100 percent crops. Top image Sigma wide open at 1.4, middle Sigma at 1.8, bottom Nikkor wide open at 1.8.

Both lenses looks good considering wide open and almost wide open aperture, but the Sigma at 1.8, looks best with high contrast and crispness.
Both lenses at F 2.0, Sigma on top, Nikkor below:

Both look fine, maybe a slight nod to the Sigma.

Nikkor 35 1.8 vs Sigma 30 1.4 - my opinion
The Sigma is a lens to respect that has given me many good images in real use at large apertures. But the Nikkor is the one I am personally attracted to. The relative bulkiness of the Sigma makes it something you use a special purpose lens, while the smaller Nikkor is something you gladly have on the camera all the time. I also have problems with the fact that a normal lens like the Sigma for cropped cameras should be bigger, heavier and more expensive than a 50 mm full frame lens. (The 510 g heavy Leica-Panasonic 25 1.4 designed for the smaller 4/3 format, and six times as expensive as the Nikkor 35 1.8 DX, is another, almost absurd example). The compact, affordable, yet excellent Nikkor 35 1.8 is more in the spirit of the classic normal.

Shooting with the Nikkor 35 1.8 AF-S

To get the bad things out of the way first: On my first time out with the lens I saw some occassional CA. Many hundreds of shots later in different conditions I see this a very small problem that rarely shows up. When shooting wide open or there about you can sometimes see some color fringing. The distortion is a little more than you would expect compared to a 50 mm normal lens on a film/FF camera. For my style of shooting this is a minor issue and easy to correct in various PP software.
OK - lets move on to the positives. From the start I saw that lens was very usable at large apertures, even wide open. The subject isolation ability was what interested me most and I took a lot of images testing this out. If you want to shoot at F1.8 or 2.0 - just go ahead and try it. Also the bokeh looks good and pleasant for this focal length.


With the 35 1.8 I set the mode to “A” instead “P” also for general walk around since this lens actually has some DOF control worth talking about. Even on a normal scene you can direct the point of interest and create some feeling of depth.

Tonality and microcontrast looks good even at F2.2:

Armed with only a prime
As those who has read my posts about the 18-200VR lens knows, I think this super zoom is an excellent creative tool, enabling the photographer to try out different ideas and perspectives instantly. So here we are with the complete opposite, a fixed focal lenght, and not even the one I prefer for walk around (35 mm on FF, 24 mm on DX). So how limiting is this? I decided to bring only the 35 1.8 on a short two day trip to the swedish Island Gotland in the Baltic Sea.
Here are some images (as with all images in this text, you can click on them to expand them to about 1200 pixels width). The odd rock formations called “raukar”:



Bikes on the beach outside Visby. Since Gotland is very flat, bicycles are popular.

Sharpness does not have to extend to infinity in a landscape shot.

The medival Hansa town Visby:

From a 200 year old fishers village:

A final shot from the beach walk.

It did not feel as restricted as a I thought with only the prime. (Many more images in this gallery) Some shots are of course impossible, I would not restrict myself to a single lens for a once-in-a-life time trip or at times where it is really important to register what you see. But otherwise it felt kind of refreshing to be selective, armed only with a fixed focal length, composition skills and good DOF control.

Conclusion
I think this lens is going to be a big hit for Nikon, giving the creative power of a fast normal to a new generation of digital shooters, starving for DOF control and low light abilities. At the price and quality every DX user should give it consideration. And as icing on the cake, rumor says that despite the DX label, it also works fine on FF with only slight vignetting.