There's been a lot mentioned about the "danger" of the the lens rotation lock lever being too close to the lens release button - well it caused me no problems.
A couple of things that do gaul me somewhat though are the image "jump" when shifting left to right and the fact that the aperture ring has no lock detent on it, when you rotate the lens it's very easy to move the aperture ring from L to f32 or f22 by accident; then you wonder why you can't move the aperture in the usual manner...!
Being a D3 user, if I can ADD megapixels to a final image AND get the composition I want then I'm happy - so the shift is useful as it enables me to create a stitch that's well over 50Mb as an 8bit TIFF (the stitched brick wall above is 50.8Mb with the "jump" cropped out).
As I said, I do like the lens and I would love to own one - in some respects I'd happily swap my 14-24mm for it.
If Nikon gave me one I'd use it all the time; I'd polish it every night and sing it lullabies as I put it to bed; but would I spend £1400+ on one - I don't think so.
For that amount of money I expect perfection in every facet of both facility and performance - this lens (at least the example I've played with) does not deliver perfection - unlike the 14-24mm.
At the asking price the lens should deliver equal sharpness across the frame, the image alignment should not change across the usable shift range and, if I MUST PAY for tilt/swing then I want to be able to use it at the same time as I use vertical shift and not be charged an extra £200+ for the privilege.
As the lens ships you can only use lateral shift with vertical tilt or, rise and fall with a sideways swing - thinking back to the times when I used to use a view camera an awful lot I can't think of many situations where those combinations of movement would be useful. More useful would be the ability to use tilt with rise and fall; in other words both movements in the same plane.
Tilt is a good movement to have access to - by tilting the lens downwards when shooting landscapes you can increase your depth of field.
But this moves your horizon; a vertical shift (rise and fall) thus helps bring the horizon back to where you want it: this also helps towards keeping the horizon closer to the axial center of the lens, keeping barreling of the horizon to a minimum.
A tilting front together with lateral shift is available with the camera in a landscape orientation, so 'pano' shooting is okay-ish, but the most valuable combination would be tilt together with vertical shift (rise and fall) with the camera in a portrait orientation.
Canon manage to make both a 17mm and a 24mm TS-E with independant rotation of both tilt and shift movements - so yet again it would appear that Nikon are behind the ball again.
Come on Nikon - WAKE UP..
As I said before though, at least with the D3's f16 to f22 performance, there seems little need for the benefit of tilt, so it's possibly a bit of an academic argument in reality.
But that means I'd be paying part of my £1400 for something I wouldn't use...which is a bad thing in Andy World.
And when you compare the lens to the Canon 24mm TSE which seems only slightly more expensive then to be honest, it's a bit of a disappointment, |
