Originally posted by chicagonature Is there a straightforward way to get a good lens? They talked about center alignment. I was thinking that if it's repairable, I could simply send the lens into Tokina the moment I receive it and tell them to optimize it, even if there's no problem. Is that possible?
Think for a moment, if that was possible
everyone who has ever bought a Tokina lens would be doing it. Tokina aren't exactly that great with QC - Nikon tends to be much more consistent, which is why I personally recommend the 14-24mm f/2.8G - though be warned it is very prone to flare. The nikkor 16-35mm f/4G ED VR* is also a good alternative, for landscape work lenses do not have to be all that fast anyway and being an f/4 lens means it is possible to use screw-on filters.
Originally posted by chicagonature Do you know of any other super-wides (20mm and below) that can be used with Nikon that matches teh 14-24mm.
not really, Even the Zeiss 18mm f/3.5 can't compete with the nikkor in terms of resolution in the corners - It isn't often when a prime with a zeiss optical design gets beaten by a nikkor zoom lens.
The only superwides that can really beat the nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8G ED by any meaningful margin are all RF lens designs, the short back focus on M mount cameras makes designing wide-angle lenses much easier and they often have superior performance to their SLR counterpart lenses** personally I find using rangefinders for landscape work just feels fundamentally wrong to me - Landscape has always involved SLR cameras or view cameras, where you get to see the result in the viewfinder before you press the shutter.
Originally posted by chicagonature if Photozone does things by the numbers, the opposite seems to be Ken Rockwell who essentially takes real world pictures and compares the centers and the corners at various f-stops. What do you think of that approach? Is there an obviously flaw? He's also claiming that the Tokina is better optically, but he's literally looking at it from a completely different point of view.
you know, whenever I hear the name Ken Rockwell I think of the phase "Fools and money will soon be parted" I wouldn't trust that moron to test a circuit breaker properly let alone a lens worth several thousand dollars. Sure he "tests" the lenses but his testing methods are far from scientifically rigourous and he provides web-compressed images as proof of his findings instead of un-processed full sized jpgs - or raw files as some reviewers do.
*Though according to my own tests, corroborated by Photozone the 16-35mm f/4G ED VR has perhaps
the most spectacular amount of barrel distortion in a lens I have ever owned - 4% but this sharply improves at the longer focal lengths down to a respectable 0.8% barrel distortion at 35mm
**the Leica 21mm f/1.4 Summilux-M ASPH beats the Zeiss Distagon 21mm f/2.8 by a
considerable margin, and also the Leica lens is substantially smaller than the Zeiss SLR lens despite there being a two stop difference in lens speed. It is important to note the Leica 21mm f/1.4 ASPH costs around $3500 more than the Pentax DFA 25mm f/4 ED ASPH so taking that into account, is the pentax lens really
that overpriced? (i'm working from current Australian prices mind you.) I wouldn't be surprised if the Pentax 645 lens matches the performance of the Leica lens on the M9.