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Nikon 35mm 1.4 issues

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Hernan Herrera

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Perhaps I could get a resolution to the following problem. I just bought a Nikon 35mm 1.4 lens and when used on a Nikon D3 camera it produces relatively sharp images with hardly noticeable CA at 1.4. On the RED with the nikon mount it's very soft at 1.4 and shows significant CA at that stop. At 2.0 the CA dissapears and it's very sharp. Is this normal for this lens or maybe I installed the mount incorrectly. Any suggestions are welcome. Thank you.
 
Nikon lenses old or new are producing a lot of CA.

It's about a production control.

That's you pay more for Leica's and do not have that issues at all even if you deal with lens is old about 40 years and more.
 
Lucerna said:
Perhaps I could get a resolution to the following problem. I just bought a Nikon 35mm 1.4 lens and when used on a Nikon D3 camera it produces relatively sharp images with hardly noticeable CA at 1.4. On the RED with the nikon mount it's very soft at 1.4 and shows significant CA at that stop. At 2.0 the CA dissapears and it's very sharp. Is this normal for this lens or maybe I installed the mount incorrectly. Any suggestions are welcome. Thank you.
Click to expand...

Doesn't the D3 do some in-camera lens correction to remove CA? Or only with newer lenses?
 
The 35mm f/1.4 Nikkor performs best beyond f/2. That's why a lot of folks choose the 35mm f/2 version altogether. As a general rule, the newer Nikkor lenses will perform better than the older ones, with perhaps a few notable exceptions. You should ask Evin Grant directly for first-hand knowledge. He's Mr. Nikon in this forum and has pretty much probably tried them all at one point or another. I personally own the 35mm f/2 Nikkor and so far it's proven to be a great piece of glass. No complaints. Of course, YMMV as different samples perform differently.

Good luck!
 
The 35mm f1.4 Nikkor is a fine lens but it's design dates back to the late fifties. It was Nikon's first multi-coated optic. Most lenses, still or cinema will show less contrast and lover sharpness wide open weather f1.4 or f2. Mostly you buy/rent fast optics to shoot in low light but that doesn't mean stopping down won't help. Pretty much all T 1.3/1.4 optics will look great at f2 and best at f2.8. Most T2 optics will look great at f2.8 but best at T 4. This true for pretty much all optics except maybe Master primes. One thing to consider though is that slower optics are easier to design but are often not built as well or to as tight tolerances because they are less expensive to begin with.

In the 35mm focal length range I'd recommend the Zeiss ZF 35mm f2 or the Nikon 28mm f1.4 or f2 AI both are better than the 35mm 1.4 wide open.
 
Thank you for the responses, but I still wonder why that same lens at 1.4 produces such good imagery on a nikon D3.
 
The D3 does a lot of post processing even in RAW mode to correct for the lens aberrations.
 
Im surprised no one mentioned this yet. The D3 is full frame 135, so it samples the image at aprox 4k at 36x24 mm, where as the Red is essentially a DX sized sensor. All lens faults will be more apparent when sampling a smaller area of the image, which is why your Red images are both less sharp and have more exaggerated CA. I notice the same thing when shooting wide open on old superspeeds when i go from 4k to 2k.
 
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