Nikon 85mm f2.8 T&S Re-orientation... PC or PC-E...Cost?

I appreciate the convenience of separate front and rear movements, but surely they're optically equivalent

 

- Optically, but not practically equivalent.

 

Back tilt/swing doesn't point the lens axis off-centre like front tilt/swing does.

 

There are circumstances that make either front or rear movements more convenient, but in most cases you want to re-centre the image on the lens axis after tilt/swing, so that you're not using the extreme outer part of the image circle. Once shift is needed as well, even the widest of lens coverage quickly reaches its limit.

 

The pitiful few millimetres of shift provided on a full-frame DSLR is meagre enough anyway.

Although I do sometimes use software corrections for key-stoning, and such like, the results don't really equal the quality of a tilt/shift lens. It's literally a "stretch".

You probably have a decent tilt-shift, then, JDM! My argument was that with some of the ones that are out there, as pixel densities increase, you should be able to lose no more quality in digital stretching than you gain by not using a cheap lens at the limits of its image circle. You already likely need some image warping just to do lens corrections. (Similarly if you use a wide lens and crop, you're throwing pixels away and scaling the whole image - but the cost of that depends a bit on what the lens was delivering to the sensor in the first place.)

 

Don't get me wrong, all donations of 19mm TS-Es gratefully accepted. Or even the older ones, even though I understand their optics aren't all that stellar these days. But the ease of retrospective tweaks has removed my desire to spend the going rate on the 24mm Samyang.

Andrew, I have the PC-E 85/2.8D and it works perfectly fine on the D850. It is a lens I would say does make ”the D850 cut”. I have also tried the PC-E 24/3,5D ED on a D850. In terms of sharpness, colour rendition and contrast, I would be perfectly happy with that as well on a D850.

 

The only thing I did not like about the 24 was the heavy vignetting in the extreme upper corners when fully shifted in portrait mode. However, that is a rare use case for me. I will probably buy one for landscape photos eventually, until I feel I can justify the cost for a 19 mm. I really like the 85 and would consider the 19/24 and 85 a perfect combo.

 

I have not tried the 45 or the 19, but since the 24 mm is considered the weak link in the chain, I would not worry about either. I do know the 24, 45 and 85 are indeed old designs and that most rewiews are written back in the 12 Mpix day. (But so are the current 200/2 and 300/2.8 as well and most still consider their optical quailty to hold up.) The 19mm is a very recent design and I have only seen rave reviews of it.

I suspect it would cost less than £1200 to have a £1500 Canon 17mm T/S lens professionally adapted to Nikon. Or to buy a reasonable quality Canon body.

 

6 degrees more horizontal AOV for less money. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

You probably have a decent tilt-shift, then, JDM!

 

Well, Yes.I finally gave in and got the 17mm TSE.

 

But I have owned the PC-Nikkor 35mm f/2.8 since 1971. It's available used for prices a lot less than a new one; and it does, I think, work on some digital Nikon bodies.

 

For architectural work, the shift is more useful and I made do with it up to now, but of course the 35mm focal length made it less useful on an APS-C body.

I wonder whether there's space in the adapter 'distance' of a F > Z Mount to build a tilt? So I can mount my old 28mm 2.8 shift in there?

 

I reckon there might be...;)

I wonder whether there's space in the adapter 'distance' of a F > Z Mount to build a tilt? So I can mount my old 28mm 2.8 shift in there?

 

I reckon there might be...;)

 

You'd have to rotate the lens around the sensor (otherwise you'd be out of the image circle), so it might clash with bits of camera body, but otherwise I don't see why not. Someone (I thought it was Lensbaby, but I can't see evidence of it) had an F-mount-to-DX-mirrorless adaptor with tilt/shift built in. (Rummage. Ah, Kipon have one? They have a NEX one, and I believe the mount is the same for crop and full frame bodies, so it would be a way to experiment on an A7 series...)

 

There's still a risk that tilting forwards will take you out of the light cone, but it may be subtle enough to get away with it. If it's a shift lens in the first place, depending on baffles, you may be more likely to be safe.

 

Thanks for the report, Heimbrandt. I'll queue it up for my NAS. :-) My brief experiment with the Samyang was actually very visibly bad, so I may have an unfairly poor opinion of tilt-shift lenses of that vintage (and I did like the Samyang 85mm, I'm not biased against them). My Hartblei and Kiev lenses really need stopping down, but are at least fairly decent once you do; they deserve more experimenting than I've given them.

What I'm not sure of is where the centre of rotation has to be? Is it nodal? ....or 'anywhere' in the adapter space will be OK? Mechanical vignetting apart!

 

I'm guessing it doesn't matter, as in it's how 5 x 4 camera movements work, but there's focusing going on in the lens itself aswell as physical distance between lens and sensor/film.

 

I can't remember whether there were any T&S lenses in the Z mount lens 'map'?

I suspect the centre of rotation for tilt has to be the centre of the sensor (such that the lens axis always points towards it) - otherwise you risk falling outside the image circle. Shifting is another matter, of course, but you need more coverage relative to your sensor area to start thinking about that. You may then want something else to make the orientation convenient for general use, and whether the lens stays still while the camera tilts or whether the camera stays still while the lens swings up and down is down to your preferred means of composition; I suspect you really want the lens stationary so your composition doesn't change. I still maintain that someone could put worm drive tilt on a sensor (which some sensor shift stabilisation may already do, within limits) and automate the process. With a 5x4 camera the imaging circle of the lens tends to be a bit more nebulous. Rotating around the lens instead of the image plane is basically equivalent to applying a shift and tilt concurrently.

 

I don't think anything as exotic as T&S made it into the roadmap, but there were plenty of gaps for "TBD". I don't believe the roadmap even includes a macro lens.

The Pentacon 6 (6x6cm format) lenses can be adapted to some other mounts for 35mm, The adapters are tilt, shift, and tilt/shift. Since the 85mm Zeiss for the P6 mount is a fine lens, this might be a way to go.

I'd worry about the res. of an older medium format lens on a high density FX chip.... maybe needlessly. But I guess it's got a huge image circle:)

 

Apart from being an insubstantial 2.5mm shorter and a substantial 135gm lighter, is there any optical/mechanical difference between the PC-E and the PC?

Edited October 27, 2018 by mike_halliwell

I think the Hartblei I own is a modified medium format lens; I believe they went expensive in later versions and started adapting Zeiss medium format glass. Likewise I'd not be surprised if my Kiev is partly some other optics. There were some tables I once found showing extremely good resolution from some medium format lenses - probably especially the recent digital ones. I'd be a little more nervous about some large format glass.

Mamiya MF (Manual Focus!) 645 lenses seem to be pretty 'cheap' at the moment in the usual variety of focal lengths, but the 80mm macro looks about right.

 

So I guess there's the Mamiya flange difference (63.3 - 46.5 = 16.8 ) plus the FTZ distance (46.5 - 16mm = 30.5) to play with.

 

47.3mm, is that right?