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Nikkor 28mm f/1.4E focus ring goes slightly past inf


serioussam

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Hi everyone

 

Soo, just bought this beauty, nikkor 28 f/1.4E, pretty happy with it but I'm quite used to shooting in manual focus, most of my lenses are in fact older mf, and when I turn the focus ring of this lens to infinity on the indicator strip it goes slightly past the mark and I get out of focus. Is this thing normal? By the way, indicator strip does stop at slightly left of infinity mark, but the physical ring itself will keep turning after that. There of course is a tactile response that indicates a stop but you can rotate past it. I never owned a G or above(newer) lens so wondering if this is at all normal.

 

Thanks for the input.

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Just to clarify, this is not something I've never seen before, I've bought 35mm f/1.4 AI-S, a much older lens about 8 years ago, used, and it has the same issue, although it's manual, it doesn't focus on infinity at the stop mark but goes past it, exactly like my new nikkor 28 f/1.4E. The difference is 35mm was used and I accepted it as-is, whereas 28mm was bought at retail shop, shiny new.

And no, my camera (D700 which is the intended shooting camera for this lens purchase) is not out-of focus as well, because I have other lenses which DO properly focus on infinity upon hitting the stop mark, and those lenses perform consistently on my other older DX camera (D5100) as well, results do look the same(in a way because DX isn't FX but the focus appears exactly the same).

This 28mm doesn't have a focus issue in auto mode when in A/M mode on either camera. It stops perfectly pointing at the middle of inf sign on an indicator strip, and image looks perfectly focused to infinity at that point. On both D5100 and D700.

So the problem I have is that I cannot blindly turn the focus ring to infinity and shoot, I'll have to look at the indicator or live view to see the detail, in which case it'll be simplier to never bother switching it to M mode at all.

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I don't think any of my AF lenses has a true infinity stop. Whether for thermal expansion or AF error tolerance or what, I don't know. My fairly old 50/1.4D stops right at the middle of the infinity mark, but the focus scale is wrong and it actually autofocuses (correctly) short of that. So the focus scale information is pretty pointless anyway unless you remember the offset.
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Focus scales shouldn't be taken at face value without checking them first. Many (non-G) lenses, especially manual focus lenses, have a small grub screw (sometimes 2 or 3) which can be loosened so that the infinity stop ring and mark in fact matches the lens' infinity focus. I've occasionally, but not often, had to do this, and then everything is just fine.
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