chulster

Hmm, I seriously doubt they would still keep spare focus ring grips for this lens. But thanks for the info.

Good idea. Thanks.

Anyone got a 35-70mm f/2.8 (D or non-D) lying around unused? Perhaps one that has heavy haze, as these lenses are wont to develop? If you wouldn't mind parting with your focus ring grip rubber, I'd like to buy it off you. I've searched eBay and AliExpress without success.

It's really not that hard at all. It seems like clean copies show up on eBay almost every day.

I don't have any experience with the manual-focus version of this lens, but the last AF version is pretty good and built quite tough, I think. Other decent choices in MF zooms spanning 50mm are the 28-85mm f/3.5-4.5 AiS and the 35-70mm f/3.5 Ai or AiS. The last is quite good optically, but with such a short zoom range, I almost never want to use it.

I've always thought the AF 35-70mm f/2.8 (D or no) would be a good "portrait zoom" on a DX body. $200 is not an unusual price for that lens. You will probably not want to go for a slower lens.

This lens is known for a tendency to develop haze between two elements of a cemented group due to a breakdown of the cement. To clean the haze, someone has to separate the two elements (by boiling?), remove all the cement, and re-glue them together. I don't know how much this costs, but it must be more than a normal CLA, and then you don't know if the lens you get back will be as good. The 35-70mm is remarkably good for its age, but the only things it has over a 24-70 are smaller size and lower weight. It may be worth the cost of repair if you often want a lighter alternative to the 24-70 that's nevertheless equally fast.

Wow.

Exiftool also uses a lens ID lookup table. But it's a different one from those used by Apple and Adobe.

Exiftool, like other EXIF readers such as the ones in Lightroom and Photos, does of course use a lookup table to provide a more useful lens descriptor than the bare lens ID, which (at least in the case of one of my lenses) is composed of eight pairs of 2-digit hexadecimal numbers. I happened to notice just now that exiftool and Lightroom provide different lens descriptors for my Tokina 100mm macro. Incidentally, a sixteen-digit hexadecimal number is enough for 18,446,744,073,709,551,616, or about 18.4 quintillion, unique IDs. Tokina could have chosen a different ID; the reason they chose the one for the Nikon 20-35mm might have been in order to take advantage of the distortion correction profile that Nikon cameras have for the Nikkor—if, that is, the two lenses have similar geometric distortion.

It's not the camera that's reporting your lens as a Tokina; it's the software you use to view/edit photos that's doing so. I'm going to guess that Tokina's engineers, when they reverse-engineered the Nikkor to come up with the content for this lens's CPU program, went as far as to copy the lens ID from the Nikkor. With the two lenses sharing the same ID (a number or nondescriptive string), perhaps the makers of photo viewers/editors got confused and started mapping that ID to the Tokina lens description instead of the Nikkor one.

Thanks. This will be useful.

I also have never had to pay an import duty. I think as long as the seller marks the goods as used, there will be no duty.

I'm not sure if I follow this. The teleconverter looks to be a fixed 2x(it woulnd't surprise me if variable TCs exist, but I've never seen one). Nikon mount teleconverters and extension tubes generally have a tab of some sort on the side that you push toward the rear mount, and then can rotate and remove the back of the accessory. The normal location for this is for it to line up roughly with the lens mount release button when mounted on the camera. I believe OP is referring to the lens itself as the "extender", with 1:1 referring to the reproduction ratio printed on the lens at its minimum focus distance.

That's true. I disagree with all of you. The tunnel viewfinder of my Kodak Pocket Instamatic has never been equalled as far as I'm concerned.

Full disclosure: this is my sister's dog.

from Mount Wilson, just outside Los Angeles