hackmann

bought a used copy of this piece to use in my nikon D90. The lens is 3 years old and its perfect, no problems due age, except to the rubber focus ring is a little "dry". No front or back focus.

English is not my mother language, I will try to be "understandable".

Wel, first at all is a big, heavy and bulky leans and use a big filter. People get intimidate by that lens, its nice!

About IQ I can tell you I liked when used at day, despite being a f 2.8. Its a little soft at wide open and you need to step down a little bit. Center shows a very high quality image and borders a little soft. I found some distortion CA and purple fringe wich is 100% corrected (at least with the lens profile in Lightroom 3). So, if you are shooting landscape, buildings at wide open I can tell you, with the correct exposure, you have a very high picture quality. I can tell also, in this scenario, it perform better then D90 18-105mm lens kit. It produces a warmer tone than 18-105mm lens, I love it, and 90% of shots I only need to apply lens profile, because image its very well balanced (colors and the exposure) - awsome. Its kind of lens that dont give you work at PP. AF works great and its not noise like people complaing. To be honest it produce less noise than my nikkor 50mm 1.8D.

But, here comes the bad part.

I am disapointed by lens performance at night. When u take a shot, the "non lighten subject" (fraction of your image that dont get lit by flash or any kind of light) get blurried, like a out of focus blurried noise image. In this case, the darken area of the image have a very poor non sharp quality. I know you are thinking "that´s is normal, its the darken problem", but its not. I can tell that because the 18-105, kit, in same scenario, perform 200% better, and even with the noise, image display focused in dark area, not blurried or out of focus..... I found this problem in every aperture range. In other hand, noise in darken area is pleaseant then 18-105mm, because somehow doenst show "purple" dots, only black ones.

The bottom of line is, due its low price, its a very good lens and its performance to landscape or portraits with the correct exposure, aperture and ammount of light, gives you a high quality sharp image. It capture a very good skin tone.

Also, the zoom ring isnt smooth in all range, maybe because the heavy front element.

If you have a nikon and want to have a lens that suit FX and DX sensor and you want to save some cash this is the lens for you.

Here you can see some samples about its image quality:

http://www.carloshackmannphotography.com/Galleries/Arquitechure/14214600_pNesQ#1058366042_84Boe
http://www.carloshackmannphotography.com/Galleries/Arquitechure/14214600_pNesQ#1058366803_2KmZS
http://www.carloshackmannphotography.com/Galleries/Arquitechure/14214600_pNesQ#1058365287_X9YfT
http://www.carloshackmannphotography.com/Galleries/Arquitechure/14214600_pNesQ#1058364258_DgMni
http://www.carloshackmannphotography.com/Galleries/Arquitechure/14214600_pNesQ#1058362720_8Qc8s
http://www.carloshackmannphotography.com/Galleries/Arquitechure/14214600_pNesQ#1058363477_iHANk