Nikon 80-200mm f/4.5 N Ai - a quick look

In keeping with my now standard way of looking at resolution and contrast in lenses, I thought I'd put an old Nikon Nikkor 80-200mm f/4.5 N Ai through it's paces and see how it did with le canard enchaine.

I picked this lens up for around 80Euro.  I know.  I paid way too much for it.  To make matters worse, it's well used and the push-pull zoom barrel does not slide entirely smoothly.  It's not bad, but it's definitely not as silky smooth as the 80-200mm f/4 Ai-S that I recently foolishly sold.  Oh well, I was in a house cleaning stage and was looking to downsize my collection of lenses.

Comparison setup -

• Some pages out of a local newspaper taped to the bedroom wall 
• Sony A6000 set to "A", 100 ISO, 2second delay 
• Massive Manfrotto tripod 
• Zhongyi Lens Turbo II focal reducer 
• No sharpening applied to the RAW output
• 500 pixel sections were taken from the various images and organized below

Here are the center and edge of the scene comparisons.  As you can see, I looked at the lens zoomed to 80mm, 105mm, 135mm, and 200mm.  As always, take a look at the following image a full resolution to note the differences between the various focal lengths and apertures.



So, what do we see here?  Simply, Nikon's old zoom is a very fine objective at all focal lengths and all apertures.  Only at 80 mm's did the lens suffer at the extreme edges of the frame.  Everything else is tack-sharp across the frame.

Looking at the other comparisons that I've performed, can you tell any difference between this lens and fixed focal-length lenses?  Think about that a moment.  Impressive, isn't it?

The primary thing that is given up by using this zoom is maximum aperture speed.  If you want to blur the background by shooting at a wide aperture, use a fixed focal length lens.  If you want sharp images from a variety of focal lengths but only want to carry one lens, it'd be hard to beat this zoom as a one package solution.