Ai AF Nikkor 28mm f/1.4D

Nikon’s own essay on this lens is a sequel to the essay on the Noct-Nikkor, and it says what the 28mm f/1.4 was for: a wide-angle version of the same idea, a lens whose point light sources near the frame edge stay points at full aperture instead of spreading into the winged smear opticians call sagittal coma flare. The essay also explains why the project did not follow straight on from the 35mm f/1.4. Nikon had already computed the 35mm f/1.4 and the 28mm f/2, and knew from both that the flare gets worse as the aperture opens and worse again as the angle widens. Going to 28mm at f/1.4 was expected to be very hard, and it was.

It took about ten years and four optical designers in succession — Nikon normally assigns one designer to a lens, and says so in the essay, which also records that after an early prototype failed quality-assurance testing the work was handed on to younger colleagues. What finally made it possible was manufacturing rather than mathematics: a precision-ground aspherical element with an unusually large departure from a sphere, placed with a strongly curved double-convex element immediately in front of the diaphragm. Focusing moves several groups at once, changing four internal spacings, which is why Nikon describes it as a double floating system rather than close-range correction.

The result is not a small lens. Eleven elements in eight groups, 520g, 88mm long overall, a 72mm filter, nine aperture blades where a Nikkor prime of the period almost always has seven, and a 0.35m close limit — longer than the 0.25m of the 28mm f/2 it sits above. The list price Nikon publishes is ¥238,000.

Whether it delivers on the premise depends on who is asked, and the disagreement is on the record rather than a matter of taste. Bjørn Rørslett tested several samples on film and digital bodies and found flare, low contrast and soft corners at the widest apertures, with everything coming right between f/4 and f/11; he notes that people have told him the rating is too harsh and declines to change it. The phillipreeve.net review by BastianK agrees the lens is soft on contrast and shows both kinds of chromatic aberration, while rating the bokeh and the close-range work highly. Nobody argues that the sagittal coma is bad — which is the one thing the lens was built to fix, and the one thing both reviewers largely leave alone.

Roughly 7,333 were made between 1993 and 2005, a single serial block from 200001 to 207333, which is what makes it scarce: fewer than the 11,000-odd Noct-Nikkors and a small fraction of the 100,000-plus AF 85mm f/1.4D lenses Nikon sold over the same years. A successor came in May 2017, the AF-S 28mm f/1.4E ED, and it is a different lens rather than a new mount on this one — fourteen elements in eleven groups with three aspherical and two ED elements, 645g, a 77mm filter, focusing to 0.28m.

Two things stay unresolved. Nikon has never named any of the four designers, unusually for the essay series, which normally credits people by name. And the launch date does not agree with itself: Nikon says 1994, Vink’s serial block opens in September 1993, and no source found here states which is production and which is sale.