NikonGear'23

Gear Talk => Camera Talk => Topic started by: Airy on March 17, 2023, 23:37:39

Title: The joys of old PC lenses with new Z cameras
Post by: Airy on March 17, 2023, 23:37:39

The 28/3.5 PC and 35/2.8 PC are small and versatile (esp. the latter), and have decent optics (ditto). The handling of these fully manual lenses is encouraging "slow photography" when using shift. With some training, you'll get 2 shots per minute or so.

The Z cameras are a game changer, for two reasons:

• no need to set manual exposure before applying shift; auto exposure will yield correct results.
• no need to restrict the shift according to shift axis; excessive shift will not produce catastrophic vignetting (although the sharpness will suffer somewhat)

Here are a few examples, with maximum shift applied (close to 12mm). Each shot is taken wide open and at f/8.

Title: Re: The joys of old PC lenses with new Z cameras
Post by: Akira on March 18, 2023, 00:02:34

They look promising.  The image of 28mm@f8.0 seems to show better corner sharpness than Nikkor-H 28mm f3.5@f8.0 does.

Title: Re: The joys of old PC lenses with new Z cameras
Post by: Airy on March 18, 2023, 00:11:03

The 28/3.5 PC is no great performer (I think it is my "worst" prime), but I suspect it has a flatter field. By the way, I took it on my first trip to Tokyo, which was useful to catch the "vertical" character of the city.

Title: Re: The joys of old PC lenses with new Z cameras
Post by: Akira on March 18, 2023, 00:59:13

Now that the old buildings are being replaced by newer skyscrapers in many areas in Tokyo, you would need that PC-E Nkkkor 19mm to catch the modern vertical character...

Title: Re: The joys of old PC lenses with new Z cameras
Post by: Airy on March 18, 2023, 09:56:34

Don't serve me another excuse for buying new gear, please. And fortunately (for my wallet), I have no plans to visit Tokyo. Well, a trip to Taipei, which is dangerously close. And Madame never went to Japan, so Tokyo becomes an option ;). Then again, the small Nikon shop/museum in Ginza closed years ago, reducing the financial risk...

Title: Re: The joys of old PC lenses with new Z cameras
Post by: Hugh_3170 on March 18, 2023, 12:01:43

And don't forget the shift lens and tilt/shift lens offerings from other manufacturers now that the Z-Mount cameras and adapters are available. 

My Canon FD 35mm f/2.8mm on an FD to Z-Mount K&F adapter does a fair job.  There are plenty of these Canon FD 35mm TS lenses on "that web site".

Title: Re: The joys of old PC lenses with new Z cameras
Post by: Gerhard2006 on April 04, 2023, 19:45:28

With the Nikon Mirrorless system we can now buy these tilt shift adaptors for our lenses. Which means all of our lenses become tilt shift lenses. I’m looking forward to using my 11 to 16 2.8 Tokina lens on either a Z 50 or ZFC crop sensor camera. The Tokina lens has a larger image circle from 14.5 to 16 mm which will cover 35 mm format on a crop sensor camera . We can now use any Nikon lens especially a macro lens which is the main reason why I bought it to do product photography. The price of these adaptors has dropped recently. Although they don’t make them for the Z mound, I bought a Sony E adaptor for my Nikon Z5, which will make this adaptor work on my camera. Using these adaptors is a nice way of controlling your depth of field as well as controlling verticals. Mirrorless  has opened up a lot of doors. Regards Gerry