[ Posted 11 January 2014 - 19:17 ]jrflanne, on 11 Jan 2014 - 19:03, said: I have a 45mm P pancake sitting on my desk staring at me. It wants a Df. Bad. I tried the two existing "pancakes", 45 mm f/2.8 GN and 45 mm f/2.8 AIS-P on the Df. True enough, the entire outfit becomes very compact, but in my opinion, these lenses can be troublesome because the grip is poor due to the very narrow aperture and focusing rings. In fact, of the two, the older 45 GN probably is the better handling in terms of grip. However unless you disengage the coupling between aperture and focus rings, it is very stiff to focus and there is the added drawback focusing works backwards from the usual Nikkor behaviour. Neither lens is a candidate for winter shooting when you wear gloves
A friend of mine, Jakov Minić, loves the 45 Ai-P on his Df and has produced wonderful images with this combination. I cannot do that due to the handling issues outlined above, though.
Here are the two "pancake" Nikkors for comparison. The 45 P in foreground, behind it the 45 GN . On the Df itself I have mounted an old pre-WWII Zeiss Tessar 50 mm f/2.8 (sits inside a focusing extension and will give infinity focus). The CPU of the 45 GN reads 44 mm f/2.8 to discern it from the 45 P (which, of course, is 45 mm f/2.8 ). The vintage Zeiss has badly hazed glass which is the reason I got it in the first place, to act as a soft-focus lens, a task it performs admirably. The brightness of this lens is lower than the other two so its CPU reads 50 mm f/3 and in contrast to the Nikkors, the CPU works only in "G" mode (the Nikkors are both "P").
