Author Topic: Recommendations for wide angle lens for IR work  (Read 1313 times)

Oskar O

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Recommendations for wide angle lens for IR work
« on: July 16, 2017, 15:27:59 »
I got curious how much I could improve my current IR setup and of special interest is using wide-angle lenses. By wide-angle I'm thinking 18 - 24 mm, full frame, though could go to 28 mm and do more stitching. My IR is done on mirrorless Sony, so E-mount lenses or anything adaptable goes. I need to use filters, a large aperture is not necessary as primary used is stopped down and quality across the frame should preferably be even. High contrast, reasonably sharp, no hot spots or other artifacts. Any recommendations? Zooms or primes are both ok.

As a side note, I recently tried IR with a Zeiss Batis 25 and it was disastrously bad, having both hotspots and general loss of microcontrast. Just proves that visual performance predicts very little of the IR performance.

Bjørn Rørslett

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Re: Recommendations for wide angle lens for IR work
« Reply #1 on: July 16, 2017, 19:10:10 »
The old Nikkor 28/3.5 is an IR classic. Lots of other "wide" Nikkors do well in IR, even zoom lenses such as 14-24/2.8 or the humble "kit" 18-xx variants.

The venerable 20/3.5 Nikkor UD is another favourite with many seasoned IR shooters.

You might also look into some of the Fisheye-Nikkors ("full frame" models). All do well in IR.

BruceSD

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Re: Recommendations for wide angle lens for IR work
« Reply #2 on: July 21, 2017, 22:08:46 »
I use only 1 lens on my Fuji S3 Pro dedicated IR camera.   Sigma 18-35 ART.   

It's better than any of the Nikkors that I've tried on it, including the 28 f/3.5 (which I do happen to own).

bobfriedman

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Re: Recommendations for wide angle lens for IR work
« Reply #3 on: July 21, 2017, 23:01:59 »
Ai Nikkor-QD.C 15mm f/5.6 C-series Ai'd
Ai Nikkor 18mm f/4 - 86mm filter ring can be difficult
Ai Nikkor 20mm f/3.5
Ai Nikkor 20mm f/4
Ai Nikkor-UD 20mm f/3.5 (F-series Ai'd) - my best - have 3 of these
Ai-S Nikkor 28mm f/2
Ai-S Nikkor 28mm f/2.8

AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED
AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm f/2.8G ED

Also PC Nikkor 19mm f/4E ED - maybe - not fully tested

Fisheye-Nikkor 8mm f/2.8 AI and AI-S
Ai Fisheye-Nikkor 16mm f/3.5 K-series Ai'd
Robert L Friedman, Massachusetts, USA
www.pbase.com/bobfriedman