Main image: Shopping mall in Tokyo, Japan

Nikon has long been criticized by photographers for not providing lenses in the popular 28-70mm focal length range, with professional built and a fast aperture. The closest option Nikon provided was the AF-Nikkor 35-70mm f/2.8. Although it was an extremely sharp lens, it's appeal never became wide-spread. In the age of increasing wide-angles, the 35-70mm simply could not satisfy the photographers wishing for a 28-70mm f/2.8.

Competitors like Canon, Tokina and Sigma all had a professional calibre 28-70mm f/2.8 lens in their line-up. It wasn't until recently that Nikon decided to launch such a lens to lure back its users. And what a terrific lens it is...
 
 

Popularity of the 28-70mm focal range

What is wide enough? There is a continally changing perception what what constitutes a wide angle. In the early days of the 1980s when I first began photography, 35mm was considered a wide angle. The most popular zoom lenses of those days were the 35-70mm lenses. 35mm was considered to be a wide-angle, while 70mm covered our "mild telephoto" needs. Today, with the advent of technology in lens-design, we are seeing more of the 28-105mm zoom lenses. The older 35-70mm lenses were relegated to the back of our cabinates, in favour of the 28-70mm lenses. 35mm is not considered wide enough, and neither is 70mm tele-photo enough.
 

With more and more 28-70mm and 28-105mm lenses on the market today, we began to see more wide angle images. Our perception about "wide" began to expand, and 35mm became more normal to our eyes. We become accustomized to wider angles such as 24mm and 28mm images, especially when such wide-angles are adopted into the photojournalistic style. Newspapers are splashed with the "subject in the foreground and deatils in the background" shots, and we see the world more and more in terms of wide-angles.

Today, the 28mm range is considered to be the minimum focal length for wide-angle zooms.
 
 

What is AF-S ?

With conventional autofocusing, the camera body has a motor which drives the autofocusing of the lens through a shaft which connects to the lens. But with Silent-Wave Motor technology, there is no direct physical drive connection between the body and the lens. Instead, the camera sends a series of electrical impulse through the electrical contacts. These electrical impulses gets translated into movement through the expansion and contraction of piezo crystals. When electical impulse is directed to the piezo crystals, the crystals expands and creates an impulse of movement. Innovative arrangement of the crystals in an efficient structure creates this silent-wave motor, with high-torque drive and precise starting and stopping movement. The end result is an extremely silent, fast and precise autofocus motor. This superior technology is also widely applied in Epson (C) inkjet printers to control the ink output with unrivalled quality among any inkjet printers.

The Silent Wave Motor technology has been incorporated in a series of Nikkor lenses, namely the longer lenses such as the 400mm f/2.8 AF-S and 600mm f/4 AF-S. Three professional-calibre zoom lenses, the 17-35mm f/2.8, 28-70mm f/2.8 and the 80-200mm f/2.8 have also received the AF-S technology. It is widely expected that Nikon will incorporate the AF-S motor in a wider range of lenses in the future, hopefully with a lower price-tag too.
 
 

Click to see enlarged image

Quietly does it... A moment of silence in the early morning, as a Japanese gentlemen waits for his train to take him to his workplace. The AFS lens zips quickly and silently to focus, a click, and the moment is captured eternally on film.

Nikon developed a extremely sharp Nikkor 35-70mm f/2.8 AF in 1988. It was a push-pull zoom design, and incorporated a macro mode at 70mm, which allowed users to attain a 1:4 magnification. The optics were extremely sharp and contrasty, making it a favorite among professional photographers. The filter size of 62mm also made it easy to use with filters.

Unfortunately, the short 2X zoom range made it a highly restrictive lens in some sense. Although the 35-70mm range was very useful, many professionals wanted to use 28mm. To change the lenses frequently between the zoom and a prime 28mm lens was frustrating, and many other companies such as Canon and Tokina has developed high quality 28-70mm f/2.8 lenses. Looking at the offering from other companies, it is easy to understand why many professionals chose third-party lenses over the Nikkor, even though the Nikkor offered superior optics.

In 1998, Nikon introduced the AF-S Zoom-Nikkor 28-70mm f/2.8D IF-ED.
 

First impressions (build quality) and handling

The lens feels like a typical AFS professional-caliber optic - well-built and instills confidence in the user.

The lens is hefty in weight - weighing in at 935g. With the lens hood on, it weighs almost a kilogram. However, when fitted to a larger camera like the F90X or Nikon F100, the combination is very well-balanced. The crinkled finish typical of the AFS lenses gives the lens a rugged kind of look, and it works well in reality, preserving the look of the lens even when used in harsh environment. The armolite finish is easy to maintain, and takes only a swipe of a damp cloth to get mud stains off the lens. The finishing is extended to the HB-19 lens hood, which is included with the purchase of the lens.
 
 

Mechanically, the lens is very well- constructed. The focusing ring and zooming ring are smooth, with the focusing ring giving a "geary" feeling (unusual but not uncomfortable). The focusing ring is well-positioned in front of the lens, and the wideness of the ring makes it easy to focus manually when you need to. The zooming ring is as wide as the focusing ring, but I felt that it is positioned slightly too far back. Personally, I'd prefer that it is moved a couple of centimeters to the front for a better balance when zooming. Both rings are covered in ribbed-rubber which makes them easy to grip and clean.

The Nikkor 28-70mm f/2.8 AFS is quite a huge lens when you compare it to its Tokina counterpart. However, it is a pleasure to handle it once it is mounted on the camera. The lens is a absolute delight to use, once you get over the initial shock of its size. When mated with the lenshood, it seems like a giant. However, once it is mounted to the camera body, it becomes a natural extension of the camera. The precise clicking of the aperture ring also makes it a pleasure to use.

Features

The 28-70mm AFS features internal focus technology, so the focusing ring doesn't rotate when focusing. This means that you can hold the entire lens without worrying about hindering the AF operation like conventional lenses. In addition to the extra hand-holding area, the internal focus also offers the additional advantage that the lens will not extend its length when focusing. It also means that the front element does not rotate when focusing, making it an ease to use filters such as polarizers and graduated filters.
 

Like the other AFS lenses, the 28-70mm AFS also features a AF/MF switch. This AF/MF switch allows the user to switch from AF to MF simply by turning the focusing ring while half-depressing the shutter release. This feature is very useful because it allows you to switch seamlessly from AF to MF, without having to press any buttons or operate any switches. Although this feature is more useful in longer lenses where the focusing might be interrupted (as in sports photography), the presence of this feature is nevertheless useful.

The 28-70mm f/2.8 AF-S also features a 9-bladed circular aperture, which merge into a nearly circular aperture to render out-of-focus areas more pleasantly. It is supposed to improve the bokeh of the lens, which I felt was a nice feature, but not really necessary. When using a wide-angle like this lens, depth-of-field is usually quite large and thus good bokeh doen't always show through.
 
 

Minor Irks

I've just described a minor irk in the handling section, i.e. the position of the zooming ring. I'd prefer that the zooming ring be made even wider, or maybe to shift it out a couple of centimeters for more convenient handling. I think that will make balancing the lens even better.

The other minor irk I have about this lens is the ridiculously deep lenshood. It is like the lenshood for the 80-200mm f/2.8 AFS, very deep and wide. It is almost half the length of the lens, and once it is mounted on the lens, it becomes very difficult to use a polarizing filter. If you have large hands, you will drive yourself nuts trying to use a polarizer with that hood on.

Here's a funny analogy: It's like trying to dig your nose with gloves on.

The nice part though - the lens hood bayonet mounts onto the lens, so you can easily remove the lenshood.
 
 

The Zen of image sharpness The soft sunlight raking across the wooden structure of the temple gate made it a perfect subject to test the sharpness of the lens. With the flexibility of the 28-70mm zoom, I could crop out any distracting objects, to bring out only the essential elements.

Autofocus

As expected from AFS lenses, the autofocus is smooth and silky. The lens focused instantaneously and silently, and it was swift to lock focus with little hunting. However, I found that although the lens was fast in focusing, it was not dramatically fast as compared to my other Tokina lens with special clutch mechanism. The advantage of the AFS over the Tokina lies however in the full-time manual override and silence in focusing. As usual, the AFS was so silent in the focusing, I had to point at other objects to make it refocus to make sure that the lens was working!

As mentioned previously, the AFS lens is able to switch to MF mode seamlessly when interupted in autofocusing mode. Full time manual (FTM) override is activated by turning the focus ring while half-depressing shutter release in AF mode on the camera.
 
 
 

Optical Quality

So how is the optical quality of the lens? We will review the optical quality of the lens, evaluating the contrast, distortion, bokeh, sharpness, light-falloff and vignetting.

A few users have commented that this lens is not sharp enough. I do not know where they got their conclusions from, but from my use of the lens it seemed like a pretty sharp lens to me. I am not saying that they are imagining things, but I did a little non-scientific test and the results seemed to indicate that the Nikkor 28-70mm AF-S is capable of very sharp performance indeed.

Click on the image below to read about the lens test results:
 

Using two samples of the Nikkor 28-70mm AFS, I shot a series of images at various focal length and aperture. The results indicated that the lenses were slightly soft at f/2.8 (as expected of any lens), but they gave excellent performance when stopped down a couple of stops, whether at the center or at the edges. In fact, when tested against the Tokina 28-70mm f/2.6-2.8 AT-X Pro II (a fine lens by the way), it outperformed the Tokina at all the settings except at 70mm f/8.

The colour of the lens is vibrant and clear, while the contrast is crisp and gives the illusion of even greater sharpness. As the test shows, the lens has visible barrel distortion at the 28mm and pincushion at the 70mm end. Although the distortions are slight enough to be unnoticeable in daily use, there are strict applications like architecture photography where the slightest distortion is not permissible.

The lens has good flare control, although the term "good" is subjective. It is best used with the deep lenshood, providing ample protection against flare exception when the sun is in the image. Because of the large numbers of lens elements utilized, some flare will show up when there is strong direct light. However, the flare is still well controlled in general, so just use the lenshood and do not be unduly concerned.

At f/2.8, the lens performs well, but there is noticeable softness at the edge and slight fall-off, when the image is enlarged. You may not notice them in the slides, or on smaller prints, but they are visible in enlargments. For the best image quality, stopping down by a couple of stops to at least f/5.6 helps tremendously in the image quality. At f/5.6 and f/8, the image quality is so excellent that it is difficult to fault. The ED glass and aspherical elements no doubt play important roles in maintaining the high image quality.
 
 

The lens can focus up to 0.7 meters (2.3 feet), which is reasonably okay for a wide-angle zoom. Primes like the 28mm f/2.8 AF-Nikkor can do down to 0.25 meters, but you lose the flexibility of a zoom lens. The closest focusing range of the 28-70mm AFS is probably good enough for most cases, as I have found. Although I'd prefer a even closer focusing limit, I'd still pick the zoom over the prime for the sheer convenience. There is no close-range correction for this lens, but the images are still quite impressive. This may be due to the presence of the aspherical elements.

All in all, the lens is a good performer. It is not a perfect lens, and it has its own share of slight distortions and light fall-off, but it is as close to perfection as it can be. I have absolutely no qualms about the superb optical quality of this lens.
 
 
 

Competition and Conclusion

Because Nikon took its own sweet time to develop the Nikkor 28-70mm f/2.8 AF-S, there is already a host of third-party 28-70mm f/2.8 lenses in the market today.

Sigma and Tokina each have their own high-caliber 28-70mm f/2.8 zooms, while Tamron came out with the 28-105mm f/2.8 (incidentally known for its stupid 82mm filter size which nobody supplies). All these lenses came before Nikon released their AFS version, and have been deeply trenched in the consumer market. The Sigma EX version is the newest of the trio, and although it reported offers good optics, its less-than-flattering reputation for bad mechanical construction put many people off from trying Sigma lenses. It's "EX" line of lenses are supposedly good mechanically too, but not many people are willing to put their money down on a Sigma.

The Tokina AT-X Pro II is based on a famous Angenieux lens design, and it scored highly in many lens tests. Personally, I am using one myself, and it is a superb lens for the money. In addition to the great optics, the Tokina is also extremely well-built and tough. The clutch mechanism, although quirky to use, offers the user some sort of Internal Focus system, and makes the lens very quick to focus in AF mode. It is one of my favorite lens, and although the new Nikkor 28-70mm AF-S beat it in terms of optical quality, the price factor will still make the Tokina a hot choice among photography enthusiasts.
 
 

Close-up of the lens: showing the crinkled armourlite finishing

The Nikkor is probably the best optic compared to the rest, with an edge over the competition by entering the race with the latest design. With 2 ED elements and a aspherical element, Nikon has spared no efforts in designing this lens. The incorporation of the AF-S motor puts it in the professional line of Nikkor lenses, and the incredible mechanical built of the lens backs that up. With a price tag many times of that of the competitors though, not everyone can afford this wonder lens.

 

Unless I am extremely rich or crazy, or unless I am a professional photographer who will make money from the purchase of this lens, I find it very difficult to justify the ownership of this AF-S lens. There is no disputing the superb quality of the optics and built, but at what price? For a fraction of the cost, you can purchase the Tokina which performs nearly as well. Perhaps one day Nikon will release a non-AFS version of this superb optic.

But if you really want the best of the best, there's nothing like a Nikkor 28-70mm f/2.8 "D" AF-S IF-ED.
 
 
 

Technical Specification
 

Type of lens: D-type of lens	D-type AF Zoom-Nikkor lens having built-in CPU and Nikon bayonet mount
Focal length	28-70mm
Maximum aperture	f/2.8
Lens construction	15 elements in 11 groups (2 ED elements, 1 aspherical element)
Focal length scale	28, 35, 50, 70mm
Distance Information	Output to camera body
Zooming	Manually via separate zoom ring
Focusing	Nikon Internal Focusing (IF) system (utilizing an Internal Silent Wave Motor); manually via separate focus ring
Shooting distance scale	Graduated in meters and feet from 0.7m to infinity
Aperture scale	f/2.8-f/22 on both standard and aperture-direct-readout scales
Minimum aperture lock	Provided
Diaphragm	Fully automatic
Exposure measurement	Via full-aperture method with AI cameras or cameras with CPU interface system; via stop-down method for other cameras
Filter attachment size	77mm
Dimensions	Approximately 88.5mm dia x 121.5 mm
Weight	Approx 935g lens only
Lenshood	HB-19 (supplied)

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