300mm lenses on nikon 1

[belgiumreporter]

This test started out just out of curiosity if my sigma 120-300 2.8 would perform any better on a camera with contrast detection than it does on phase detection.

The 120-300 allways gave me trouble on my DSLR's and the build in AF fine tune of the DSLR's just wasn't sufficient to solve the problem.

Now it so happens i've got some nikon 1 body's and an FT1 adapter so i thought i'd mount the lens on the 1V2. To my surprise it performed very good at any aperture focus was very fast and spot on so my initial thought that there was something wrong with the lens isn't true.

The solution would be to bring both dslr camera and lens to the repair shop to have them matched for phase detection use. (or buy a Z body  )

While i was at it i thought to compare some of the 300mm lenses i have at my disposal.

So i tried these:

Nikkor*ED300mm 1:4.5

Sigma 50-500 1:4.5-6.3 APO DG HSM D @300mm

Sigma 120-300mm D1:2.8APO HSM

Sigma 70-200mm 1.28II Macro HSM EX

Nikon As Nikkor 70-300mm 1:4.5-5.6G ED VR

To make a long story short all of them performed very well exept for the nikkor 70-300. At first i thought the performance wasn't good because i forgot to switch of the VR while using it on a tri pod, but when i switched it of there wasn't any noticable diffrence... this lens however performs very well on my DSLR's but for some strange reason it won't work well on the nikon 1 bodies...

The lenses:


This is the scene:


Enlarging the good ones:








And the bad one:


All shots were made camera mounted on a Manfrotto 028 tripod with a 400 geared head

[philbirch]

I picked up a Nikon V1 with the FT1 and a bunch of Manfrotto stuff for £100. Though I dont have any AF lenses that use internal focusing, I have good results with my other Nikon lenses.

Recently I bought a chip, which glued to a LM adaptor gives me auto exposure and focus magnification. The great thing with LM is you can stack further adaptors on it: M39, M42, CFD, NAI, NG etc.

The V1 isn't a wide angle friendly system.

[belgiumreporter]

Apr 14, 2020 13:29:56 GMT -5 philbirch said:

The V1 isn't a wide angle friendly system.

Indeed i isn't

The nikon 1 system has 2 main problems,



1) not very wide angle friendly, the only real wideangle would be the 6,7-13mm zoom wich would equal a 19 to 37 mm in full frame. This however is a very elusive lens and a quick ebay search led to 5 being available prices ranging from 678$ to 1087$ (all of them in Japan) so unless you have a lot of money to burn i don't think this would be a good option for wide angle shots on the 1 system.

However, there's a cheaper and even wider solution available in the form of the high quality nikon converters wich were made original to fit the coolpix 9900 type cameras but are easily adaptable to just about any other lens or camera. There's the WC-E63 0,63x wich will, combined with the 10mm standard lens give you the approx field of view of a 20mm in full frame. Even wider is the FC-E8- 0,21x fish eye converter once again in combination with the 10 will give a bit over 200° circular image about the same goes for the FC-09 0,2x but this is a very big chunk of glas wich in my opinion will give to much strain on the (non original) lens it is mounted on. These converters don't work well with the 1 zoom lenses (sharpness)

The V2 with the difrent converters

Here's a few examples with the 10mm- WC-E63 and FC-08 combination.





the 10-30 zoom /FC-08 combination dosn't give the best sharpness.


Same scene the 10mm without converter


2, and this is a diffrent story, because of the small sensor size even the 18,5mm 1:1,8 won't give good out of focus areas in the image, for this i don't see a solution. Also note the “grain” in the out of focus areas, even though the camera was set at the lowest (160)ASA and the lack of dynamic range due to the small sensor size.

Nikon 1 with 18,5mm at 1:1,8


Nikon D800 with 50mm at 1:2


On the other hand, with the longer focal lenghts great results are possible the 50-500 becomes a 140-1400mm equivalent and the 120-300 2,8 becomes a 336- 840mm 2,8 equivalent.



The 1 system has it's virtues, but with nikon now working on the expansion of the Z system for those who seek mirrorless system cameras, the 1 will become history or a fun toy to play around with providing it can be found at a reasonable (low) price.