Nikon AF-S Nikkor 35mm f/1.4G Lens Review

Nikon AF-S Nikkor 35mm f/1.4G Performance

At maximum aperture, sharpness approaches excellent levels in the centre of the frame, but is only fairly good towards the edges of the frame. Stopping down improves sharpness across the frame. Although the clarity in the centre reaches outstanding levels from f/2 onwards, the sharpness towards the edges of the frame falls behind somewhat, reaching good levels with the aperture stopped down to f/2 and excellent levels by f/11.

Resolution @ 35mm

How to read our charts The blue column represents readings from the centre of the picture frame at the various apertures and the green is from the edges. Averaging them out gives the red weighted column. The scale on the left side is an indication of actual image resolution. The taller the column, the better the lens performance. Simple. For this review, the lens was tested on a Nikon D600 using Imatest.

Levels of chromatic aberrations are low at every aperture. Fringing is at it's strongest at f/1.4, but the level is low enough that you would be hard pressed to notice, covering 0.4 pixel widths.

Chromatic aberration @ 35mm

How to read our charts Chromatic aberration is the lens' inability to focus on the sensor or film all colours of visible light at the same point. Severe chromatic aberration gives a noticeable fringing or a halo effect around sharp edges within the picture. It can be cured in software. Apochromatic lenses have special lens elements (aspheric, extra-low dispersion etc) to minimize the problem, hence they usually cost more. For this review, the lens was tested on a Nikon D600 using Imatest.

As you may expect from a wide aperture wide angle lens, falloff of illumination towards the corners is quite severe. At maximum aperture the corners are 2.79 stops darker than the image centre and visually uniform illumination isn't achieved until stopped down to f/4 or beyond.

Imatest only managed to detect 0.623% barrel distortion, which is a very mild amount of distortion and should not cause any issues day-to-day. If perfectly straight lines are paramount, you'll be glad to hear that the distortion pattern is uniform across the frame, which should make corrections in image editing software afterwards relatively straightforward to apply.

Thanks to Nikon's Nano-crystal coating, incidences of flare and ghosting are very rare indeed. Contrast holds up very well indeed, even when shooting into the light. A petal-shaped hood comes supplied with the lens, which does a good job of shading the lens from extraneous light that may cause issues.

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