THIS LENS IS OUTSTANDING! | Nikon 200mm f/2G VR II Review | Sebastian Oakley
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- čas přidán 3. 08. 2024
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This was superb
Thanks for the comment, really appreciate it!
Its an absolutley stunning portrait lens
Oh I can only imagine!!!
Wonderful piece of glass. This lens would shine on my Z9 and D850.
Oh it would be stunning!
Hello mate,
Nice video. I've got series one (Nikkor 200mm f2G ED VR) which doesn't have Nano coating. Is this one very different from the first generation? I bought it second-hand from Ted's Camera in Melbourne which comes with 3 year Nikon warranty as Ted's is Nikon certified reseller. That is quite quick as well and has VR. I paid 3800 AUD which is around 2500 USD. HAve you ever used the first generation?
Cheers
Hello, thanks for the comment - I had the first gen as a backup to this one, first gen was just as amazing and tbh the VRII isn't much of an upgrade at all.
The original 200f2 is an amazing lens super fast and worth a very penny!!
@@SebastianOakley Thanks for confirming. I will keep it then. Cheers, Babak
@@babakrad4438 no worries!
For the price they charge it better be outstanding.
That is very true, these are not cheap lenses by any means!!!
this is the f mount lens i will keep forever. nothing renders bokeh like this one to this day. the new z135 1.8s plena is close but not quite same.
That's really interesting to hear, I love this lens and it's taken amazing images over the years
For this lens to shine, you need to put it on a camera that has the OLPF [1] Eliminated. In the case of Nikon, at a photosite density expressed in full frame MP, the decision point to Eliminate it or not is 36MP.
The Nikon D800 has an OLPF but in the otherwise equal (ceteris paribus) D800E it was Eliminated.
On a 36MP D800, this lens gets 28P-Mpix from DxO Mark, which becomes 34P-Mpix on a D800E, but then gets 41P-MPix on a D850 [2]. Removal of the OLPF has an impact though [3].
Put it on a 24MP pro body and you're looking at OLPF and your raw processing software's deBayerisation and demosaicking more than at this actual lens's performance.
While it is a 200mm with f/2 (means that at infinity focusing distance, its entry pupil is 200mm/2=100mm). If it has focus breathing then it also has aperture breathing and focusing closer by focal length gets longer, but while the entry pupil may remain 100mm in diameter the corresponding number in f/number will increase. My 105 macro lens is about 160mm at 1:1 closest distance and while its entry pupil is 105/2.8 at infinity it is f/4.3 at 1:1. BUT. The aperture number says nothing about light transmission. Compare a 1.2L lens from one brand to a 1.4G lens form another brand (from this 200/2's era). The 1.2L has a light transmission of 1.5 at f/1.2 and the 1.4G also has a transmission of 1.5 but at f/1.4.
This 200/2 has a transmission of f/2.4 at infinity. The 1.2L shooter will tell you that it has very shallow Depth of Field (DoF) and you can answer, but it is by far not as sharp as the 1.4G, so it has a larger Circle of Confusion (CoC - ceteris paribus) and hence the 1.2L may have an equally shallow DoF as the 1.4G both fully opened. The 1.2L shooter now will tell you that it gives such beautifully soft images, upon you will quip back, of course, because it has a lot less sharpness.
So this 200mm/2 is a niche lens. Very expensive, fixed 200mm, beautiful rendition, very sharp, and reasonable chromatic aberration. But niche applications.
To another commenter calling this a stunning portrait lens, I would say that the lens is stunning, but that is no guarantee for stunning portraits. I don't need its blur ("bokeh" is everyday Japanese for "blur") in a studio shoot, where it is too big and this easily stuns the sitter. I would also add that perspective - how we render a 3D face or body in its proportions as 2D image - depends on distance, not lens, but 200mm forces me to stand farther away and this may complicate communication with the subject, plus it gives some depth compression. The latter may be flattering in some cases, but undesired in other.
Not necessarily more sharpness, I need. Remember the words of artist-photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson that "sharpness is a [petit] bourgeois concept" - in which arrogant upper-class artist HCB pejoratively expresses his disdain for uncivilised narrow-minded less educated people. Yet has a fair point if we leave pity citizens alone.
Sports photos, birds in flight, speedy wildlife in motion - in all cases where stills are tack sharp at all levels, if there is zero subject speed-related motion blur, to me such stills are still-born.
Imagine these photographers responding to that: "but have you seen how beautiful the background blur of my hugely expensive lens is?" ROTFLMAO, yesteryear's youth might think or say.
This is my lecture (recurring rant) to commercial/professional portrait and wedding photographers too, in reply to rants on "bokeh". That bride wants to see herself as a supermodel in her wedding dress and your "reportage". Looking at her images, she cannot see anything else than herself, she could not care less about your lens's bokeh and it's her sentiment that pays your future bills.
My worst F-mount lens in DxO Mark (180/2.8 ED) in sharpness on a 24MP camera with OLPF is still good enough to reveal the down hairs in sitter's face that the naked eye (brain) will generally not see, plus it gives a look into skin pores.
I migrated to a camera without OLPF, after having suffered from getting "across the frame colour cast" that I could not get rid of in post, caused by total reflection between the OLPF and another layer (sensor? Bayer filter grid?) that the OLPF keeps distance from.
Stay under overcast British skies or indoors' equestrian events and you never have this problem.
Note that OLPF-yes/no depends on photosite density and in the case of Nikon a 20MP D500 (APS-C format camera called DX format by Nikon) has none, which explains why its images equally are as good as or better than shots from a 24MP full frame.
I migrated to the Z system for its lenses, as a way to get lenses with much less chromatic aberration than I got from my 1.4G primes. I also saw the Z system as a path to better AF with eye tracking. With an 85mm/1.8D single point AF with the focusing point in the middle and recomposing was easy - it has much less sharpness than the 85/1.4G, hence at its larger Circle of Confusion (CoC), the 84/1.8D has more Depth of Field (DoF) at the same f-stop. Recomposing with the 1.4G implied shifting the AF point around and for me to keep looking through the camera, thus interfering with my photographer-sitter interaction. The Z 7 as of firmware version 2 was a nice improvement on all levels for me, but its "recognition AI AF" was in its infancy. I hoped that the Z 7ii would solve this, but it didn't. Nikon decided to dedicate the second EXPEED 6 in the Mk ii completely to the eVF, not anything else. Now the Z 8 - wow. Eye recognition in lower light, 3D tracking - wow. No, your landscapes will not get better shots from these upgrades. Especially when you shoot everything from a tripod. The D and first two generations Z camera's sensors had more sensitivity to photographer-caused motion blur than the Z 8's.
Sharpness has become so good that I need skin-softening AI that retains the sitter's character, does not become plastic, in the photos.
I could look into the 200/2 Mk ii if I needed a fast and tack sharp 200mm prime and with the FTZ adapter shoot it on my Z 8 - it would do great. Nikon have come up with "S" class Z lenses in order of what F-mount lens needed to be improved on, urgently. Either because it had optical issues, or because competition. In the case of the 200mm prime, you are in niche territory where exceptional quality and very low sales numbers combine into very high prices - as a self-fulfilling prophecy. I can however buy an "S" class Z 70..200/2.8 zoom that has the optical qualities of a prime lens. "New" this zoom will be in the ballpark of a second hand 200/2 or even cheaper as they are hard to find and sought after.
With the Z camera, I do not need the f/2 (with T=2.4 transmission) or else have a darker viewfinder as I would get in the case of an SLR - the eVF is an electronically amplified almost night-vision one and it still focuses for me with its AF, down to LV -9, where it cannot measure light any longer and long exposure times must be based on my wild-assed guesses, or my handheld light meter. At LV -9, through an SLR's viewfinder I see nothing, even with an f/0.95 lens on it.
This is not a rant against Nikon's D cameras and F-mount lenses by the way. If they match your photographic use cases, they are absolutely fine.
[1] If you don't know what an OLPF is, or don't understand why it may be there, I can explain - ask me.
[2] Check this out. This tack sharp 200mm, expressed in DxO Mark's P-Mpix sharpness unit, tested on the following cameras:
D5 - 20MP - OLPF - 20P-Mpix
D750 - 24MP - OLPF - 24P-Mpix
D800 - 36MP OLPF - 28P-Mpix
D800E - 36MP - no OLPF - 34P-Mpix
D850 - 45MP - no OLPF - 41P-MPix
Here we see that ceteris paribus, both under OLPF, we get 16.7% more sharpness from the 50% more MP between 24MP and 36MP.
Only removing the OLPF gains 21.4% ceteris paribus between 36MP and 36MP.
Then the 25% gain in MP from 36 to 45 ceteris paribus (both without OLPF) gives us 20.6% gain in sharpness and there's more going on than just more MP (e.g. a change from old-school to BSI sensor could be culprit in violating ceteris paribus).
The reason why a gain in MP doesn't relate linearly to human perception of sharpness is that MP are an area number and for the human visual brain we need a "linear" comparison.
When we compare a 6,000*4,000 (24MP) camera to a 7,360*4,912 (~36MP) one, then the 50% MP gain translates in file size and required processing power, memory, and I/O bandwidth, but we need to linearly compare the 7,360 to the 6,000 and that's only a 12.6% increase. "We" measure detail resolution (as distinct from gradation resolution AKA bit depth, which is again distinct from dynamic range) e.g. in linePairs per millimetre - a linear unit. "We" express enlargement of an image in "linear". "We" express display resolution in a linear unit: Pixels Per inch (PPI) or a printer's resolution in Dots (Droplets) Per Inch (DPI). As to MP this means, for the human eye to see significant improvement, you need to double linearly and that looks like this: to double a sensor of X*Y=MP linearly, you get 2X*2Y=4MP.
As mentioned above, the snake in the comparison grass is violation of ceteris paribus. 45MP is 87.5% more than 24MP, and we should need 96MP to get double the 24MP resolution ceteris paribus. But at 70.8% resolution improvement we get an almost linear-to-MP resolution improvement because a.o. the OLPF was removed between the two.
[3] in the Bayer paradigm, the silent agreement between parties is that a Bayer camera shoots raw images consisting of monochrome data elements and that software magically turns each single colour data element into an RGB pixel. We can simply call the extreme noise in the Bayer raw image "Bayer noise" and forget about "luminance noise", "colour noise" or "not enough photons" and quantum-physics' derived [male bovine excrement], as all these distract from the quality of the raw processing (conversion) software. Using raw processing software developed with the assumption of an OLPF being present to convert raw shots taken without OLPF, will not remove all Bayer noise in the final RGB-pixel representation. Topaz gave better AI to do so in their DeNoise AI app (and Sharpen AI, Gigapixel AI apps) already years ago, then a few years later DxO followed with DeepPRIME in PhotoLab (Adobe Camera Raw - ACR - and Lightroom Classic - LrC - competitor) that DxO also offers separately as plug-in for LrC under PureRAW name. In 2023 the Mudbricks finally found time to insert better handling of Bayer noise in their "Enhance" bundle of optional functions in ACR (the Develop tab in LrC is actually ACR).
Thanks for the comments
Do they do a pocket version ?
Unfortunately not... Not going to get away with this at the zoo!
This kind of lems isn't for me. But IIRC, someone compared it to the 135/2, and the 200/2 was sharper wide-open.
Interestingly, Fujifilm makes a 200/2 for their X mount system.
Yes, I agree this lens isn't for everyone at all, and some would argue I was using it for the wrong purpose back in the day... But it's exceptional!
Yes Fujifilm have a 200F2 - never used it or seen one out in the open but can only imagine it's Wonderful
Get your facts straight, it's not the only prime lens they have not released in Z mount! The 300mmf2.8 has not been released in Z mount and there are several others! In reality this is not the sharpest lens wide open, it gives that impression because off it's shallow depth of focus wide open ! I've owned three of them and they are very good, great for isolating rider and horse especially in a small show jumping ring etc!
Oooo apologies for getting a few facts wrong, the Z system never interested me so I don't follow it!
@@SebastianOakley Sorry, I read my comment back and it came across as a bit arrogant, it wasn't meant that way, cheers and happy shooting!