now *that’s* backwards-compatibility

Friday, Jan 5. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Photos

zac told me about his dad’s old Nikon SLR from the 60′s, and on a whim jaime brought them over during lunch, and we tried them out. turns out they still fit perfectly into my brand new D80 digital SLR. these are some old manual-focus lenses, so they obviously don’t auto-focus, but they see to work fine.

the two lenses are a 80-200 f/4.5, which is pretty much a pure overlap with the 55-200 lens i already own – so not much to be gained there. but the other lens is the classic Nikon 50mm f/1.4 lens which i’ve been having a blast with all night. it takes some great portrait photos with some really shallow depth of field.

i’m debating whether or not to cancel the order for the 50mm f/1.8 AF i have at Amazon. i’ll play with this MF f1/4. for a few more days and decide – but so far…so good

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2 Comments to “now *that’s* backwards-compatibility”

  1. SwitchBL8 Says:
    January 6th, 2007 at 12:09

    Watch out with older lenses. DSLR’s have the CCD/CMOS closes to the lensmount than the traditional film was. Some lenses will not fit because of that, or zoom-lenses might damage the CCD/CMOS when zooming.

    Other than that: it’s the other way around with lenses. The newer DX lenses probably won’t work on the old SLR’s since the projected image does not fill a full-frame negative.

    As for the 50mm f/1.8 or f/4. Go with the f/1.8. With a 50mm and f/1.8 (or faster) you can do pretty amazing stuff without using a flash. The f/4 is just too limited for that.

  2. dan Says:
    January 8th, 2007 at 00:42

    I just saw your beagle pictures with the MF 50/1.4. Nice work. Photography is awesome, isn’t it? :-) I love available-light photography, and the 1.4 goes a long way in that respect (and don’t be shy to bump up the ISO rating up to 800 or so… it still looks very good).

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