I have this little lens already for 8 years or something, and have hardly used it even though it’s quite a decent lens. It gets good reviews and rightfully so.
So after all these years it’s time to do a first test and see if this would be a good lens for astrophotography.
Putting the Nikkor 50mm F1.8 AF-D to the test
I tested the lens using a simple testchart to check the sharpness of the lens in the center and corners and to see if this lens has any distortion. Here is the full test image taken at F2.8
You can clearly see there is only a very tiny amount of distortion and the Nikkor 50mm F1.8 AF-D produces an almost flat image.
Next we need to check at which aperture the lens is at its sharpest.
Looking at the sharpness of the lens at different apertures we see that the lens produces the sharpest result at F2.8. At F2.8 the Nikkor 50mm F1.8 Af-D is also nice evenly sharp in the corners.
Conclusion
This first test looks promising. This little and very inexpensive lens produces nice sharp images without any noticable distortion. I’ll take it outside for some real star testing to see if the Nikkor 50mm F1.8 AF-D is suitable for astrophotography as well.
Update:Read the results of the astrophotography test for the Nikkor 50mm F1.8 here.
[…] a while ago I wrote about a short test of little cheap gem of Nikon lenses; the 50mm F1.8 D. This looked promising enough to test the lens for real under the stars. Let’s look at how […]