Does anyone use adapted Nikon G lenses on their A7?

Hi, just for kicks I tried my 18-55 and my 35/1.8 DX on the A7r (I recently bought a D3200 only because of the ridiculously low price they were selling it at a supermarket).

 

The 35 covers almost the complete full frame format, only the very extreme corners suffers from bad vignette. But I found it to be always way less sharp than my Minolta MC 35/1.8 with the exception of the exact center of the image full open.

 

The 18-55 covers the full frame between 24 and 55mm, but it is usable only by f/8 onwards (fully open is utter crap, but remember that I tested it on the A7r that supposedly it is quite unforgiven on lenses; I didn't find it to be so bad on the D3200, quite the contrary actually).

 

Anyway they are a real pain to use, because:

 

- the adapter that you have to use to set the aperture does not indicate which aperture you are setting, so you will have to calculate that looking at the difference in shutter times from full open

 

- the focus throw (i.e. how far you have to turn the focusing dial from the nearest focusing distance to infinity) is ultra-short, so focusing on something with any kind of precision is a pain, and I did this from a tripod. Handheld? I would forget about it

 

In my opinion, it is not worth using G lenses unless you already own some very expensive piece of glass. If you want to stick with Nikon, do yourself a favor and buy 2 or 3 manual focus Nikkor lenses. They are quite cheap, the quality will be absolutely great with many of them, and they will be a pleasure to use!

You are so right^

I have 3 nikon f, a 70-200f4 macro zoom, a 28 3.5 and a 50 1.8 and all of them work quite well with the metabones adapter & focus peaking/zoom etc, i tried a mates dx zoom and it was not worth bothering with frankly.

You are so right^

I have 3 nikon f, a 70-200f4 macro zoom, a 28 3.5 and a 50 1.8 and all of them work quite well with the metabones adapter & focus peaking/zoom etc, i tried a mates dx zoom and it was not worth bothering with frankly.

 

BTW, I don't know if you're interested in infrared photography, but for this the 28/3.5 is utterly fantastic. I've used it a few years back with a Nikon D70 DIY converted for narrow infrared, and the images were amazingly tack sharp corner to corner.

What exactly do you want to know? I've been steadily selling off all my Nikon glass, but using the G lenses is not a problem at all if you have an adaptor that includes aperture control. That said, changing aperture is not something you can do comfortably with the camera to your eye - you do need to lower it and fiddle around a bit, as it's a very . What I usually would up doing was just preset the aperture I wanted to work at and stick to it. So, for example, I only really use my 50mm f/1.4D for portraits, and I know that my particular copy is best at f/2.2 so that's where I almost always leave it (for portraits).

 

One thing that you do need to be careful with is that due to the location of the ring for selecting between G lenses and non-G lenses, it's very easy to slightly turn it out of position whle handling the camera. If that happens, it's easy to wind up shooting at the wrong aperture, so for example if you've stopped down to f/8 on your non-G lens using the aperture ring but the ring on the adaptor is turned out of place then the lens will actually be at a faster aperture.

 

To be honest, though, I'm getting rid of the Nikkors and other F-mount lenses because the direction of the focus ring is the reverse of most other manufacturers, and it bothers me when switching between the Nikkors and, say, Zeiss lenses. I know Takumars are the same, but I don't have any.

I'm looking at buying the A7s because of the low light + 4K video possibilities. I do a lot of inside filming and I'm over using artificial light for simple tasks.

 

Basically here in Australia its going to cost $5.5k for the A7s + Atomos Shogun. I love what the shogun can do and cant wait to use it. However I own a Nikon D610 and 6 quality lenses (24-70mm 2.8G, 70-200mm 2.8G, 105mm Micro etc). I dont want to sell them because they are all basically new and are awesome with the D610. But maybe I can sell them all and buy everything back in Canon second hand? I believe Canon has more potential to get 4K right in the future than Nikon. 

 

I'm also looking at buying a Kessler Second shooter setup. 

 

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