Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Nikon 10-18mm f/4G for FX ?!?!

There's a pretty hot rumor floating around the internet about a supposed super-ultra-wide-angle aspherical lens. The Nikon 10-20mm f/4G...

Apparently this rumor surfaced on some Chinese chat-room or something. Of course it was forwarded on to Nikon Rumors and there you have it. I'd say that any info you get from there should be taken with a big grain of salt. They'll pretty much post anything. I do believe I recall one of their posts bragging abut being the first to call out the Nikon D10, yeah good job on that one...

Anyway, there is a pretty convincing looking photo of this fabled lens, but I'm gonna call bullshit on this one. First of all, looking at the lens it's just way too damn big. It's damn near as big as the 14-24mm f/2.8 (if not bigger!). The only reason I can see Nikon making this lens an f/4 is to reduce the size.

From the pictures I've seen on the internet, including one where the 14-24 was overlaid on the supposed 10-18. The lens bodies are almost exactly he same until you get to the lens hood which is suspiciously curved. A curved lens hood would most likely mean that the front element does not move as the lens is zoomed. This would be very strange indeed as all Nikon ultra-wides and even standard wide zooms have a moving front element.

It seems to me that this would be a strange offering from Nikon considering that the 14-24 is one of their most amazing lenses and it's only been out for about 1 1/2 years. The focal range makes no sense in Nikon's current pro lineup (14-24, 24-70, 70-200). It seems like in Nikon was going to add to this lineup they'd just go ahead and make it a 10-14 f/2.8. It would be smaller and there would be no overlap. Now if the 10-18 was a DX lens, yeah I'd believe that.

Well, enough of my musings on this subject. Do a search for this and check out the images for yourself. With that I leave you with an image of Jeff Keith of Tesla taken with the very real and very amazing Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Your right, its total bs