Let's have a look at the Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 ED. The first one. From
the 1980s. The first one. Let's have a look at it. The Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 ED, from the 1980s.
It's the chap in the middle here:
In the middle there. The Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 is a fast telephoto zoom with a pushy-pully-twisty-turny design. It was launched in late 1987, and at the time it was Nikon's top-of-the-range photojournalistic lens. My hunch is that many thousands of images of Milli Vanilli, Madonna, and the Berlin Wall were taken with a lens very much like this one, perhaps mounted on a Nikon F4, which was released a few months later.
Nowadays it's one of the cheapest decent 80-200mm f/2.8 lenses on the used market, partially because of its age - it was discontinued in 1992, so mine is at least 31 years old - and partially because it uses screw drive autofocus, which is fading out of history.
What is screw drive autofocus? From 1985 until roughly the turn of the millennium Nikon's cameras had a system
whereby the autofocus motor was in the camera body, with the gears in the lens. The motor drove the gears in the lens with a little spring-loaded screw.
The system worked, but it was noisy and buzzy, and it had trouble
with big telephoto lenses, so starting in the late 1990s Nikon gradually
switched to a new arrangement that had all of the mechanical bits inside the lens, which meant that different lenses could have different motors etc.
As of 2024 a couple of Nikon's top SLRs still have a screw drive motor, and at
least here in in the UK Nikon still sells the screw-drive 50mm f/1.8D, but
screw-drive lenses are a dying breed. None of the new Z cameras use it.
They're interesting on the used market because they mostly still work with modern Nikon cameras - at the very least the aperture mechanism and exposure system work - and if you're prepared to focus manually they can be a bargain.
The three lenses pictured above illustrate three different generations of
fast telephoto zooms. The Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1 on the left is a
manual focus lens from the 1970s that attracted a lot of press at the time. It was slightly longer, slightly wider, and slightly faster than the 80-200mm f/4 zoom lenses of the day. It also had a clever macro mode that went down to a surprisingly
close 1:4.
It's actually not bad by modern standards, if you stop it down a
little bit, viz the following images shot at a local air show with this lens on a Fuji S5
at f/5.6:
The Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 ED is a decade newer, with autofocus, and the Canon
70-200mm f/2.8 IS on the right is newer still, with image stabilisation. It was launched in 2001, which is technically almost a quarter of a century ago but still feels like the modern age.
Belluno, in the foothills of the Alps
I'm not going to formally compare the three lenses. They are however essentially a stop apart -
the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 is sharp in the middle at 200mm f/2.8, the Nikon
80-200mm doesn't get as sharp until f/4, the Vivitar 70-210mm is the same
again but at f/5.6.
The Vivitar 70-210mm has some nasty purple fringing in the edges that
never goes away. It works best on crop-sensor cameras, where the edges are cropped out. The coatings or glass
of the two autofocus lenses mostly eliminate red/green and blue/yellow colour
fringing, but the Nikon 80-200mm has purply highlights wide open, perhaps because it was designed in the film era.
The Vivitar 70-210mm is noticeably more
zoomy at the long end than the 80-200mm, more than the 10mm difference would
suggest, which makes me wonder if the 80-200mm is more like an 80-180mm.
Let's see what the Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 is like. The following image was shot with a fourteen megapixel, full-frame Kodak DCS
14n using the 80-200mm at 200mm. This is straight from the camera, hence the
tilt and the unretouched dust spots. f/2.8 is at the top and f/4 is at the
bottom:
The
vignetting is still obvious at f/4, but it's not especially offensive. Up-close at f/2.8 the 80-200mm is obviously softer, with a purple colour cast, but not
disastrously so, and it's probably not an issue if you're photographing portraits (again with f/2.8 at the top and f/4 at the bottom):
Subjectively the whole image is sharp across the frame at 80mm f/4 and 200mm
f/5.6, and even wide open only the very edges are blurry, and then only
slightly.
Here's a more extreme example of purple, again at 200mm f/2.8 and
then f/4 - pay particular attention to the BMW logo:
Do you know what BMW stands for? It stands for BE-ME-WE. The
company was founded in the late 1960s by a hippie who was keen on communal
living. He believed that we should all BE, and that we should eliminate ME and
become WE instead. Later in life he developed a type of house that used
bottles and cans as building materials. His name? Brian Malcolm Williams. Of
Cologne, Germany.
The purple fringing is an issue if you're photographing shiny things, although
it has to be said that Photoshop will easily fix that. Unless the subject is
also purple, in which case the job is more complicated. The only other
optical problem is a hefty dose of pincushion distortion at 200mm, noticeable
here at the top of the image (the metal barrier was straight and level in real life):
Historically the 80-200mm f/2.8 ED was one of the first lenses for the Nikon autofocus
system. It was released back in 1987, a year after the Nikon F-501, which was Nikon's first modern autofocus SLR. The first batch of Nikon AF lenses had naff-looking shiny black plastic bodies, but the 80-200mm f/2.8 has an attractive crinkle finish that looks more modern than 1987.
Mine is the original, mark one version,
which has a three-position focus limit ring. I left it in the "full" position because I paid for the lens and I'm going to use every bit of
it. The focus limiter works with a pull and a twist. I suppose it would be handy if you were at an airshow or sports venue etc and you expected to focus on distant things all the time.
When the autofocus system misses the lens takes
a couple of seconds to whizz from far to near and back again, and it's very
noisy, but the only time I've managed to completely fool the autofocus system was by trying to photograph things through rainy glass windows or fences etc.
The minimum focus distance is about a metre and a half, which is standard for lenses of that era. The Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 from a decade later is the same. Unlike the Vivitar lens it doesn't have a special close focusing gear.
Incidentally ED stands for extra-low dispersion. It's a special type of glass
designed to ensure that the different wavelengths of light focus at the exact
same point. As mentioned up the page it works very well, although there's
still a bit of purple.
In 1992 the mark one 80-200mm f/2.8 was replaced by a mark two version that had a focus limit
switch instead of a ring. It also added distance information to the autofocus
system - it was an AF-D-for-Distance lens - which tied in with Nikon's flash automation,
although otherwise it was optically the same.
In turn the AF-D version of the
lens was replaced in 1997 by a mechanically revised model with a twist-to-zoom
design, although again the optical design was the same, or at least the number
of elements and groups didn't change. It's entirely possible that the coatings
were improved or the interior was tweaked somehow. Surprisingly the mark three screw-drive 80-200mm f/2.8 appears to still be on
sale, or at least Nikon's US website lists it as a current product (at
$1,224).
In 1998 Nikon launched a non-screw-drive 80-200mm f/2.8 that was briefly sold
in parallel with the screw-drive 80-200mm. It was the first of Nikon's
new non-screw-drive AF-S-for-Silent Wave lenses. It
was only in production for a few years before being replaced by a 70-200mm
f/2.8 lens that had image stabilisation.
Judging by the serial number mine is one of the earlier lenses, from
1987-1989, but the push-pull mechanism still feels grippy. The back end of the
lens is sealed, and it seems tightly-made; mine doesn't have any obvious dust. It's a chunky, solid lens that doesn't rattle.
There are a couple of awkward things. Manual focus is activated with a clutch
mechanism that involves pressing a button and twisting the entire barrel of the lens, which has the side-effect of preventing the lens from having a tripod foot, because the collar would have nowhere to go. The front element rotates as it focuses, and it sticks out, so you have to be careful not to bash it against anything. If
you're using a polarising filter be sure to rotate the filter after you've focused.
As with all Nikon lenses from this period you have to make sure that the
aperture ring is at f/22 when you put it on the camera, otherwise the electronics get confused, but that's a
Nikon thing. Nikon people already know about that. Or at least older Nikon people know. Modern Nikon lenses don't have an aperture ring.
The bokeh isn't especially great, although with a
200mm f/2.8 it's easy enough to arrange the photo so that the background is a
wash of colour. The following is an unusually bad example:
I think it's something to do with fishing. The only Italian I know comes from train
announcements - allontanarsi dalla linea gialla is burned into my
brain - but pesca looks like it has something to do with fish, so my
hunch is that zona di pesca regolamentata is "zone of fishing
regulations".
Can I sustain a relationship with an Italian woman if we only talk about yellow lines, platform numbers, and fishing
regulations? Is that enough? No, it probably isn't enough.
No, hang on. I know messia satanico as well. That might be the clincher. "Je suis un messia satanico. Voulez-vous allontanarsi dalla linea gialla avec moi?" Could that work? Is that sexy? I'll have to try it out.
Those are the 80-200mm f/2.8's only bad things. On the positive side the colours are natural-looking. Saturated but not overpowering. In most of the images in this article I've boosted the contrast a bit, but the shot of the bridge above and the vertical alleyway a few paragraphs ago are straight-from-the-camera.
Flare? I have no idea, I didn't shoot into the sun. The 80-200mm has a 77mm filter thread. As far as I can tell Nikon's official hood screwed directly into the thread - the mark two lens had a bayonet mount - which strikes me as slightly unsafe given that the front element rotates. But perhaps it connected some other way. I'm not sure.
Italy wasn't designed for cars. Or rather the nice-looking bits weren't designed for cars. And even though there are masses of scooters, there are also masses of cars, because Italy isn't great if you're a pedestrian. It has pavements that end abruptly, out-of-town shops that are only a short walk from the town but inaccessible because there are no pavements, pedestrian crossings that favour cars etc. And yet it continues to exist.
Does the original 80-200mm make any sense nowadays? I'm not a Nikon person so I'm at a disadvantage here. It would be interesting to compare it with one of Nikon's modern 75-300mm f/4-5.6 consumer-level zooms with image stabilisation, or the perennial 180mm f/2.8. My hunch is that the image quality at f/8 would probably be about the same, and with the modern zoom you would be able to shoot at f/8 because of the image stabilisation, but there's a lot to be said for f/2.8. It subtly blurs out backgrounds and makes the subject stand out.
On the used market the early 80-200mm f/2.8s hover at around £250 or so, give or take £100 depending on condition, and of course the newest examples are very old. I waited ages for a good copy. I was originally going to pair it with a 35-70mm f/2.8, which was Nikon's contemporary fast normal zoom, but that thought reminds me of something else - the 35-70mm f/2.8 apparently has a problem with hazy elements that get worse with age, whereas judging by internet reviews the 80-200mm f/2.8 keeps on keeping on, because they were built to be used and bashed about by professionals.
And that is the Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8. Good but not excellent wide open, slow and buzzy autofocus, really well-made, no obvious quirks, nice but not overpoweringly contrasty colours, cheap, durable, chunky, holds its value.
