They say in heaven that loves comes first, which is pretty inconsiderate if you ask me. You'd think that love would be better at sort of thing. Still, let's have a look at the Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 ED, a fast telephoto lens from the superbad 1980s.
I've actually written about it before, back in July 2024, but I was curious to see what it was like on an APS-C camera, and in any case it's a good lens, so why not dig it out again? And take it to Geneva. Why not take it to Geneva, and let the sun shine through its polished glass elements once more.
The 80-200mm f/2.8 ED is way old. It was launched in late 1987, about a year after Nikon switched to autofocus. Nowadays the lens is only available second-hand. It's the cheapest fast short telephoto from one of the major manufacturers, which is why I was drawn to it.
Why is it cheap? Partially because it was popular, so there are a lot of them about, partially because it was discontinued in 1992, so even the newest example is very old, and partially because it uses Nikon's screw-drive autofocus, which is fading into history. Most modern Nikon cameras won't autofocus it, but the aperture and metering are still usable.
How old is 1992? Well, according to Google, 1992 is 33 years old. That's old!
The original 80-200mm f/2.8 was replaced in 1992 with an AF-D version that was optically the same, but with a revised focus limiter and a chip that could transmit distance information to the camera's flash system. The second version was replaced in 1997 with a model that had twist-to-zoom instead of push-and-pull-to-zoom. That model appears to have remained on sale until 2024-ish. Perhaps Nikon just forgot about it.
As of this writing it's no longer listed on Nikon's website. Instead the company sells a 70-200mm f/2.8 model that has image stabilisation and a swishy modern autofocus motor.
For all the images in this post I used the lens with my Fuji S3 Pro, which is now well-travelled. I took the same camera to Greenland a couple of years ago and still use it now and again. The S3 takes universally-available AA batteries and has lovely vivid colours, but more importantly it has a special sensor. That's why I still bother with it.
Over the last thirty years most digital SLRs used mass-produced sensors made by Sony or Philips, but a few manufacturers went their own way. Canon pioneered the use of CMOS, Sigma came up with a high-resolution Foveon sensor, and Fuji invented Super CCD, which had slightly larger imaging pixels than the competition.
Two of their digital SLRs, the S3 Pro and S5 Pro (pictured above) used an upgraded Super CCD sensor, Super CCD SR, which has two layers of photosites. Imagine a conventional six megapixel sensor, albeit with octagonal sensors, and then imagine a second set of much smaller pixels inserted into the gaps between the first set of photosites. Imagine that.
Now try to remember the number 949368. It's a simple number, just six digits. Try to visualise an interleaved pattern of dots in your mind while also remembering the number 949398. Nine four nine three six nine. Did you know that there was an episode of Star Trek: Voyager with The Rock in it? He played a wrestler in space.
No, I'm not making that up. There actually was an episode of Voyager with The Rock. It was called "Tsunkatse" and it was from the second half of the show's run. It also had Seven of Nine, because at that point in the show's run the ensemble cast had degenerated into Seven of Nine, The Doctor, Captain Janeway, and some other people. Late-period Voyager should really have been called Star Trek: The Seven of Nine and The Doctor Show, and yet Kate Mulgrew, Jeri Ryan, and Robert Picardo were charismatic actors who worked well together, and the show went up a notch when they appeared.
Which wasn't a surprise, because the original ensemble was pretty dire. There was the resentful co-star who didn't want to be on the show but continued because he was being paid a lot of money, plus the annoying fake-happy alien chef whose amusement value was undercut by a decision to direct him as if he was suffering from PTSD, which technically he was, but it made him pathetic rather than funny, plus the anonymous alien lady who was only two years old but was involved in a romantic relationship with the aforementioned alien chef - what was that all about? - and the ensign who wasn't as irritating as Wesley Crusher, but on the flip side had no distinct personality. There was also Tom Paris, whose name had Paris in it. And some other people.
And some of them were space terrorists, but only in the first episode. From the second episode onwards they weren't space terrorists any more. Because the show's producers wanted to have interpersonal conflict and actual jeopardy, but because this was pre-Battlestar Galactica they wanted to have family-friendly interpersonal conflict and not too much jeopardy.
None of this has anything to do with lenses. I just had to get it off my chest. That's not a reference to Jeri Ryan's physique. I just wanted to say it. Yes, technically it was Seven of Nine, The Captain, and The Doctor, plus some other people, because Kate Mulgrew was great as well. You remember how the James Bond franchise retained Judi Dench as M when the series switched from Pierce Brosnan to Daniel Craig, because even though the films were tonally different Dench was excellent in the role? Kate Mulgrew was like that. She transcended the material. For all the opprobrium directed at a female Doctor Who in recent years my recollection is the the grumbles about a female Star Trek captain faded away almost immediately because Mulgrew was excellent in the role.
There was also an episode where Captain Janeway went back in time to the twentieth century in the holodeck to investigate one of her ancestors, and it was almost a completely different show? It was something about the upcoming millennium. I admire the production team for at least trying something different. Suffice it to say that the end result of all these photosites is that every exposure with an S3 and S5 contains two images, a regular exposure, and a second exposure four stops dimmer.
Top command-line RAW processing tool DCRaw can even split them apart, viz:
Where this is useful is for retaining highlights. Consider the following image of a swan, which is way overexposed:
But what of the 80-200mm f/2.8? And what of Geneva? An odd holiday destination, from a UK perspective. I was drawn to it by sexual frustration. The city oozes with pent-up sexual frustration. Switzerland's chief product is chocolate, which it exports. The people who actually live in Switzerland have to make do with raw grass and rocks. Everybody wears a suit so as to disguise their animal nature. The major landmark is a spurting jet of water that gushes all over the locals:
Incidentally CERN's campus has a plaque that commemorates the very first website, but you can't see it unless someone lets you in, because the place has security gates. The World Wide Web in a recognisable form slightly predates The X-Files, which was one of the first contemporary pop cultural things to have a major internet presence. By the time Voyager came along, two years later, the Web resembled its modern incarnation, but narrower, slower, with smaller images, and tiny tiny videos. Voyager was a thing, but it was quickly forgotten, and then Enterprise famously failed to be a thing, and Star Trek itself faded into irrelevance while Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica had a renaissance.
