Home ·· News Room ·· Prints ·· Licensing ·· Gallery ·· About Us ·· Contact Us ·· Articles ·· Services How Sharp is the Nikon 50mm f1.8 lens? October 19, 2006 Buy the Nikon 50mm f1.8 here Return to lens comparison
	Everyone who is searching for something beyond their kit digital SLR lens invariably posts to various photography forums asking the question "Which lens next?"  "What lens is the sharpest [for the money]?" Here is the answer: The famous and incredibly inexpensive Nikon 50mm f1.8 is the best sharpness versus dollar that you can buy in the Nikon family hands down.  It occurred to me as I wished to capture some of the great purple sky that was going along that there was no wind so the branches on a tree across the street would be quite sharp, only the leaves slightly moving.  A perfect condition for what I have been looking to demonstrate for some time about the Nikon 50mm f1.8.  Before going into any more discussion, here is a sample of the proof you will need. Below are two images taken of post sunset sky with virtually no wind to move branches.  This image and cropped section were taken on a Nikon D200 at 1.6" (seconds) and f9, a great sharpness area of the Nikon 50mm f1.8.  The white balance was set to daylight and the shot was done JPG LARGE/FINE with an in camera sharpness setting of +1.  This seems to be the consensus among D200 shooters where to place in camera sharpening for good JPGs right out of camera, so there is nothing special there.  It is my standard setting. Figure 1: Full image reduced to 600x402 using PS 7 Image Size: Width 600, Constrain Aspect Ratio Figure 2: A center crop of Figure 1 from the red box area Figure 3: Sharpening applied to the sample, Unsharpen Mask Amount 160%, Radius 1.0, Threshold 12 The only adjustment in Figure 2 was in Photoshop was to the levels of the image since the contrast was fairly low.  I adjusted the white point from 255 to 230.  There was no sharpening applied to the cropped section of the image and you are looking at a 1:1 pixel for pixel crop of the red boxed area of the large image. Figure 3 shows an Unsharp Mask applied to the sample image at an Amount 160%, Radius 1.0 and Threshold 12.  These value are a relative baseline for applying Unsharp Mask as suggested in the Photoshop 7 help.  As you can see, it does make the image in Figure 3 look a little "hard" looking, but remember that you are looking at a 100% 1:1 crop from the original D200 10MP image. My conclusion is that if a person wants a unbelievably out of camera sharp lens for a mere $115 (US price from B&H Photo, Oct 19, 2006), the Nikon 50mm f1.8 cannot be matched. In fact, this is the cheapest lens in the Nikon lens arsenal.  And a nice bonus is that f1.8 is quite fast, creating a much brighter image in the camera view finder than any kit slow zoom will ever provide. Return to lens comparison Buy the Nikon 50mm f1.8 here
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