I have used about 30 different Nikon lenses over the last 35 years and I believe (subjectively - I have never objectively measured it) that each lens can differ a very small amount in its "color temperature." It is not something normally noticed because the color temperature of the light falling on the subject usually is far more variable than any variation in the glass color transmission but when changing lenses I have often seen a color change in my image when the existing light didn't change noticeably. I have even seen a variation in warmth between two lens of the exact same model. I have some duplicates of lenses and even they are not always exactly the same. Why the variation? I don't know. Maybe manufacturing tolerances allow for some color temp. variation? Or maybe it is all in my head! But put me down as one person who believes not all Nikon lenses, even two of the very same type, produce exactly the same color temperature when shot in identical light. It seems to me they should. But I have found some that don't.

TaoTeJared said:
Fyi - For testing the ISO and F-stop are critical and shutter speed is not. Keep the iso at 200 and the F-stop 2 stops above the lowest F stop. i.e. variable lens 3.5-5.6 test at F8-F11. 2.8 lens test at f5.6.

Each step up in ISO you loose resolution (i.e. 2250 lines at Iso 200 become 2100 lines at 400, 1850 at 1600 - example only- each model is different.) You also start to loose shadow & highlight detail as you move up in ISO.

Good tips.

Next tine I test, I'll use this as a baseline, and I will do some more testing as the year moves along.

Don't forget that some color casts are always expected, since most glass types and coatings do not have a completely flat response across the entire spectrum from UV to IR, but may cut off the blues and/or the reds slightly. Add that to the fact that light travelling to the edges of the frame usually have to pass through more glass, and you will have some variation from edge to center.

I haven't heard about this impacting image quality much (other than a very subtle change in subjective "feel"), so I guess this is why most people don't worry about it.

I think you will find that all the Nikkors will have very good sharpness and rarely will you find any that do not have a high IQ. Each lens does have it's own signature or look as well. This shows in the color shift you saw, contrast, vignetting, bokeh, chromatic abrasions, crispness, flaring, 3d effect, etc. You don't see this as much in "kit" lenses but do in the more higher end primes.

Fyi - For testing the ISO and F-stop are critical and shutter speed is not. Keep the iso at 200 and the F-stop 2 stops above the lowest F stop. i.e. variable lens 3.5-5.6 test at F8-F11. 2.8 lens test at f5.6.

Each step up in ISO you loose resolution (i.e. 2250 lines at Iso 200 become 2100 lines at 400, 1850 at 1600 - example only- each model is different.) You also start to loose shadow & highlight detail as you move up in ISO.

If you are getting more and more into lens testing, setting something up in your home where you can repeat day in and day out is really the best way. I use a desktop lamp shining on a wire basket to do my quick tests. I like vignetting and add it to almost every photo so that is of no concern so this setup works for me.

Now ... using my old 1978 vintage 70-200mm push-pull zoom (no automation at all - its an entirely manual AI 35mm "FX" lens), the results from it appear to be equal to, or ever so slightly "better" in places (subjective term, I know), than my 2010 purchased DX 55-200mm VR lens.

Both lenses deliver the same color balance (as far as I can see), so that issue I saw yesterday must be related to the FX wide angle lens.

Of course, the AI lens may be a poor copy and the DX lens the best example of the design they ever made, so they equal out, or vice versa - I have no idea what, but whatever it is, they are darn close IQ speaking to each other! Considering how much more advanced we are 35 years on, both with manufacturing, materials and design technologies etc, it says a great deal about those older designs...

Differences in set ups were to do with speed/exposure to get the same brightness/contrast.

Under todays conditions (overcast), my D7000 metering would have set things like this in landscape mode;

DX 18-55 (55mm) - 1/50th, f5.6 @ISO400.
DX 55-200 (55mm) - 1/60th, f4.0 @ISO250.

I played around with the focal lengths and they all varied the exposure settings much as expected (thank goodness something in all this was predictable).

The AI lens had to be set manually and I used the LCD on the camera to eyeball it. I took a series of 25 shots adjusting the various settings (some bracket) and using the LCD and histogram, ended up with it set to (focus at 70mm) - 1/50th, f4.5 @ISO200. I didn't see any vignetting!

Importing all the shots into my PC confirmed these settings as more or less right for me to make the best comparisons, for my brain/eye combination anyway.

Being super critical, the AI lens lost too much in the darkest shadow detail for my personal liking and using NX2, I could up the exposure by 1.4 before the rest of the shot started to became compromised. I suspect in use, I could easily open it by half (or more) of a stop over whatever meter readings delivered depending on the exact conditions and get the results I want. Maybe a coating is starting to cloud over? After all, it is 35 years old....

spraynpray said:
So what happened to your results when you exchanged the lenses and reviewed the shots again?

Been too busy working to do anything about this yet. Saturday night is not a time off if you are using a camera, is it? Give me a few hours and I'll set it up again, but today, we have a heavy overcast sky...

So what happened to your results when you exchanged the lenses and reviewed the shots again?

NikoDoby said:
I didn't say there was. However some of you have proven time after time that you don't play well with others in these subjective discussions. So now I have to kneel down in the sandbox and give preemptive warnings before someone's sand castle gets kicked over.

Niko,

If you kick sand in my face, I'll be a very angry little boy... HAHAHAHA...

By the way, I am moderator of my local areas residents online discussion group (we have a group on Yahoo) with over 240 members - some of whom wouldn't even let anyone else IN the sandbox if I didn't "remind" them to be nice every other day!

You don't want to post any messages about voting anything other than for a member of the Bush family... Considering we started out trying to get the weeds on the entrances to our sub-division removed, it all gets really heavy, really fast!

Bottom line is that I sympathize with you. Running a board/forum is not easy.

I didn't say there was. However some of you have proven time after time that you don't play well with others in these subjective discussions. So now I have to kneel down in the sandbox and give preemptive warnings before someone's sand castle gets kicked over.

Where was the unfriendliness?

Keep The Discussion Friendly or I will close this topic like all of the other heated lens test and sensor resolution threads. Lets stay away from the DX vs FX sharpness debate and stick to the "color temp" or contrast between lenses.

Yea, with such a small amount of time between shots about the only other thing you could have done was to meter the exposure. ;)

And I don't know if all Nikon bodies actually use a set temp for "daylight" or if some treat it as a hint towards the range to be working in. Your raw files could answer that.

Testing123 said:
I know...
Yet you draw conclusions. ;)
What where the lighting conditions (sources) and what were the white balance and exposure settings?

No offense taken. :)

Not having access to a calibrated lab to use to define the settings for every item of gear I own, I have to rely on real world results obtained with my retail copies of everything. I know that empirical (as in observed) results are notoriously unreliable but its all I (and I suspect 99% of the rest of us) have - results from a certain lab that seems to have as many critics as fans excepted. So conclusions... yes. Experience of getting actual results with the specific copies of the items I have. It works for me, as I suspect it does for all those of us without that calibrated lab to deliver results for all our own gear.

By the way, lighting was all bright indirect mid-morning sunlight. We have a cloudless sky and as far as I can tell the same light conditions were in force over the 30 or so seconds between shots.

Same shaded location (camera was on a tripod) all settings manual for both lenses, daylight white balance. Exposure for both shots I used to compare were 1/160, f8, ISO100 (manual settings). Focus was set manually to the same place on the target, which was a brick wall facing towards my house.

Does that help?

bjrichus said:
I wasn't trying to be scientific about it, what got me was the observation that it seemed to be producing results that came out "cooler" is all...

I know...
Yet you draw conclusions. ;)

Point being that your conclusions may be sound, but w/o knowing that the gross contributing factors (which you didn't list) were controlled for there are plenty of things which can (and no offense, more likely to) cause a perceivable difference in white balance. As everyone agrees, lenses can have different "white balances", but their effects are typically quite small. A few minutes difference in time can change the white balance of the sky far more than the widest spread I've ever seen between two lenses.

What where the lighting conditions (sources) and what were the white balance and exposure settings?

Testing123 said:
This test does not appear controlled well enough to attribute seen white balance differences to the lenses in question.

I wasn't trying to be scientific about it, what got me was the observation that it seemed to be producing results that came out "cooler" is all...

TaoTeJared said:
My thoughts exactly! I have had 3 and gave up trying to find a decent one.

OOPS... It is the 28mm f2.8D - not f2 - Nikon USA product number 1922.

I will be holding onto it as suggested!!!!!!

Actually, the color rendition I get with the DX lens is closer to the real scene than the FX 28mm - at least to my eyes/brain combo - so all I need now is to combine the sharpness of the 28 with the zoom and I am in heaven! LOL!!

Now to get my old "push-pull" 70 - 200 AI zoom out and see how it does!

Testing123 said:
BTW, what is the 28mm f/2 D? If you meant the 28mm f/2.8 AF-D I'm shocked. You have an excellent sample if it out resolves an undamaged 18-55, keep hold of it. I love the 52mm filter primes, but that one is typically considered the red-headed stepchild of the family.

My thoughts exactly! I have had 3 and gave up trying to find a decent one.

This test does not appear controlled well enough to attribute seen white balance differences to the lenses in question.

But, yes, lenses (to simplify) can have different "white balances".

BTW, what is the 28mm f/2 D? If you meant the 28mm f/2.8 AF-D I'm shocked. You have an excellent sample if it out resolves an undamaged 18-55, keep hold of it. I love the 52mm filter primes, but that one is typically considered the red-headed stepchild of the family.

Also, the differences you do describe need not have any bearing on the fact one has a smaller image circle than the other. FX as a format can be sharper than DX as a format for reasons other than the actual lenses used.

Coatings and different glass can make images warmer or cooler. Zeiss is well known to be warmer than many other makers. The 85mm 1.4G is warmer than the old AF-D lens as well. Sigma lenses use a different glass makeup (I can't remember what it is) that tends to give a purple or greenish tint to some of their lenses. You can really see is in the Chromatic abrasions or the Bokeh in images. None of this is really noticeable unless you look really hard at pictures of white walls, but it is there.

Ageing occurs with wine but not with the bottle that contains it. I have never heard of the age effect color at all. Not to say it couldn't happen to 50+ year old lenses, but nothing that was coated and made to the high standards in the last 10-20 years of Nikon.

I wouldn't categorize FX and DX in the all inclusive way you have suggested. Each lens is different and is engineered for different uses. I have 16 lenses, some DX are sharper than some FX lenses. Sometimes it is the reverse. My Tokina 12-24 (dx) is tons sharper than my (fx) 24-120vr 3.5-5.6. Nothing comes close to my 60mm or 105vr macros but I'm willing to bet the 85mm DX macro would beat the pants off of many FX lenses.

I think it hardly matters unless you either shoot film or use white balance presets and shoot jpeg. I'm not saying that everything would be the same shooting through a color filter—only that the kind of variation in lenses' color transmission isn't so much to be important (even jpeg is probably fine). Nowadays you can just shoot raw and change white balance in post processing.

We all say that FX beats DX for sharpness and I am convinced of this simply by doing my own side by side tests - using a DX body on a tripod, setting the camera values manually and just changing the lens then enlarging the image and eyeballing it is easily enough for me to see the increase in definition on the FX lens. Perhaps the change in definition/sharpness/whatever you want to call it was as a result going from zoom to fixed focus?

The DX is the "kit" 18-55mm and the FX is a 28mm f2D lens.

One other factor that I saw change is color. The DX is noticeably warmer than the FX lens!

I didn't expect that. Perhaps the lens coating on the 28mm lens are so different or that as it's a bit older than the DX lens it's aged and is actually noticeably colder now.

What does our assembled panel of experts think about this topic (lens color) that I almost never seen discussed?