where there’s smoke there’s fire

As promised earlier today, here is the guest post review of the Nikkor 20mm f/1.8G ED lens:

When the new Nikon AF-S 20mm 1.8G was announced (only a few weeks prior to Photokina 2014) it created quite a buzz on the Internet. And – as always with announcements nowadays – the first impressions were quite biased. Many (include myself) expected the price to be way higher, but therefore the optical and mechanical quality to be more in line with the 24/35/85 f/1.4 primes. What Nikon gave us instead was an unexpected addition to the highly regarded (especially in terms of price/performance-ratio) line of the f/1.8 FX primes, where we can now choose between 20/28/35/50/85mm focal lengths. The 20mm is not only the most recent but, also the most expensive of the bunch. Still, it is definitely more affordable than the aforementioned f/1.4 primes. Before the 20mm was released, the Nikon AF-S 24mm f/1.4G was the wide angle lens of my choice in the 20-28mm area. I actually bought it on “day one” since the day after the release I was going to go on vacation and I figured that would be quite the opportunity to “test” the lens.

Since I have used the 24mm quite extensively over the past few years and many of my favorite photographs were created with it, I am also going to show some comparisons between the 20mm and the 24mm because my guess is many folks that are/were in the market for the AF-S 24mm f/1.4G (but didn’t pull the trigger yet because of the high price tag) may also be interested in the AF-S 20mm f/1.8G. But first: what do you need a fast wide angle prime lens for?

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