In addition to updating my Missing Nikkors article for the umpteenth time, I decided to take another approach. What follows is my current (and probably last F-mount) Nikkor Wish List and my rationale for it.
DX Lenses
I've been extremely vocal about Nikon missing the boat with DX lenses (buzz, buzz). Yes, Nikon can and did sell a lot of consumer convenience 18-xx DX zoom lenses. A lot, as in millions in total. The problem is that these are all one-time buys, they stay on the camera forever, and that user is done buying lenses. Then Nikon wonders why no one is still buying DX lenses. Well, it's a lower level user and they have the one lens they want.
Yet Nikon management can look across town and see Fujifilm selling a whole bunch of APS-C (DX) type lenses. What's going on there?
Duh: photography, dudes. The serious photographer understands lenses and wants more. Not more 18-xx lenses, not more kit lenses, not more low-cost and lower-quality AF-P lenses. Funny thing is, one of Nikon's more successful and well-regarded recent cameras is the D500, and you'd think they'd want to make the D7500 successful too. These cameras absolutely demand appropriate lenses. But Nikon doesn't have many of them. Indeed, other than the 16-80mm f/2.8-4E and the 35mm f/1.8G they don't have any.
So here we go. The needs in the DX lineup are plentiful:
- 14mm f/2.8E DX — Does Nikon remember Galen? He'd be demanding a lens like this. Because he'd still be running up mountains, only with a DX body instead of an N65.
- 16mm f/2E DX (1) — My requirement used to be f/2.8, but because of the Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8, it went up: Nikon needs a fast wide prime to shift some sales.
- 23mm f/1.4E DX — The modern mild wide angle that can roam indoors and out.
- 23mm f/2.8E DX Pancake (2) — For the rest of the world, the travel lens that is also mild wide angle.
- 50mm f/1.4E DX (5) — (Can be anything from 50mm to 60mm) — The modern short portrait tele for the crop sensor crowd.
- 70mm f/2E DX (4) — The longer portrait tele. This is about as far as we can go in primes and get any real benefit from making the image circle DX instead of FX, so the FX line will take the mantle the rest of the way. Technically, the current 85mm f/1.8G FX can hold this space, though I find it a little long for portraits and a little fat for a DX lens. Thus, this isn't the first hole I'd try to fill if I were Nikon and its priority drops to #4.
- 12-24mm f/4E DX VR (3) — The remake of the original wide angle pro lens from Nikon. We don't really need 10mm. What we need is really good performance to the edges that holds up with 20/24mp image sensors (and whatever comes next for DX).
- 16-50mm f/4E DX AF-P VR — In theory, a clearly smaller lens than the 16-80mm f/2.8-4. We need to keep the DX advantage (smaller than FX) in our kits, even if it means sacrificing something (in this case a stop of aperture and some telephoto).
- 50-135mm f/2.8E DX AF-P VR (6) — The missing fast telephoto zoom. Frankly, Nikon has their work cut out for them, as the Sigma 50-100mm f/1.8 Art is a really, really good lens. So good I might not buy this Nikkor even if it existed.
- 50-135mm f/4E DX AF-P VR — The complement to the other two f/4 zooms, giving you a capable 12-135mm (18-200mm equivalent) kit that's highly capable (24mp acuity levels) in as small as possible sizing (the f/4 and DX bits).
Had Nikon started by delivering two of these a year starting in 2014, we'd have been done in 2019. Moreover, the signal that it would have sent would have kept some of the defections to Fujifilm from occurring. That's 10 lenses I defined, and Nikon only introduces about six a year on average. They'd have to have completely prioritized DX lenses or added a great deal of launch capability to turn DX around. They did neither.
So, to all those managers at Nikon scratching their heads wondering why DX failed them so quickly, go down the hall to the restroom and look in the mirror.
FX Lenses
The tricky part here is that Nikon updated many of their FX lenses, but they didn't make them all E or AF-P or video/mirrorless ready. I'm not 100% sure what they should have done about that. Starting the prime lineup all over again seems like a task that would have delayed the mirrorless line, unfortunately.
Still, I like the idea of revisiting a few key lenses. In particular:
- 18mm, 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm f/1.4E AF-P fast focus primes. Some focal length gaps are fine; these were the lenses needed to quickly help fill that E/AF-P/video/mirrorless requirement but still work fine on the big, high resolution DSLRs. We need that 18mm for crop video by the way, not so much for still use.
- 135mm f/1.8E and 200mm f/2.8E primes, and a 400mm f/4E PF prime. This would have rounded out the telephoto prime set (the 400mm gives you the 500/600mm f/5.6 with the TC-14EIII). I know a lot of folk will be surprised that a 200mm f/2E FL or 300mm f/2.8E FL aren't on my list, but I think Nikon thought the 120-300mm f/2.8E dealt with that problem. Once we get into the exotic lenses, the demand is now near zero for new ones at the current pricing. Basically most of those lenses end up getting bought by lens rental companies, and they're not repeat buyers.
- 200mm f/4E Micro-Nikkor VR. Oh dear have we missed this lens. For a company that was so instrumental in pioneering macro photography, it seems that they've completely lost the thread. Instead of new capabilities, we keep getting "copy stand" macro lenses (e.g. 40mm DX and 60mm FX). Anyone still have a copy stand?
The good news is that the zoom side of things has given us remakes to bring latest technologies into the key Nikkor lenses. The 24-70mm and 70-200mm f/2.8E zooms are already in place. The 14-24mm f/2.8 is the one that needs the most refresh, and I'd make the 24-120mm into a 24-85mm f/4 or maybe 24-105mm f/4 myself. The 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6G could use a freshening, too, as the new 70-300mm and 200-500mm have revealed its weaknesses, and Nikon could really use a better handholdable telephoto zoom that makes it to 400mm.
So in FX, I ended up with twelve unmade lenses on my wish list.
Final Thoughts
I haven't even talked about the mirrorless system, and I identified 22 lenses I believed Nikon needed to produce for DSLRs. That's four years worth of their historic levels of introduction (six a year).
Nikon's strength entering the DSLR era was lenses. Ditto for Canon. It's why they dominated the DSLR market as they did the late film SLR market. I can't believe that Nikon didn't realize that lenses are a truly protective barrier against competitors. Fujifilm erased the DSLR DX advantage with their XF mount onslaught of mirrorless lenses. Not the proliferation of Fujifilm mirrorless cameras, which also happened, but lenses. It's those Fujifilm lenses that attracted crop sensor customers right in the heart of Nikon's success (the D70 level, which currently is served by the D7500).
Someone needed to wake the boys up at the glass factory. Maybe it got too hot for them with all that glass being made and they all took a long siesta.
Thus, my final wish list here is also a checklist as to whether Nikon actually filled their gaps. They didn’t. The point is that the Nikon F-mount had holes and weak points, and the serious DSLR shooter is still waiting for them to fill those.
In the last seven years this checklist was sitting around waiting to be updated, I was really able to take only two lenses off it, the 105mm f/1.4E, and 120-300mm f/2.8E.
