Has Nikon recalibrated your 85mm f/1.4G?

Started 6 months ago | Question thread
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just Tony
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Has Nikon recalibrated your 85mm f/1.4G?
6 months ago

I'd like to know how satisfactory that was. I rented one last week and discovered three things:

1. The image quality can be phenomenal.

2. The focus shift with stopping down is extreme, and this can get in the way of using it to best advantage.

3. Luckily the AF precision happened to be extremely good so I didn't also have to fight randomness.

Everything that follows is based on a tiny sample of one lens on one D800 body.

For shooting at f/1.4 the optimal AF fine tune adjustment was -1.

For shooting at f/2.2 the optimal AF offset was +6.

For shooting at f/4 the optimal AF offset as predicted by Reikan FoCal was a whopping +23. Of course the closest I could get was +20. For shooting at f/5.6 or beyond I'd use the same +20 setting. I missed focus on some of the f/4 shots but 5.6 and 8 were usually spot on so the greater DOF saved the day.

I used +20 most of my shooting but I had to switch AF fine tune off for f/1.4. For f/1.6 through 3.2 I used Live view in order to avoid endless expeditions into the menu system.

Clearly, an optimum of +23 warrants some attention from the repair shop. But even more bothersome is that one setting is not usable for the whole aperture range. It would be great if both issues could be addressed together.

So my main question is that if I owned one of these lenses and sent it in to Nikon for AF recalibration, can they linearize the AF offset behavior, letting me use a single in-body fine tune setting and have it deliver the goods at any and all shooting apertures? Or did you still end up having to micro-manage the AF fine tune?



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