Are your 16-35 VR corners unusable?

Hi friends,

I have Nikon 16-35 f4 VR and 18-35G, want to love 16-35 for VR and build quality, as I like to shoot without tripod when traveling. Use it on d800.

If I focus to second half of frame or infinity even f8-f10 corners are unusably even resized to 2000px. Is there 1) lens issue and I need to send for calibration 2) some secrets with focus points on UWA?

When focus on half of frame, or 1/3 first half of frame, corners are acceptable.

The same focus points with 24-70 or 18-35 has good corners, acceptable. Comparing with 16-35 they are perfect.
Any ideas about this lens? Thanks for help.

focused on middle house

Try another copy or get it checked... I think it's a great lens, have some excellent shots from it

Simon

I was actually doing some garden shots with this yesterday pretty similar to your example in terms of focusing distance although at 16mm and F/8 rather than 18mm.

There is definitely some corner softness at 100% but less so than your example and further into the corners.

I have the same lens and found my copy has horrible edge too when compare to my 14-24G and Samyang14, but I think that has more to do with the field curvature than anything else, so now when I use this lens I pay special attention to the edge and make sure I adjust my focusing a bit to make sure the edge appears to be sharper, I am shooting my landscape picture on tripod and using LV manual focus 99% of the time, so that's a easy to do, I found I got much better edge performance this way.

Thanks everyone for posts and advices.

I tried several images to take with different focus points and found that when focusing to 1st third of the frame in most cases corners are pretty usable and after processing they are good.

The main thing we all use 16-35 I think is VR. I cannot take photos in the morning or early evening at f8-f11 @ 1/5 sec. when walking around without tripod. Photo with softer corners or noting at all

It seems that lenses can be usably with extreme accuracy on focus point. If we had a new Canon 16-35 IS

Here are some shots with focus to 1/3rd taken 2 days ago. I think pretty usable. Thinking to leave this lens in my bag and sell 18-35. VR + build quality the main reasons.

JOrmsby wrote:

As one who owns the 18-35G and has tested it against the 16-35 VR, I'd say soft corners are not that unusual on the 16-35. I know some are very happy with it, but I have to admit as a Nikon shooter, I'm really jealous of Canon's new 16-35 f/4, which has gotten great reviews, especially for the corners. As a mostly wide-angle shooter, I really think Nikon missed an opportunity with their 16-35. It's pretty mediocre for the price. The newer 18-35G is better but still not on the level of Canon's new wide angle.

this is true and some bad ideas are coming to head 6d + 16-35 and 24-70 But hope Nikon will release some new version of wide lenses with VR.

MoreorLess wrote:

I was actually doing some garden shots with this yesterday pretty similar to your example in terms of focusing distance although at 16mm and F/8 rather than 18mm.

There is definitely some corner softness at 100% but less so than your example and further into the corners.

thanks for post. where was your focus point?

thelenspainter wrote:

Paul Liukas wrote:

Hi friends,

I have Nikon 16-35 f4 VR and 18-35G, want to love 16-35 for VR and build quality, as I like to shoot without tripod when traveling. Use it on d800.

If I focus to second half of frame or infinity even f8-f10 corners are unusably even resized to 2000px. Is there 1) lens issue and I need to send for calibration 2) some secrets with focus points on UWA?

Focusing far away is the wrong strategy for a UWA lens unless everything in the scene is at infinity.

When focus on half of frame, or 1/3 first half of frame, corners are acceptable.

This is the correct strategy.

The 16-35 has strong field curvature at the corners, at the wide end of the zoom range. The field curves sharply away from the camera. This means if you want the corners sharp when nearby objects are visible there, you need to use hyperfocal distance to focus as close as possible while keeping distant objects sharp.

Further, I would question the application of the term 'usable' to the extreme corners of the image area. It is very rare that a composition works best with important elements positioned so far in the corners. So in reality, a bit of corner softness matters very little. As described above you can minimize it using correct focusing technique.

thank you for advices. I agree with you, just some times, when you have near to far composition, these corners can ruin a photo completely. Actually for such images one should you PCE I think.

JOrmsby wrote:

As one who owns the 18-35G and has tested it against the 16-35 VR, I'd say soft corners are not that unusual on the 16-35. I know some are very happy with it, but I have to admit as a Nikon shooter, I'm really jealous of Canon's new 16-35 f/4, which has gotten great reviews, especially for the corners. As a mostly wide-angle shooter, I really think Nikon missed an opportunity with their 16-35. It's pretty mediocre for the price. The newer 18-35G is better but still not on the level of Canon's new wide angle.

Hey, you better be careful making such statement in the Nikon forum, "we' Nikon owned the WA territory, LOL, yeah as current owner of 14-24G and 16-35G I also wish Nikon upgrade the 16-35 sooner rather than later, it's one of my most frequently used Focal range lens, so a upgrade is welcome and I am willing to pay for the premium price.