50 years of Nikon F-mount – Nikkor-S 5 cm f/2 vs. Nikkor AF 50 mm f/1.8D
3. Build quality
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The focusing system of both lenses works in the same way - by moving all the elements one way or the other; it doesn’t change the mutual position of the elements so the focal length remains the same. In the Nikkor – S the manual focus ring is ribbed and has small grooves for fingertips. It works very nice and smoothly but not loosely so its use can be called very comfortable. On the ring we can find a distance scale in feet and the caption “LENS MADE IN JAPAN”. Other specimens of this lens had the scale in meters and feet.
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The Nikkor-S 5 cm f/2.0 has two chromium-plated bands. The first surrounds the front element and it extends during focusing; it contains a non-rotating 52 mm filter thread. The second band is between the manual focus ring and apertures ring; opposite to it we find a caption “PAT. PEND.”. The black apertures ring allows to change the aperture by 1 EV stop in the range from f/2.9 to f/16.
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Of course it is needless to say that the Nikkor –S 5 cm f/2.0 is completely made of metal. In those times they didn’t use plastic in barrels.
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When it comes to its optical design, the older lens is, surprisingly, more complex than its younger brother, although it is slower. The Nikkor –S consists of 7 elements in 5 groups. The forty years younger Nikkor AF 1.8/50 D has one element less. The specimen in our tests had a six blades diaphragm, although at that time there were series of similar instruments with a nine blades diaphragm.

At the end of this chapter there is one more issue to clear up. The Nikkor –S 5 cm f/2.0 is one of the oldest F mount lenses so it belongs to the type frequently described as a non-AI so without the aperture ring-light meter cooperation mechanism, called AI (Automatic Indexing) and introduced in 1977. The lenses, manufactured after that date had a hook on the aperture ring and its position depended on the aperture. Early bodies with the AI system were connected to this hook using a little lever, which, when the non-AI lenses were used, could be lifted up. The modern bodies doesn’t have a possibility to lift that little lever so there were some doubts whether or not we would manage to attach such old lenses to a body of, say, a D3x. It turned out that the lever is very thin so the lens’s body slides beneath and it stays fixed after the connection. By contrast, the AI lenses move the lever by a value depending on the maximum relative aperture. It creates a problem, though. Even if the body has a possibility to save the information about the used Non-CPU lens, some strange data often find its way to the EXIF. Although the focal length is saved correctly, the active aperture is not. In EXIF we find the most often the lens’s maximum aperture, regardless of the aperture that was really used. It happened from time to time that the body got silly and just saved some random aperture values.
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