AF Nikkor 35-70mm f3.3-4.5 vintage lens review

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The lens has a plastic body, it weights 240g, it is 58 to 71mm long and it has an external diameter of 67mm, with a 52mm front thread and the from element turns when focusing.
The iris has 7 blades, the aperture is clicked and it goes from f3.3 at 35mm or f4.5 at 70mm to f22, without half steps.
The focusing ring is textured, it turns 110 degrees and minimum focusing distance is roughly 35cm.
The Nikon F mount has a flange distance of 46.5mm. 
Adapter: https://amzn.to/3y1dhiP (affiliate link)
This little plastic guy is one of the first Nikkor autofocus lenses, specifically the second version of the 35-70 commercialized in 1989.
It doesn’t have an internal focusing motor, using instead the screw drive focusing system, meaning that the motor is inside the camera and it couples to the lens via a single screw.
It might sound as a bit of a novelty, but I used this lens on the Nikon N70 with the screw drive focusing and it turned out to be much faster than expected and reliable. More about that and the N70 in a dedicated video coming soon.
Now let’s see how the lens performs.
Sharpness wide open is not the best but not bad either, with the edges being softer than the center. Stopping down to f8 it gets very sharp all over the frame. It seems to be both softer wide open and sharper stopped down at 70mm.
Chromatic aberration is present wide open in high contrast areas but it quickly disappears stopping down.
Colors, contrast and saturation are quite natural, if a bit on the warm side, without being punchy.
Specular highlights have hard edges but otherwise pretty clean and backgrounds don’t feel busy.
In normal use I didn’t have any issues with flares and ghosting, but shining a light straight into the lens does produce some interesting flares.
This is exactly the kind of lens that most people will tell you to stay away from, but honestly it’s actually pretty good.
Wide open it has a nice softer character and stopped down is no different from most other lenses and, as Alex said, you can get these for dirt cheap.
And let me take a moment here to stress this out: do not over pay for lenses. Ever.
Well I guess that’s it, but stay tuned because I’m working on a video about shooting film on the Nikon N70 using this lens.


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