35 mm f/2.8 lens — A History of Improvements Tale 38 : From Nikkor-S Auto 35mm f/2.8 to NEW Nikkor 35mm f/2.8

The original Nikkor-S Auto 35mm f/2.8 lens was on the market for quite a while before it was eventually remodeled. However, I wonder if you are aware that there were actually two Nikkor-S Auto 35mm f/2.8 lenses. The two had the same name, so it was not generally known that they were different. A few years after the first lens was released, a major change was made to the lens system. Let's look at the history of this.

In 1959, two months after the introduction of the Nikon F camera system, the first Nikkor-S Auto 35mm f/2.8 was released. The lens has a 5-group 7-element configuration, as shown in Fig. 1, and looks like a front converter design with two elements, concave and convex, arranged in front of a Tessar-type group. It is an early retrofocus-type lens with lower design performance than lenses that came later, requiring higher levels of accuracy during assembly. This apparently led to delays in the launch of the lens, evidenced by the fact it wasn't available until two months after the release of the Nikon F.

The difficulty in manufacturing the lens and the slower than expected pace of production was a great setback for Nikon. To improve productivity and boost basic performance, it was decided that the lens would have to be redesigned. Based on past experience, it was concluded that a similar lens type would not lead to major improvements. Therefore, development of the new lens began with a thorough review of the lens type. Eventually, after several years, the later version of Nikkor-S Auto 35mm f/2.8 was completed. The 6-group 7-element lens configuration, which is shown in Fig. 2, comprises a Gauss-type rear group that helps to reduce aberrations, including spherical aberrations, coma and curvature of field.

The later version also contributed to improved productivity, resulting in the successful production of the 35 mm lens system.

The redesigned NEW Nikkor resulted in a 35 mm lens system that offered better performance. However, improvements were to continue. The Nikkor Auto 35mm f/2 was put on the market in 1965, following the release of the second 35 mm f/2.8 version, and this led to the development of a succession of excellent retrofocus-type lenses. This then state-of-the-art technology had to be incorporated into the 35mm f/2.8 lens system.

The challenge included reducing the number of lens elements and further boosting performance. A design plan drafted as a report in the late 1960s provided a solution. However, this design was not adopted, allegedly because the lens would have been longer than the existing Nikkor-S Auto. The introduction of a new lens required new jigs and fixtures to manufacture the lens, as well as the reorganization of production lines. With the additional time and effort required for production, any new lens system would have to show superiority over existing models in all areas, including performance, size and production cost.

Later, improvements were made based on the lens design plan included in the report, and eventually the lens shown in Fig. 3 was completed some 10 years after the 6-group 7-element Nikkor-S Auto was released. The year was 1975, and the lens was designated the NEW Nikkor 35mm f/2.8. The lens was designed with a 6-element 6-group configuration, and therefore contained fewer elements than the existing Nikkor-S Auto but succeeded in enhancing performance.

As an aside, before I became involved in lens design, I took it for granted that the more lens elements, the better the performance. This is not correct, of course. The performance of a lens does not depend on the number of elements it has. More elements may increase lens design flexibility. However, higher performance lenses cannot be realized unless designers make full use of such design flexibility. Furthermore, the more lens elements there are, the higher the chance of manufacturing errors occurring, while ghost and flare are certain to increase. In practice, fewer elements facilitate the development of higher performance lenses. This is why lens designers make every effort to streamline lens element configuration.

Let's now turn to the improvement of the lens systems from the standpoint of lens performance. Although I had wanted to compare all three models, the first Nikkor-S Auto version was not available, so my performance test is limited to the later Nikkor-S Auto and the NEW Nikkor.

One of the improvements of the NEW Nikkor over the later Nikkor-S Auto is coma compensation in the off-center image areas. Example 1 shows a night view shot with the two different lenses. Such night scenes are usually shot by stopping down to f/5.6 or f/8, but the example photos here were taken with the largest aperture of f/2.8 in order to clearly show the distinguishing imaging characteristics of the two lenses. When the images are enlarged, the points of light appear comet-shaped in the image taken with the Nikkor-S Auto. However, these comet shapes are not present in the image taken with the NEW Nikkor. This suggests that the NEW Nikkor provides better contrast and clearer pictures, even when wide open. The differences are more recognizable in pictures taken with a digital SLR camera, which has a smaller angle of view with the same lens and therefore shows a slightly magnified image.

Compared to the NEW Nikkor, which provides clear images, even at its largest aperture, Nikkor-S Auto has slightly less contrast when wide open due to some residual coma. The results are polished images that are somewhat delicate, a characteristic that many photographers find appealing.