Nikkor 80-200 F2.8 (Circa 1988 model) test shots

[Slaphead]

A few months ago I found one of these for sale (full website here) for believe it or not 80 swiss francs (≈$80 these days). OK, I thought, I'll take a risk (No brainer really as 80 francs will barely buy you few beers and a pizza here). When I got hold of it I simply put it on my old D40x just to check it would take a picture, then stuffed it in the cupboard and kind of forgot about it. Anyway last Sunday I remembered about it and decided to take it for a well overdue test drive. Result - for a 22 year old lens I'm impressed, v. impressed.

It's one of the push pull to zoom and twist to focus lenses, so that took a bit of getting used to at first. Not to mention it's quite heavy. Also the screw driven autofocus is quite slow, as you might expect on a lens with no fewer than 4 focus limit settings, but certainly perfectly usable, and much better than I expected from a lens of this vintage. Anyway on to the pictures

The following 3 images were taken with in aperture priority at f/9 simply to test the general image quality at the typical sweetspot apertures

Finally this quick portrait of my brother was taken at f/2.8. This showed a softening of the image together with a bit of contrast loss - hence I chose to convert this to B/W.

However viewing the original untouched RAW at 100% shows that plenty of detail still remains.

All in all I think I scored a bit of a bargain here, and I'll certainly start using this lens on a regular basis.

 

[orb9220]

Yep the older one-ring 80-200 f2.8 AF-D usually goes for $350-$500 range used.

My used newer two-ring version goes for $650-$800. Got mine for $800 came with the tamron 1.4x. Which gives me 280mm f4 when the need arises.


My Gal "Bertha" by orb9220, on Flickr

And either one is a Classic for Pro's in it's own right. Fantastic Bargain there!
.

 

[Derrel]

There are actually two of these older versions: the one the OP has is the first version, with the rotating "ring" style focusing limiter, which has a big, knurled rotating ring switch that encircles the entire barrel. I have owned two of the old, first-version 80-200's, and got both of them really cheaply. One had an almost dime-sized crater on the front element, and I payed $350 for it...it came from a guy who shot a lot of motocross, and it was a rock ding off a back wheel of somebody's dirt bike! The crater was nasty-looking...but it seemed to have almost no impact on the pictures whatsoever. The second one I got cost me $500 some years back. These first two, one-ring designs are the absolute lightest 80-200 2.8's, almost a full pound lighter in weight than later designs! They also make good manual focusing lenses, since the focus and zoom are on one,single control ring...they are actually decent lenses, but suffer a bit of lowered contrast when wide-open,and also have a bit more chromatic aberration in their longer focal length ranges than later designs.