The Nikkor 10.5mm fisheye


General impression

  Nikkor 7

I have been attracted to the Nikkor fisheye after seeing a few pictures on various internet forums. My first reaction was that that lens was a kind of expensive gadget but I found a number of enthusiastic users. I decided to give it a try and a last thing helped: Nikon just started a 20% rebate program when I made up my mind and we were just before Christmas...
As a result I got the lens for Christmas... the first impression was that the lens was very very small. A lens cap and a pouch are standard in the box. There is no separate sun hood, it is integrated in the lens body. If you want to adapt a filter, you need very small ones you put on the rear element. Because of the curvature of the front element, it is impossible to add anything in front of the lens.  About the fisheye itself, it is adapted to APS-C sensors (DX) with a 1.5 crop factor (that lens is similar to a 16mm fisheye on a film reflex camera) with a 10.5mm focal length. It is a rectangular fisheye, that means that the viewing angle is 180 degrees on along the diagonals. A circular fisheye would give you 180 degrees in all directions with black corners. Using the de-fishing option of Nikon Capture for example, you can get straight lines again (and a normal perspective). This gives the effect of a super-wide angle (much wider than a 12mm for instance) but with some drawbacks: a serious loss of details in the corners and right and left borders of the picture and a visible color aberration (can be somewhat corrected with the appropriate post processing, but don't expect perfection there)

Pros

- excellent build
- small (very compact)
- 2.8 maximum aperture
- funny to use - surprisingly "usable"
- availability of de-fishing option in Nikon Capture
- usable as a super-wide angle
- reasonably sharp fully open
- very interesting results (perspective)
- fast focus (not really relevant because of the enormous DOF)
- very short minimum focus distance allowing nice effects (a few cm's)
- based on my experience, no flare until now

Cons

- Color aberration (CA) in the corners
- corner softness when de-fishing
- no AF-S motor (slow focus) - not critical because of the extreme depth of field
- expensive for a "toy"

Examples (more coming soon)

A few typical pictures (I like taking pics by putting the camera on the ground, timer activated, gives very nice perspectives)

  bruday09

Comparison between a 12mm wide angle shot and the de-fished view from the same spot

  brg3

  brg2

Conclusion

A very nice lens, more than just a toy, superior quality, small and light, with a few limitations you can correct with the appropriate tooling. Highly recommended.