AF Angenieux 28-70mm f/2.6 vs. the rest of the world
Introduction
The 28-70mm range is considered by many professional photographers to be the most widely used one on a 35mm film or sensor. Therefore it is not a big surprise that most manufacturers offer lenses in this range for the professionals as well as for the beginners. Third party companies are not an exception to this rule.Angenieux is a French firm well known for their high quality motion camera lenses as well as for some important innovations in the optics. In the 1990-ies it tried to enter the photography marked by offering some very interesting lenses for the main camera body manufacturers: Nikon and Canon. Unfortunately they did not see a future for their efforts and discontinued the production line focusing on motion camera lenses only.
The AF Angenieux 28-70mm f/2.6 was one of the most anticipated Angenieux products but only some 3000 F-mount lenses were produced. I was told that Nikon delivered the electronics for these lenses, so no reverse engineering was necessary on the Angenieux side. However I was not able to find any confirmation to this online.
Noticeably, the lens has a constant opening aperture at f/2.6 but this is not registered by the two Nikons I tested it on which showed f/2.8 instead.
Even today, using digital equipment, some customers continue to report superb image quality delivered by the Angenieux 28-70mm and some consider it even better than the Nikon flagship lens in this range: Nikkor AF-S 28-70mm f/2.8D ("The Beast"). This was the reason I decided to buy an Angenieux and am fortunate to have a very well preserved one now.
Soon after I started taking pictures with the lens, I noticed that it delivers somewhat "softy" pictures. I decided to buy The Beast and do this test.
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Written by betso on 12/16/2011, 12:00am in"Photography". | Comments: 0