I love the feel and angle of 35mm yet I don’t have one – excluding the kit lens of D3400. Hence I thought: What 18-55 lens on full frame camera might do? Below you’ll see some full 24MP size samples on which I’ll talk a bit, and there’s more here, in this Flickr album, if you’d rather look at them yourself without reading what I have to say – or afterwards to see some more photos. So, let’s come directly to the point after the technicalities:
Technicalities
- You can click on the photos and see them on Flickr, and download the full-size image for your personal use to see them in more detail.
- All photos are taken with Nikon D750.
- I used the lens mostly at its widest aperture – f/3.5 at 18mm, f/5 at 35mm, etc.
- I shot on aperture priority mode with Auto ISO setting and minimum 1/100 shutter speed.
- I don’t share RAW files here. I have them, though, and can share, if you’d like, with you. Just drop me a mail at pennilesspenner@gmail.com and we can sort it out.
- All photos are edited to taste, yet:
- I didn’t apply sharpening, neither did I play with the corners for you to see it all yourself. Also I left, if I remember correctly, chromatic aberrations untouched. But I’m not sure and take this with a pinch of salt.
- It was a rainy day and the lens might do better in better light conditions: D750’s ISO performance is unbelievable and gives almost perfect images at ISO 12.800 either. Still, sharpness relies on ISO too and bear in mind that many photos are over ISO 2.000.
- I needed to edit more than I’d like, yet the lens, combined with the sensor of course, gave me the flexibility to do what I want – mostly.
- Lastly, the lens handled the colours a lot better than I expected. Good job, kit lens!
Wide Open Samples
A closeup in which the leaves were few centimetres away from the lens, so long that you don’t zoom more than to the 50% of its full size, the photo appears rather fine – though afterwards come the problem, shared at all focal lengths: The lens isn’t sharp as you’d expect, and there always is some motion blur caused I don’t know by what. Had it been the case with my other lenses, Tokina 16-28/2.8 or 50/1.8, then I’d think it’s because of the shutter vibration but no, it is not – at least I don’t think so.
A farther “closer” shot for you to see how the lens copes with the out of focus areas – badly. I like 35mm I said in the beginning, here let me fix it: I like Takumar 35/3.5 which does amazing 3D photos with a wonderful creamy background. I’m not sharing one here but will at the end of this post for things not to get confusing for fast-forwarding eyes.
The scene is a tad dark – intentionally. You can see the falloff on the corners but given both the frame and the light-shadow distribution, albeit visible, it’s not disturbing. This would be the case in most photos anyway if you ask me.
The lens, as we all know, cannot do portraits – and as you see, it can’t with a full-frame body either. There’s subject separation to some little extent but it can’t do more. Given the aperture, f/5.6, we shouldn’t expect much but this is worse than I thought. And, well, otherwise the lens did a really decent job.
Go closer at 55mm, things get better but the problem I mentioned above remains: It’s by far not sharp but the way as if there was some quake there.
Narrower Aperture Samples
Yeah, the corners. They’re the optical limits of the lens – it can’t cover 35mm sensor as we know and expect. Put that aside, I’d say that the lens worked perfectly here – so long that you know what to expect from it. What did I expect? Tokina 16-28 to outperform it, but not extremely – and this is what I found. I could use the lens at this point had I not the Tokina, and wouldn’t yearn for Tokina that much.
Move from 18mm to 24mm and already the lens covers the whole full-frame sensor – and doesn’t do a bad job at all. If you’ll let me exaggerate slightly, it’s on par with my Tokina. Anyway at and below 24mm, even 28mm we use the lens at f/8 the least, and in the photo above, the lens really did a fantastic job.
Standing at the same spot and changing only the focal length gives the photo above. Colours and shadows are all the way fine again, yet I like the output of 24mm better. There’s a strange problem, though: Here it feels like I took the photo with my mobile, a Xiaomi with Gcam installed, and there’s something wrong which I can’t name. Still you could use it, I reckon, if you won’t have anything better.
Go no more close than I said and it works fine – and it feels like the GCam photos. Glass, probably, is made to work better on the wide end than the narrow, hence the drop in quality.
A last sample. Again I’m standing at the same spot. The extreme edges are dark and there’s nothing to do with it – neither you can better the quality as the problem is with the glass.
Takeaways: Conclusion
If somehow you can get a full frame camera but not a lens, you can, as you see, use your kit lens to make decent images. They aren’t the best for sure, but not as bad as you might have thought. If even the kit lens can do this much, better lenses surely will do better.
Which DX/APS-C lenses can you use? That I don’t, sadly, know. I’ve seen across the internet that Nikon 35/1.8 can be used with little to no vignetting, yet I don’t have it to check it out. I believe that most primes can be used so long that they aren’t wide-angles.
Why did I make this test? For a number of reasons. One was to see if DX lenses can be used on a full-frame camera. Second, I wanted to compare and contrast the performance of the same lens on DX and FX bodies – about which I’ll write soon. Third, I wanted to see if I really love 35mm – and I found out, as I said above, not really. My love is towards Takumar, not its focal length.
Don’t shy away from trying new things, yet keep your expectations real: If you want the kit lens to do as good as Tokina, you’ll be upset. If you’ll be okay with it coming close, you’ll be happy. It’s all about expectations.
May the light be with you!
