Nikon vintage 300mm 2.8 preset - $27,000 - (Flagler Beach, FL)
Nikon has always been devoted to developing new glass material. The ED glass that is so commonly used today was also pioneered by Nikon in the 70's. In order to meet the demand of news and sport photographers, Nikon saw the need to develop high performance telephoto lens. One of the biggest problems they had to tackle was chromatic abberation. Chromatic abberation causes colour smearing and loss of sharpness in large aperture lens like 300mm f2.8. The use of Extra-low Dispersion glass ( ED ) can effectively eliminate this problem. The first pre-production Nikkor-H 300mm f2.8 was announced in 1971. A total of 72 units were made with serial numbers running from 603011 to 603082. This batch of pre-production lenses were exclusively for press photographers. {This lens is # 603065…} Nikon was keen to release this lens before Sapporo Winter Olympics in Feb 1972, even though their in-house developed ED glass was still not ready yet. Nikon had to settle for a different glass material manufactured by German company SCHOTT GLAS. The first Nikkor-H 300mm f2.8 therefore did not carry the "ED" markings. It may seem strange that Nikon chose to use pre-set aperture when designing this lens. Apparently, the advice Nikon had gathered from the professionals then was to give priority to high optical performance rather than automatic aperture. They believed that such lens would be used mainly at the largest aperture anyway. Stopping-down would only happen when time was not critical. Since there was no aperture linkage to worry about, Nikon could freely put the aperture at the most ideal location for optical design and use numerous aperture blades to achieve the best possible "Bokeh" (aesthetic quality of the blur in out-of-focus areas). Also, having the aperture and focus control in the front means that the entire forward section can be detached and used on the other optical systems e.g. Video camera. In fact, this lens, with an image circle covering 60mm x 60mm, was originally de…
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From ebay.com - 1 month ago