Nikon Nikkor AF-S 58 mm f/1.4G review - Coma, astigmatism and bokeh

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Nikon Nikkor AF-S 58 mm f/1.4G

14 February 2014

Arkadiusz Olech

7. Coma, astigmatism and bokeh

Already the Noct-Nikkor was advertised as a lens which could correct the coma very well. In the case of its successor you can rise the standards even higher and expect a perfect performance in this category. The performance is indeed perfect, but only in the corners of the APS-C/DX sensor. In the full frame corners the coma is distinct and it doesn’t disappear even after stopping down to f/2.0. It is nothing to be proud of but, in order to defend the Nikkor a bit, we can say that the more expensive Zeiss Otus didn’t correct the coma in a perfect way either.

Nikon Nikkor AF-S 58 mm f/1.4G - Coma, astigmatism and bokeh

When it comes to the astigmatism there are no serious problems; still it would be difficult to call the level of that aberration negligible while the average difference between horizontal and vertical MTF50 function values amounted to as much as 9.5%.

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The defocused light points look nice and guarantee you very pleasant blur area. It is true you can notice concentric rims inside the circles but their intensity is low so they shouldn’t be problematic. It is important that already by f/2.8 the circle in the corner of the full frame sensor doesn’t differ significantly from the one you get in the frame centre.

At the end we decided to compare directly the tested Nikkor and the Zeiss Otus 1.4/55. Although the results of the Nikkor are very good, the photos below prove that they are far from perfect; it is also evident the Zeiss features more even light spread in the circle.