The 24-120mm Zoom Nikkor was made from 1996 through 2002. Many regard it as the worst AFD zoom, in much the way the 43-86mm Nikkor is similarly damned in the MF era.
My copy of the 43-86mm zoom shows that, in its Mark II version, the lens is a capable performer, and a lovely compact package on a smaller film camera body.
By contrast, the 24-120mm, with its high 5:1 zoom range, comes with more design compromises. For one, the lens is not constant aperture, the speed falling to f/5.6 at the long end. Second, there is considerable weakness in the edges at 24mm with poor definition and chromatic aberration aplenty. The optic also comes with a reputation for sample variation and the plastic content means there’s a bit of wobble in the extended part of the lens at longer focal lengths.
Shown here at 120mm, fully extended. The lens hood is as useless as these things get.
Then again, mine came mint, boxed, with caps, hood and no fewer than three 72mm filters – UV, IR (!) and ND. Quite why you would want an ND filter with a lens that is already natively slow beats me, but whatever. And the price of entry – and proceeds of exit if it’s not for you – was a very modest $83 shipped. After selling the useless IR and ND filters, my cost was $17!
At 24mm the lens is compact and the zoom action is by a rotating collar rather than trombone action, meaning the lens ages well with none of the slop common in well used push-pull zooms. You can compare sizes with the 85mm f/1.8 AFD, a decidedly superior optic, in this image:
The zoom is at 24mm. Note the dual aperture indexes – blue at 24mm, yellow at 120mm.
The good news here is that the lens is very sharp in the center at all apertures, with negligible chromatic aberration. AF is satisfyingly fast and very welcome given the lens’s small maximum apertures. There is fairly pronounced vignetting in the corners at anything below 50mm but that is easily corrected using Adobe’s lens correction profile in LR. At the edges the story is different. I’m reproducing extreme corner test images here as the center ones are so good. In all cases the lens correction profile was applied. These are 40x enlargements:
As Adobe does not include a profile for this optic with LR, I used that for the later VR version and it works well:
Lens correction profile applied in Lightroom.
At 24mm the extreme corners really suffer at full aperture, only coming into their own at f/11. At medium and long settings things are much better, as disclosed above.
Handling of out of focus areas is rather so-so, if not awful, at the long end using wider apertures. (At the short end it’s tough to get anything out of focus). See above.
So your under $100 investment gets you a lens with a wide zoom range, decent performance at most settings except at full aperture at the wide and, and so-so out of focus handling. But if you want to carry just one wide-range zoom for outdoor snaps, the 24-120mm AFD Nikkor checks many boxes. Use with a polarizing filter is tricky as the front element rotates some 30 degrees through the zoom range. Adjust the filter once the focal length is set.
Comparing the results with images from the Canon 5D using the 24-105mm L auto kit kens, the Canon shows even greater barrel distortion at 24mm and poor corner definition and chromatic aberration in the corners fully open. The Canon is larger and heavier, owing to its constant aperture design and is generally a stop or two sharper than the Nikon. It also costs a lot more.
This lens is made in Japan and is 28 years old. Its debut price was more than $600 USD which was the cost of the AF 24-50mm f/3.3-4.5 D lens of this era. Around the introduction of this lens, the Nikon F5 was Nikon's pro-body 35mm Single-Lens-Reflex (SLR) film camera. It is a "D" lens meaning that it transmits distance information to the camera.
This is the grandfather of the popular Nikon AF-S Nikkor 24-120mm f/4 G ED VR lens which makes it the father of the Nikon AF-S Nikkor 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6 ED VR IF. Nikon now produce a Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S and it all started with the lens of this review.
Nikon began the "normal zoom" lens line with the 43-86mm of the 1960's and then much later on increased the zoom ratio with the 35-105mm, 35-135mm and 35-200mm. Other manufacturers were designing 28-200mm lenses around this time, and Nikon were planning a lens with this range, but the department in charge decided to release a Nikkor with the wider 24mm on the short end and the shorter 120mm on the long end, a 24-120mm lens. While this offered a lower zoom ratio than the 28-200mm (5× versus 7.1×), their thinking was that a wider lens at the sacrifice of some reach would have more appeal so the green light was given to develop the 24-120mm. A retrofocus design this wide and long is certainly more difficult to design than a 28-200mm lens.
This design adopted two aspherical elements with the goal to reduce the total number of elements (shortening the length of the lens) and correcting aberrations. Aspherical elements are very common in modern wide-angle lenses because they help clean up aberrations in the edges of the frame.
This is an internal focus design so it does not change size as it is focused.
FROM A NIKON BROCHURE: Incredible 5× zoom is ideal for travel, landscape and portrait photography. This lens produces higher resolution photographs with excellent contrast thanks to Nikon's aspheric element design. Internal focus maintains compact size. Accepts 72mm filters; HB-11 lens hood.
For the most part, this review uses a Nikon D800E DSLR, so the limits of the resolving power of this lens are really tested.
Compactness Compared
Compared here with a DX lens; it's very compact for a full-frame 24-120mm lens.
Performance
The autofocus is fast on a modern Nikon DSLR, but it can be a little indecisive at times.
Distortion is heavy with barrel distortion at f=24mm and pincushion disortion at f=120mm. Pincushion distortion is most prominent at f=50mm!
Diffraction has begun by f/8. Use greater stops than this (smaller number) for maximum center sharpness, but shoot at f/11 for maximum sharpness over the entire frame including the corners.
Color fringing is prominent thanks to the lack of ED glass, but could have been much worse if not for the aspherical elements. This can be corrected in post.
Color fringing detail at 3-to-1:
Even stopped down to f/11 the lens is not the greatest in the corners. Imagine if it did not have aspherical elements!
Infrared
The infrared performance is wonderful — no hotspot whatsoever.
Ghosting & Flaring
There is some ghosting and flaring. This lens doesn't have as advanced a coatings as newer lenses, but it could be much worse.
Bokeh
The bokeh is not the greatest particularly on the long end because there are rings around the highlights as well as they take on the shape of the diaphragm which is not round. This is only really a problem when pixel-peeping because, stepping back, these flaws are not so evident.
Apertures
aperture maxmin 24mmf/3.5f/22 28mmf/3.8f/25 35mmf/4f/25 50mmf/4.5f/29 70mmf/5f/32 85mmf/5.6f/36 120mmf/5.6f/36
Construction
The 72mm filter threads rotate as the lens is zoomed, so first choose a focal length then adjust the polarizer because focus does not rotate the filter threads. This is a varifocal design as it changes focus as it is zoomed.
While being an AF D lens, it is still very solid feeling, not feeling flimsy at all. For example, the tolerances all seem tight.
Compatibility
Because this is a "D" lens without AF-S, it is compatible with many Nikon DSLR cameras, such as the D70, D70s, D80, D90, D100, D200, D300, D300s, D500, D7000, D7100, D7200, D7500, D600, D610, D700, D750, D800, D800E, D810, D850, D1 series, D2 series, D3 series, D4 series, D5, D6, etc.
The autofocus is not compatible with Nikon cameras that lack the little autofocus drive pin in the lens mount, such as the D40, D40X, D50, D60, D3000, D3100, D3200, D3300, D3400, D3500, D5000, D5100, D5200, D5300, D5500, D5600, etc. The lens will mount and meter with these camera bodies but with manual focus only. Also, it will not autofocus on any mirrorless camera.
The best way to use this lens on a DSLR is with the aperture ring locked to the smallest aperture then use the camera's command dial to change it.