Tokina AT-X Pro 17mm f/3.5 First Impressions

I mentioned it in my last post, and my 'new' Tokina lens was waiting on the front doorstep for me to come home from my desk job today. First thing I noticed was that it was about as big as I expected it to be. Petty wide for a prime, wide-angle lens, and its heaviness and quality just says "professional" in every manner. With my previous Tokina lens purchase, in spite of its imperfection, I was pleased enough to want to try a more modern lens from Tokina. It's now my most expensive lens, ironically with all the Nikon/Nikkors I have, and the quality definitely shows.

I took the lens out back, and just wanted to see the angle of view. I forgot to switch the camera back to matrix metering, so the exposure's a little off, but I'm amazed nevertheless, at the quality of the details in this lens (click on thumbnail to view a 100% crop -- I chopped the sky off to make it a little more interesting):



While it's not a very interesting picture, the thing I've noticed right away is that this lens is SHARP! To put things into perspective, I normally leave the sharpening at "normal" or, if I need a little extra boost, I'll set it to "medium high" in Capture NX. With this scene, I actually brought down the level to "Low" -- and at that level, it's still quite good. You have to apply some sharpening to RAW images, because they tend to be a little bit softer. With this lens, I might actually be able to reduce the sharpening set in the camera. Wow. Just. Wow.

To further illustrate how sharp this lens is, here's one picture that I shot at 1/2oth, and clearly didn't hold the camera steady enough (I was antsy in anticipation, and also was chewing gum). While it's clearly got some motion blur, it's still evident that this lens is very, very sharp:



One more example, shot at f/5.6, so the depth of focus is rather limited. But, again, I set the sharpening to "low" in Capture NX and converted it to JPG. Other than changing the color mode to Mode IIIa (which my camera doesn't have), and adding the usual bit of saturation to compliment this, that's all that I've done to this image:



It's clear that this lens will be a favorite in my arsenal. I loved shooting at 18mm on my Nikkor 18-70 AF-S, but wanted a prime lens at either 18mm or 20mm. This Tokina, at (at the cheapest) 1/2 of the price of the going rate for the AI Nikkors (let alone the AF ones), clearly meets the need I was looking to meet for a lens at that focal length range.

One more picture -- since it was sunny outside, I wanted to test the lens flare capabilities, and also see how it handled IR. So, I slapped on my generic IR filter, grabbed some things in my back yard to function as a make-shift tripod for the 8-second exposure, and shot several pictures. This is the one I thought suited best for posting, and so I spent the time to clean up the massive noise and converted it to sepia (hey, I think I'm the only one doing IR in sepia...):



Okay, final picture. Got up this morning and decided to add one more IR picture, but this time in cyanotype. It's not perfect, but I just love how this turned out.



I love Tokina's pro glass. If I do ever decide to go with a 12-24 zoom, I'm not going to hesitate saving the extra hundreds of dollars and get the Tokina. I have a feeling that this 17mm, though, will definitely become a favorite very quickly.