While you can focus and compose wide open, you'll have to manually stop the lens down to meter and shoot. Trouble there is that you have to look at the aperture ring because, according to the article, the click stops aren't linear: some are half a stop, some are one stop, some are two stops. They really needed to make this either an auto lens or at least a preset lens.
Well..., who buys that lens does it to gain those 2.5 stops. Thus he will typically use it at 1.2-2 . As that would be more an aperture than his previous 35mm lens yields, there is no reason to stop-up for focusing/composing. Just set the lens at 1.2-2 and let the stopped-down auto-exposure do the rest.
And seen the flaws described too, he would likely take his 35mm 2.8 lens too for all the other tasks than short distance.
Well..., who buys that lens does it to gain those 2.5 stops. Thus he will typically use it at 1.2-2 . As that would be more an aperture than his previous 35mm lens yields, there is no reason to stop-up for focusing/composing. Just set the lens at 1.2-2 and let the stopped-down auto-exposure do the rest.
Well, that limits its usefulness-- how and where it would be used -- and I don't think that way of using it is worth $600 to me. I'd rather have either of the other two Nikon lenses, which have reasonable quality at f/1.4 and f/2, plus the ability to be used as a general purpose lens with full aperture metering and auto-aperture operation.
I've been more than happy with my 50/1.2 AI and 50/1.4 (common and inexpensive). I suppose I'm just not the consumer this new lens was developed for.
The used manual focus Nikon F 1.4 is said by the reviewer to be in the same price range as that new one.
Howver that only works on the F-mount. The air gets thin in that F-stop range. Who has no Nikon like me would have to use a non-linked adaper (if possible), and then its lack of autodiaphragm does not matter anyway.