At the moment, I have the Nikon 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5 lens.  It’s a really nice lens.  But it’s a DX lens, bought when I had the D300. It was really handy on my recent trips to Kyoto and Macau, being able to zoom out to 10mm, capturing entire buildings even though they were often on narrow streets where one couldn’t back up more than a few feet.

But now I have the D700 and if I wanted to keep using that lens, I’d have two choices.  I can use the “DX crop” mode, which just uses the center of the image sensor and cuts down the number of effective megapixels recorded by half.   Not so nice.  If I turn off the DX crop mode, at 10mm I get this weird effect, a round image that leaves about 1/3rd of the area black and with a lot of color fringing around the edges.  Zoom in to 15mm and the effect is almost gone.  By 18mm the image does fill the frame, but what’s the point of a 10-24 zoom if you can only effectively use it from 18-24?   So I’ll be selling off that and my other DX lenses as well.  (Some have suggested that I should keep the DX lenses in case I ever decide to buy a second, back-up DSLR, such as the D90.  I don’t think that’s likely to happen.)

If I’m looking for a different wide angle zoom, one for the FX sensor instead of the DX sensor, and if I want to stay with Nikon, there are two choices.

There’s the 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, which retails in Hong Kong for $15,750.  This lens is  said to be a classic, built like a tank and tack sharp.

And there’s the recently released 16-35mm f/4 lens, which retails in Hong Kong for $10,800.   With this, one is obviously losing 1 F stop and 2mm at the wide end, where it can matter. But saving a pocketful of change.

On the other hand, the 16-35 has VR (vibration reduction) and if one is mostly shooting at night, this could be a very handy addition.  But on the other hand, initial reviews of this lens say that it’s not at its best when one is zoomed out to 16mm.

So maybe it’s time to consider Tamron, Tokina, Sigma?  Something else to investigate over the coming days or weeks.  I’m now getting intrigued by the notion of making several day trips to Shenzhen and exploring and photographing different areas of our very interesting neighbor and I know that a wide angle zoom will be very useful for this.

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