Nikkor 60mm f2.8D AF Micro

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An incredibly sharp lens. If you need or want to take photos anywhere near 60 mm whether macro or not, take off the zoom lens and use this one. I use it mostly to rephotograph old slides and photos -- it is much faster than using a scanner to digitize your huge collection of old photos and slides. By the way, when doing that you will normally want to shoot "raw" since you'll be doing some heavy color and contrast adjustments on them. Once you have corrected your photos, then you can save them as JPEG to save disk space (or keep them raw, but I suggest using "NEF compressed" in that case).

It has a clever mechanism, similar to a zoom lens, that changes the spacing of the elements as you focus closer. They call it "Close-Range Correction System". You probably get some bellows factor and focal length change out of the deal, but not as much as you'd get by simply racking out a simple lens.

It stops WAY down to f32 for incredible depth-of-field but beware diffraction effects that start to kick in at about f16.

Letter soup:

  1. AF: Auto Focus, mechanically coupled to the camera.
  2. D: Aperture ring. On a Nikon D200 you won't have any use for the aperture ring.