searching for a good ‘normal-zoom’

I love my Nikon Camera body, functionality and ergonomics, However, it is really difficult to find the right travel zoom to fit with my equipment. I have tried a few and not yet found the right one.

There is the kit lens that came with my Nikon D600 – 24-85mm 1:3.5-4.5G: good glass but no aperture ring, very slow minimum aperture and cheap plastic mechanics with plastic sticky-ness in the zoom ring and a pretty uninspiring manual focus ring. I really prefer to have an aperture ring.

Before that I had the AF Nikkor 28-200mm 1:3.5-5.6D – very useful focal length, aperture ring, but again very slow minimum aperture, limiting for depth of field, and cheap plastic mechanics with really awful plastic sticky-ness in the zoom ring and a limited manual focus ring.

So I tried the old Tokina AT-X 28-70mm f2.8 – nice lens mechanically, mostly metal, very well dampened zoom ring, very useful minimum aperture of 2.8, but very soft at the tele end to the degree of looking quite foggy, and somehow a bit limited zoom range 28-70mm.

The lens that I am looking forward to is a Fuji that will probably be released towards the end of this year: XF 16-55mm f2.8 – I assume like all Fuji lenses well built, mostly metal, acceptable aperture and well dampened aperture ring, optically superb and around $1000. That means a change of Systems. However, as I have already experienced the Fuji x100s and am very happy with it, the change looks like a real possibility. I don’t think that I will find a similar lens for under $2000 or better, $1000 in the Nikon range (I’ve checked out the Nikkor 24-120mm for $1500 which has the same plastic issues as the other 2 Nikons). I am also not willing to go to huge and heavy Sigma lenses – good optics and good mechanics, but hard to carry around – or similar Tamron lenses.

So at the moment it goes back to prime lenses, more specifically my manual focus Voigtlaender 40mm f2 which I can use in FX and DX settings giving me 40 and 60mm. The lens is small, light, optically outstanding, mechanically just beautiful, the way you want a lens to feel, just not the ‘travel-zoom’ that I was looking for.

Here are a couple of pictures:

RW3_8699 Voigtlaender 40mm_wp

40mm

RW3_8698 Voigtlaender 60mm_wp

60mm

RW3_8701 Voigtlaender 40mm_wp

60mm

Any suggestions what lens I could look at for my Nikon D600 FX camera?