The Nikon lens information page is a great resource for Nikon nerds. With its help and a serial number you can check to see if the 28mm ƒ/2.8 Ai-S on offer on Ebay really has a 0.2m close focus or if it’s an inferior version, just to offer one example. Another cool feature is the number of lenses made.
A few days ago I was motivated1 to have a look at how many lenses of different types have been made through the ages. I was specifically interested in primes vs. zooms. To this end, I munged the data from the site and scrunched together some data. The entire result it up on Google docs.
Some cool facts:
- Nikon has made 56 millions F-mount lenses. Of these, 22 million (or 40%) are primes. The rest (34 million) are zooms.
- The top 3 lenses made are all DX consumer zooms: the 18-55mm II (3.3 million), 18-55mm VR (2.9 million) and 18-70mm (2.3 million). The most prevalent prime is the 50mm ƒ/1.8 Series E (1.7 milion), #4 on the list.
- Among all lenses made, 35.6 million are AF, the rest are manual focus.
- In the top 20 list of lenses made, 15 are zooms, 5 are primes (all 50mm).
- The most prevalent AF “pro” lenses are the 50/1.4D (#27), 35-70/2.8 (#34) and 70-200/2.8 VR (#42)
- Nikon makes a lot of 35/1.8 DX lenses, 180K so far!
Feel free to have a look at the stats yourself! I’ve put the text source here.
1 read: someone posted something on a forum that made me mad.