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Magic Lantern Nikon Lenses (Magic Lantern Guides)

Magic Lantern Nikon Lenses (Magic Lantern Guides)

List Price: $19.95
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Utterly unhelpful book
Review: As a critical guide to Nikon lenses, this book is quite useless because all Nikon lenses, in the author's opinion, are sharp and contrasty. He makes few distinctions but showers indiscriminate praise, making it quite impossible to make an informed judgment. Few of his assertions are based on fact, and none are based on rigorous trials.

Even as a factual guide to lens specifications, the book contains enough inaccuracies to make it useless.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Biased and subjective book.
Review: Besides basic technical specifications that can be easily found in Nikon guides and booklets, the book offers little trustworthy information. If you are hunting for unbiased opinion about Nikon optics look elsewhere. Verdict: Not recommended.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: a photographer guide - but not a shopping guide!
Review: I often buy second-hand Nikon lenses thru KEH.COM but sometimes it's difficult to know exactly which model of lense is displayed on their shelves. With the Moose Peterson book, any doubt vanished ! If you have an F5, you must go to Moose website dedicated to that camera.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Unique for help in selecting which lens to use
Review: I'm an experienced photographer who uses many of the lenses in the book. I have different oppinions of their performance than Moose. For instance, Moose dislikes the performance of the 85/2 AI-s and I love it.

On the other hand, lenses all vary greatly due to production tolerances, so no lens will always agree with what anyone says.

Yes, the book has a lot of info and is one of the few books of it's kind. OK, it's probably the biggest book there is on current Nikkor lenses, so give it a few more stars if it's the only book you can find. Therefore it is very valuable. However the information is not entirely accurate. Watch out for incorrect matching of illustrations and captions.

Moose is a great photographer; not a lens designer. Therefore his impressions relate to how well they relate to his wonderful work in the field, and not necessarily how well the lenses perform technically or even what all the various technical innovations mean or how they work inside the lens.

I suggest referring to "The Nikon Compendium" (also only 1994 edition) for more correct info if you really are curious about "how sharp" any lens is.

Also look at Nikon's own book, "Eyes of Nikon" from the early 1980's for the best look into their manual focus lenses of that era.

We'll see how well corrected the new edition is.

Thanks to Moose for taking the effort to write the book!

This review (c) 1999 Ken Rockwell. All rights reserved

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Disappointed
Review: I've just finished reading both editions of B Moose Peterson's book, "Nikon Lenses" cover to cover.

They are interesting, entertaining and informative; however, they are also wordy, trite and poorly written. Don't take me wrongly: there is a lot of good information in them. But, both editions are peppered with misinformation and some of the technical data is haphazardly presented and there are dozens of "facts" that are just plain wrong.

I get the impression that Moose has rewritten something in his own words, adding some original material, but that a good deal of the material was written by someone else. I suspect he has never even handled some of the lenses about which he writes. What's more, especially in the second edition, my impression is that he added material hastily on a few new lenses and rushed to press without bothering to revise much of the material that needed correction and updating from the original edition.

Moose is an excellent photographer both technically and esthetically. He needs to write books about what he knows best. Unfortunately, a compendium of technical data on Nikon lenses is not what he knows best. Whatever the value of these two books, I resent their glaring errors and I resent the attitude of a publisher foisting off what I believe to be obviously poor material on Nikon fans.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good overview of Nikon lenses, but too subjective
Review: I've just finished reading both editions of B Moose Peterson's book, "Nikon Lenses" cover to cover.

They are interesting, entertaining and informative; however, they are also wordy, trite and poorly written. Don't take me wrongly: there is a lot of good information in them. But, both editions are peppered with misinformation and some of the technical data is haphazardly presented and there are dozens of "facts" that are just plain wrong.

I get the impression that Moose has rewritten something in his own words, adding some original material, but that a good deal of the material was written by someone else. I suspect he has never even handled some of the lenses about which he writes. What's more, especially in the second edition, my impression is that he added material hastily on a few new lenses and rushed to press without bothering to revise much of the material that needed correction and updating from the original edition.

Moose is an excellent photographer both technically and esthetically. He needs to write books about what he knows best. Unfortunately, a compendium of technical data on Nikon lenses is not what he knows best. Whatever the value of these two books, I resent their glaring errors and I resent the attitude of a publisher foisting off what I believe to be obviously poor material on Nikon fans.


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