Richard Haw's Classic Nikon Repair and Review

Hello, everybody. I am kind of busy today so I will not be making any posts about repairs or anything. I would just like to show you an old image that I have here that I found in my old folders and thought that this would make for a nice discussion piece.

What you are seeing here is the front element of the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 DG HSM “ART” lens. I really liked this lens a lot and cannot find any crippling faults with it but one thing that’s a big issue with this lens has always been the lack of weather sealing.

The lack of weather sealing may not mean anything to some but it can be annoying if you find yourself going in and out of vastly different environments where water vapour has the tendency to condense inside the lens due to big temperature changes.

Another not so big irritation is when you are blowing canned air into the front of the lens after cleaning it from a day’s use. If you look at my image, you will see that the canned air has seeped into the crevices of the front element and condensed some water vapour under the front element. I normally wouldn’t bother with this but I was really pissed-off because this lens has spent less than 2 days with me, Imagine the heartache. The lens is now still working fine after 2 years but looking at this image still leaves me traumatised.

Canned air is OK but it is too strong for most things. It is powerful enough to blow water or dust deep into your gear’s body and can even be the cause of a fungus outbreak since spore can be blowed into place that you do not want them to be in. Using canned air to blow into your camera’s mirror box is also never a good idea because it might lubricants or oil from the shutter mechanism into the sensor and as Nikon technicians told me – even blow dust bunnies into the corner of the sensor’s low-pass filter. This will make sensor cleaning an even more problematic.

I rarely use them these days as I find them uneconomical in the long run and a good rocket or bulb blower is usually more than enough for almost all cases. Next week, I will show you how to overhaul a really popular lens! Come back next week to find out what that is. Ric.

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