Hello, everybody! Do you remember “Magical Princess Minky Momo” (魔法のプリンセス ミンキー モモ)? It’s a famous cartoon about a magical young girl that has the power to transform into an adult version of herself to solve problems encountered in her city. The show is revolutionary, it gave us the new genre of “magical girls”, young girls that can do amazing things, which set a new trend at that time. The show did not last very long and it ended with the tragic death of the poor princess, only to be reborn as baby. That last episode is considered “cursed” in Japan, because tragedy would follow each time it was aired. Today, I will introduce to you something revolutionary, and like Magical Princess Minky Momo, it didn’t last a long time in production. But there’s a difference, this is not “cursed”, it was hailed to be the lens that changed the public’s perception about zooms, in a way, you can say that it dispelled the said “curse of the zoom”.
Introduction:
The great Zoom-Nikkor 28-45mm f/4.5 K was sold from 1975, it was replaced by the similar Zoom-Nikkor 28-45mm f/4.5 Ai which was sold until 1978. It set a new milestone, it is the first true wide-angle zoom by a major company that went into production. It was hailed as an engineering breakthrough back then and it helped change the bad reputation of zoom lenses had until that time of being poor performers and the tendency of having wild distortion at either end of the focal-range.
The barrel is compact, but dense. Unlike many Nikkors of this period, it does not have distance scale. The filter size is 72mm, quite huge compared to its peers. The minimalist configuration makes it look akin to a modern lens made in the 1990s, but no, this is a lens that was designed during the early 1970s.
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