Lens Test Glossary     About these reviews

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INTRODUCTION

This very special lens was introduced in 1977 as an AI lens and updated to AI-s in 1982. It was discontinued in 1997. I've never used this lens, but people keep asking me for an opinion.

This is a special purpose, hand-ground aspherical lens intended to be used at f/1.2 for hand-held night or astronomical photography. It sometimes sells around $1,000 or more used. It was very expensive in its day because it was hand-made, then again, no one cares today (and it's no long made new) because manual lenses are not very useful for digital cameras.

If you need f/1.2 I'm sure you'll love it. It ought to be much better than today's manual focus f/1.2 lens (non "Noct") that sells for about $430 here.

If you want a normal lens, I'm sure the $110 50mm f/1.8 AF-D lens is better when you stop both lenses down to normal daytime apertures.

Here's an article about the specifics of the design.

SPECIFICATIONS

It has 7 elements in 6 groups. It has a hand-ground aspherical element, the key to it's incredible perfornamce at f/1.2.

It focuses to 0.5 m or 1.7.'

It takes the Nikon HS-7 snap-on or HR-2 screw-in rubber hood and weighs 16.4 oz. (465g). It measures a fat 74mm (2.9") around by 63 mm (2.5") long and takes compact 52mm filters

It stops down to f/16.

Price: It listed for $1,200 in New York in December 1993. You can still buy a brand-new 50mm f/1.2 (non-NOCT) for $430 in 2007.

PERFORMANCE

I've never used it.

From everything users tell me, it's the best you can get if you shoot at f/1.2, and about the same as a lens for 1/10 the price at smaller apertures.

People who own it love it. Please remember it's designed for people who use it wide open, which are the people who own it. The 58mm f/1.2 Noct is not a general purpose lens. For most uses a 50mm f/1.8 will work as well or better.

The Aspherical element lets it shoot at f/1.2 and keep points of light as points of light. Points of light don't turn into little birds, comas or blobs at the side of the image, so long as you're in focus.

The reason you want this lens is if you need to keep sharp points of light as sharp points at f/1.2. It does this better than anything. By comparison, a regular 50mm lens turns sharp points of light at the corners of the image into little batwing coma distortions instead. See the page here for examples.

Similar Lenses

The unique 28mm f/1.4 AF is made with the same (or better) technoiloigy, and is also fantastic wide-open. It's also as expensive. The 28mm is the perfect "normal" focal length for Nikon digital cameras, similar to a 43mm on a 35mm camera. The 58mm on digital is simliar to an 85mm on a film camera.

ANECTDOTE

This story was told to me by Ernie Mastroianni, photo editor of Birder's World magazine:

About 10 years ago, a photographer at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (I was a photo editor there for 19 years) offered to sell me his Noct-Nikkor 58mm f/1.2 lens. He knew I was into astrophotography and thought that I might be interested in a high speed lens. He was right. I came up with the $175 that he needed and proceeded to enjoy taking pictures of the Milky Way with 20-second exposures, with no tracking and no star trails. It was an excellent portrait lens too, showing fantastic Bokeh and producing some excellent results for group and family pictures, being sharp from edge-to-edge.

But as I migrated to digital, I found that the lens was a bit too long and it could not be converted to a D-lens. It sat on my shelf until I noticed that someone sold one on eBay for about $1,200, although I was not sure if it was a scam.

So I put my own lens up for sale, hoping I might get a legitimate offer of about $1,000. The bidding immediately passed $1,000, but it was all from folks with new identities or very low bidding histories. One bidder, with a big 0 for a history, kept bidding it up beyond anyone else, until it climbed over $2,000. Too good to be true, I thought, and this looks like a scam.

So I wrote the bidder, and said I was wise to the usual tricks, that he better pay with a money order from a real bank and it has to be for the exact amount. I won't ship to Indonesia and I'll hold the lens till the check clears, blah blah blah.

The bidder wrote back. He was a buyer for the Princeton Particle Physics Laboratory, and he needed the lens for some exotic physics experiment. His scientists said that only the 58mm f/1.2 Noct-Nikkor would work. Not the 55mm, not the 50mm. Just the 58. His story checked out, the lab was real. He needed my 58mm lens and the US government was willing to pay whatever it took. In fact, he needed SIX of the lenses. He was happy to hear from me, because he was getting hounded by scam artists who were trying to sell lenses that they did not have. He had no eBay identity because of government regulations.

So he bought the lens for about $2,100, which financed my Nikon D80 and a high-end pair of astronomy binoculars. I later saw that he shelled out about $2,600 for some other Noct-Nikkors that did not appear to be as pristine as the lens I sold him.

A fun story, and I got some cool stuff out of it, but to tell you the truth, I do miss that lens. There was something about it that always produced sharp, saturated images.

RECOMMENDATIONS

If you need this you already know it. It is a very special purpose lens. If you don't know why you need this, don't buy it.

Remember that there is zero depth of field at f/1.2. Your camera, eyeball and focusing screen need to be very carefully aligned in order to get sharp results at f/1.2.