Nikon AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G

Canon shooters get the plastic-bodied 50mm f/1.8 STM for about a hundred bucks. Nikon people pay closer to two hundred for this one, and the extra money is not marketing air. The Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G has a wider focus ring, a real distance scale window, and an aspherical element that Canon's cheap fifty skips entirely. It is the most basic prime in the F-mount lineup and it still outclasses the obvious rival on build and on edges.

Wide open at f/1.8 the center is already good and the corners are soft, which is exactly what you want from a fast fifty. The aspherical element kills most of the spherical aberration that made the old AF-D version glow at f/1.8, so this lens is crisper wide open than the screwdriver fifty it replaced. Stop down to f/2.8 and it snaps into clinical sharpness across most of the frame. By f/5.6 it is as sharp as anything Nikon makes at this focal length. The rounded seven-blade diaphragm keeps specular highlights circular off-center, and the bokeh is smooth without being creamy. It is honest rendering, not character rendering.

The signature, if it has one, is neutral. Color is accurate, contrast is moderate, and the lens does not impose a look the way a Sonnar or a vintage Planar does. That neutrality is why it sits in so many bags as the do-everything prime. Portrait shooters use it on DX bodies where it frames like a short 75mm. Documentary and street photographers run it on FX for the field-of-view a normal lens gives you. It is the lens people learn on and then keep, because there is rarely a reason to upgrade unless you specifically need f/1.4.

The honest weakness is longitudinal chromatic aberration. Shoot a backlit branch or a chrome bumper wide open and you get green fringing behind the focus plane and magenta in front of it. The aspherical element fixed the softness but not the color fringing, and it does not fully clean up until f/2.8 or so. There is also some focus breathing, which matters if you pull focus for video but not at all for stills.

Where it sits today: this is the default normal prime for anyone shooting an F-mount film body or an older Nikon DSLR. The G designation means no aperture ring, so you set aperture from the camera body, which is fine on an F100 or an F6 but locks it out of fully manual bodies like an FM2. Cross-shop it against the 50mm f/1.4G if you want shallower depth and rounder bokeh, but the f/1.8 is sharper wide open and costs half as much. On a film body, the 58mm front thread takes a cheap polarizer or ND, and if you are metering wide open in dim light, set Zone Light Meter to f/1.8 and let it place your shadows. The extra stop and a third over an f/2.8 zoom is the whole reason this lens earns its spot.