Nikon Nikkor 24mm f/2 AI-S

Wide open, bright point lights near the corners sprout little wings. The 24mm f/2 Nikkor renders specular highlights with visible coma at f/2, the way nearly every fast retrofocus wide of its era did, and that single trait shapes how you use it. Stop down to f/5.6 and the coma collapses, the corners tighten, and stopped down it is a genuinely sharp 24. Wide open it trades that crispness for a stop of speed.

Every SLR wide has to be retrofocus to clear the mirror, and Nikon corrected this one with CRC, their close-range correction system, where a floating group shifts as you focus near to hold the corners together at the minimum distance. It arrived in 1977 as an AI lens and continued as the AI-S version into the early 2000s, a long production life. The 52mm filter thread is the same one on half the primes in the F system, so your polarizer and your grad NDs move from lens to lens without an adapter.

Color is classic Nikkor, neutral with a faint warmth, contrast a notch below modern multicoated glass. Flare is controlled but not immune; put the sun just inside the frame and you will catch a veil, so the period hood earns its keep. The 24mm angle is the reportage wide, broad enough to put a room around a subject without the stretch and bowing of a 20 or 21. Distortion is low for the class. Field curvature is the thing to watch, since the plane of best focus dishes slightly, which matters more on a flat brick wall than on a real scene with depth.

This was the available-light wide for film-era documentary and photojournalism, the choice when the 24mm f/2.8 was a stop too slow for a dark interior or a stage. On an F3 or an FM2 loaded with Tri-X it lives in that world. Today it gets adapted onto mirrorless as often as it gets shot on film, where focus peaking finally makes that wide-open plane easy to nail.

That extra stop is also a metering stop. In a dim bar or at blue hour, f/2 lets you work a scene where f/2.8 would push you toward a tripod or longer exposures. Open Zone Light Meter at f/2, read the shadow you want to keep, and place it, and the f/2 reading keeps your shutter speed in handheld range.

The honest weakness is the value math. The 24mm f/2.8 AI-S costs less, weighs less, uses the same CRC trick, and stopped down many reviewers rate it the sharper of the two, so you pay a real premium for one stop and a little more coma wide open. The f/2 holds its value because nothing else in the manual Nikkor line gives you 24mm at f/2, and on a dark night that number is the whole reason you reached for it.