Nikon Series E 50mm f/1.8 (long-nose)

This is the cheapest way to get genuinely good Nikkor glass on the front of a Nikon body, and most people who have shot one already know it. The Series E line was Nikon's late-1970s economy range, a set of consumer lenses meant to go with the compact EM body and keep cheaper, plastic-barreled, single-coated optics off the Nikkor name. The trick the line is remembered for is where it saved the money: plastic housings and simpler coatings rather than degraded optical formulas. Several Series E lenses ended up very good for what they cost, and the 50mm f/1.8 is the one people point to first. It carries the same optical recipe as the metal-barreled Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AI-S, so what you are paying so little for is the cheap housing, not cheap glass.

The design is a six-element, five-group double-Gauss. Souichi Nakamura took the older, bulkier Nikkor 50mm f/2 layout, slimmed and flattened a couple of elements, and got a shorter lens that also corrected better: less coma, less lateral chromatic aberration, and distortion that is essentially gone even at the close-focus end, which is rarer than it sounds on a fast fifty. A note on the name. The original run is the compact all-black plastic version, with the filter ring sitting almost flush against the front element. A later 1981 revision wears a chrome ring, runs a couple of millimeters longer, and recesses the front element a touch more, closer in feel to a proper Nikkor. Same glass, different snout.

Wide open at f/1.8 it is soft, and it does not pretend otherwise. You get visible chromatic aberration, a little smearing in the corners, purple fringing on hard backlit edges. The single coating (you can catch the purple cast on the front element) is the real giveaway against the multicoated AI-S, and it shows up as weaker flare resistance and more coma when a streetlight sits in the frame at night. Stop down to f/2.8 and the center snaps into high microcontrast; by f/5.6 to f/8 the whole frame is sharp and the lens punches well above its price. The bokeh is calm rather than swirly, backgrounds staying smooth without the nervous edges some fast fifties throw, which is most of why people keep one on a body for portraits and walk-around work.

That single coating is the one real limitation, and it is worth respecting. Shoot toward the sun without a hood and contrast drops into a milky veil. A 52mm hood fixes most of it, and 52mm is the standard Nikkor thread, so filters and step-downs are everywhere and cheap. If you want this lens to flatter skin wide open in low light, meter for the shadows in Zone Light Meter and place them on Zone III or IV, because at f/1.8 the corner falloff and the softer contrast are already working against you and you do not want thin shadows on top of that.

Where it sits today is simple. It is the first lens a lot of people put on a borrowed FE or FM, the one a friend hands you with the body. The natural cross-shop is the AI-S 50/1.8, which costs more and buys you the metal barrel and better coatings for a marginal optical edge, or the f/1.4 if you actually need the extra stop and the slightly cleaner wide-open rendering. Plenty of shooters skip both. For the money, structured center sharpness and no distortion to speak of, this one earns its keep.