Why does the Nikon 12-24mm vignette on a D800 at 12mm?
Asked 6/28/2012
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2 answers
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I’m using a Nikon D800 with a Nikkor 12-24mm lens, and at the widest setting I get strong dark corners/vignetting. I don’t see this on my other Nikon DSLRs, and it’s not caused by editing. What causes this, and is there a camera setting or lens choice that will avoid it?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
14y ago
2 Answers
10
That is the wrong lens for your camera. The Nikon 12-24mm F/4 is an excellent lens but it is designed for a crop sensor. Nikon calls those DX lenses.
Luckily, Nikon makes an even more fantastic lens for your camera, the Nikkor 14-24mm F/2.8 which they call an FX lens. It will give you a wider angle of view, brighter aperture and is very sharp.
If you enable DX crop mode on the D800, then the vignette will disappear because the camera will crop the image for you which results in an obviously reduced resolution and angle-of-view, pretty much wasting a good part of what you probably paid for the D800.
Originally by user1620. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1620
14y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
The most likely cause is that your 12-24mm is a DX lens, while the Nikon D800 is an FX/full-frame camera. DX lenses are designed to cover a smaller APS-C sensor, so on a full-frame body they often don’t fully cover the frame—especially at the widest focal lengths—causing heavy vignetting or dark corners.
That’s why you didn’t notice it on Nikon crop-sensor bodies: those cameras only use the smaller central part of the image circle.
To avoid it, you have two main options:
- Enable the D800’s DX crop mode, which crops the frame to the DX image area and removes the dark corners, but reduces resolution and narrows the field of view.
- Use an FX lens designed for full-frame coverage if you want to use the whole D800 sensor.
In short: the lens/body format mismatch is the reason for the vignetting.
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