Tokina AF 12-24mm f/4 AT-X 124 Pro DX II Lens - Nikon Mount

I received my Tokina 12-24mm DXII wide angle lens very quickly. I could not wait to put it through some paces even though I was hesitant at first to try anything but Nikon lenses. I use a Nikon D90 and this lens is flawless with it. The auto focus is very quiet and responsive. I ran it through the gamut of fstops at every setting from 12mm to 24mm. My results indicate that it is a little soft wide open but quickly sharpens as you progress through the settings. At 14-15 mm seems to be very sharp. The colors are true and vibrant. I took over a hundred pictures at church, mostly outside, both in the shade and sunshine. I did not see any distortion or chromatic aberrations. If there were any, my camera must have corrected them automatically. I probably should mention I compared this lens to my Nikon 18-105mm with VR, side by side and picture for picture, at all settings. The Tokina is actually sharper at 18mm than the Nikon 18-105. Up to and including 24mm, they both were very good. This was a pleasant surprise to me and I would not hesitate to recommend this lens to anyone who might being trying to decide whether to purchase it.

This is technically my first third party lens (the other is the fantastic telephoto Sigma 70-300mm APO). It is extremely sharp throughout its range and the photos come out colorful and accurate. Zooming and when needed, manually focusing is silky smooth. Which is very nice for a lens at this price range.
Keep in mind though it is large and heavy. But that's what you get when going with Tokina. Which to me isn't really a bad thing. And yes! It even comes with its own durable lens hood and weather resistant sealing on the mount end.

I got the Tokina 12-24 f/4 DX II a few months ago. It is a well-built ultra-wide angle lens (UWA). Like all UWAs, it is not the easiest lens to learn to use -- distortion lurks in every move. If you want no distortion in a photo, you need to make sure that anything that is within a few feet of the lens is not off to the left or right of your field of view. If it is, it will be stretched wide. You need to make sure that you point the camera to the horizon point of the field of view, and don't tilt the camera up or down. If you do, the vertical lines will bend in or out. Further, you want to have significant objects up close to the lens, a dozen or so feet back, and off in the distance to give the full sense of 3D depth of field that the lens can provide. And finally, you want to know when to break these rules to invoke one or more of those distortions for artistic effect. This lens may take a lifetime to really master, but it is a lot of fun to experiment with.

The lens is quite sharp and, like all UWAs, has a very deep depth of focus -- even wide open. Its contrast and color fidelity are excellent. Some people find it a bit on the cold (blue) side, but I find it faithful to the colors that I see. If you find it too cold, the Sigma UWAs are skewed more to the red (warm) end of the spectrum. For my taste, they seem off, but YMMV. The other Tokina that many people love is the 11-16 f/2.8. It is based on this lens' design, and is similar in most ways. Its narrow zoom range was off-putting to me, as I like to choose one lens and keep it on for an entire outing if possible. The 11-16 just seemed too unremittingly wide angle to use as anything other than a specialty lens. I have been quite content with the 12-24 in this regard, and have been happy to limit myself to just this lens on some excursions. For example, I only used this lens when I went to the Chihuly glass exhibit in Grand Rapids. I have posted a couple of photos from that event above.

I have had a couple of disappointments with this lens. First, the lens hood that came with it is visible in the upper corners at 12mm. This is a rare instance of lack of attention to detail by Tokina, which is a wonderful lens company in general. Second, this lens will fail to focus more than any other lens I own. That may reflect the extreme depth of field of an UWA, as just about everything is always in pretty good focus with this kind of lens -- so it may be hard to choose the "right" focus. Indeed, I will often manually focus this lens now. The lens has a focus scale on it and you don't have to be too precise with UWAs, so it is easier at times just to eyeball the distance and set the focus by hand. It's easy to do, so I don't want to give the impression that this represents a big deal -- it was just something that surprised me. For the most part, the lens focuses reliably and quickly. But, in some reasonably well-lit contexts, it just doesn't want to choose a focus.

This lens has pronounced chromatic aberration (CA), but I never see it. One of the pleasing aspects of current cameras is that they handle this sort of thing very well in software. While I always shoot raw, I use Capture NX2, which applies the same lateral CA correction that my camera would apply if I had shot JPEG. If you shoot raw and do not use Capture NX2, you will have to manually correct for the CA. But most image processing software makes this relatively easy to do.

Flare is a real issue with UWAs, and this lens is no exception. The DX II is supposed to be an improvement over the original Tokina design, but it is still a constant concern when you compose your shots. All in all, this lens is a lot of fun to use, but it is also a tremendous challenge to learn to use well. If that piques your interest, then you would probably enjoy learning to use an UWA. If so, the Tokina 12-24 f/4 DX II is just about as pleasing an example of a UWA lens as you could hope to find, and it is very competitively priced. I highly recommend this endlessly fascinating lens.