Nikkor 400mm f/3.5 IF-ED The size of the Nikkor 400/3.5 compared to a film box.
The Nikkor 400/3.5 was considered a super telephoto lens back in 1976 when it was introduced.
A year after it’s introduction it was changed to the Ai specification and again in 1982 it was changed - this time to Ai-S.

Today it is a real bargain if you need a fast long telephoto lens of excellent quality – if you can live with the manual focus that is.

These lenses (Ai and Ai-S) do not have built-in CPUs so on a lot of modern camera houses metering won’t work.

Build quality as well as optical quality is as already mentioned excellent and at the same time the weight is “just” 2.8 kg. which is not much considering the slightly faster Ai-S Nikkor 400/2.8 weight at 5.1 kg.

Apart from that one of the first thing one notes when using this lens is that it is quite front-heavy due to the large front elements which makes it a bit tricky to use on some ballheads with light camera bodies but which at the same time makes it quite stable when everything is locked down.

I bought a beat-up Ai version recently for around 800 Euro for use on my Fujifilm Finepix S2 Pro and I must admit that I have been very pleased with the results even when used with non-Nikon teleconverters (Kenko 1.4x and Sigma 2x).

 Great spotted woodpecker shot with available light on an overcast day using the 400/3.5
Recently I have used this lens with a Kenko extension tube for small birds (minimum focusing is 4.5 meters to a reproduction ratio of 1:9.8 so a small extension tube helps tremendously when trying to fill the frame with the small birds).

Beaver feeding in a swedish river an early morning photographed with the 400/3.5 My only gripe with the optics of the lens so far is a very slight reddish fringing around high-contrast areas in a few instances but that is really minor.

Another discovery I made while taking the test pictures for this review is that the lens has less contrast than my Sigma 400 APO Macro but is much sharper.
The "lack of" contrast may be due to less-than perfect coating on my example though.
The lens is quite sharp all the way through the apertures as can be seen on the test photos below even though sharpnes does improve by stopping down the lens a bit (which is needed most often anyway because of the shallow DOF).

The construction is also quite good except (at least on my lens) the focusing grip that seems a bit loose – which may also well be from wear and many year’s use in the field.
The tripod collar on the 400/3.5 is of a rotating design and is small but very sturdy.
It is even rumoured to be the best tripod collars on any long Nikkor lens to date...

Another feature that might interest people is the possibility to use 39 mm filters in the drop-in filter holder - much less expensive than buying 122 mm front filters.

The small built-in shade.

The lens also features a small built-in shade which is not very useful considering the diameter of the front element.
On the picture above it is shown fully extended.

Well... on to the test shots.

I made test images at F:3.5, F8, F11, and F:16 and cropped out a small portion (see at the end of the review the size of the crops.
I then proceded to blow up the size of the crops to 25x normal size to be able to study the quality closely.

Test shot at F:3.5 - Center Test shot at F:3.5 - Edge
F:3.5 - Center F:3.5 - Edge
Test shot at F:8 - Center Test shot at F:8 - Edge
F:8 - Center F:8 - Edge
Test shot at F:11 - Center Test shot at F:11 - Edge
F:11 - Center F:11 - Edge
Test shot at F:16 - Center Test shot at F:16 - Edge
F:16 - Center F:16 - Edge
Test shot of a flash manual taken at minimum focusing distance at F:3.5, F:8, F:11, and F:16.
All crops are blown up to 25x normal resolution using "nearest neighbour" in Photoshop (please refer to the full test picture for the size of the crops in the full image).
No sharpening was applied before or after resizing.

The size of the areas cropped out for the test relative to the full image.

Looking at these test shots it is evident that sharpness increases markedly from F:3.5 to F:8 and then improves slowly up to F:16.
Also it would seem that the edges of the picture suffers somewhat from chromatic abberations.

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A lot of the technical specifications for this article were found on:
http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/companies/nikon/nikkoresources