I recently purchased from B&H, an older Tokina 80-200mm f/2.8 ATX SD manual lens for $229. I may have overpaid, I couldn’t find much on the web on this lens so it was hard to know the average price of this lens. I got it yesterday and plugged in into my D90. Firt of all, this lens is huge! I didn’t measure it but it looks to be about 12 inches long without the hood on and although it’s not particularly wide, the length makes up for it. The weight isn’t too bad, about the same as my Tamron 28-105 f/2.8 although in comparison, the Tamron is much shorter and stockier.  

Although the lens was titled “Autofocus” on B&H’s website, the lens is completely manual. I’m not sure why it was titled that way… Being born almost entirely in the digital generation of photography. I’d not had a lot of experience with completely manual lenses. I’ve played around with some of my autofocus lens by setting them to manual trick focusing situations but that was about it. It was involved some learning on my part. The actual act of focusing the lens manually is relatively simple, the difficult part with a completely manual lens is that you also have to select your ISO, aperture and shutter speed manually. That meant, for me at least, a few minutes of trial and error to get the exposure “right.” Going from outdoors to indoors involved having to reset everything. I had a “feel” for what was the right settings for each but until I took a few shots I wasn’t completely sure. I’d become fairly dependent on the Aperture priority mode on my D90 with my other lenses so going completely manual was an unexpected learning experience.

Ergonomics
As I mentioned before, the lens is big. So its not entirely comfortable to handhold. The lens did come with a tripod collar but I usually only utilize a tripod in a studio setting or when taking nature/HDR pictures. I prefer to handhold if at all possible. Its definitely doable with this lens its just not as comfortable as others.

Handling
It took me a bit to get used to the lens as it features a push-pull zoom mechanism. I’ve used push-pull lenses before but this Tokina features a unique (and backwards in my mind) reverse push-pull in that you push out to reach the 80mm range and pull towards you to reach the 200mm range. The lens itself is a fixed length so that pushing only affects your range and doesn’t increase or decrease the actual size of the lens. The focus ring is genereously sized and made out of a firm rubber grip that is easy to turn and to hold on to when zooming. Getting used to the inverse zoom was difficult at first but easily overcome with some experience.

Actual Performance
Because its manual, focusing is as fast as you can physically perform it and once you have it you can see the true speed of the D90. You can fire off a burst of shots before you can blink. Without having much experience focusing manually I found myself constantly double and triple checking to see if I had the image as sharp as it would go. I would turn the ring until it looked very sharp and then do it a little more to see if it got better but then it would blur so I’d go back and go back a little too far and it would blur again so I’d twist forward till eventually I just had to be comfortable with it. I feel this is more a limitation of the viewfinder on the D90 than the lens, with a bigger and brighter viewfinder it would be easier to see if the image was in focus. After a great deal of experimentation the Tokina lens turned out some very sharp pictures even when at maximum aperture of f/2.8. Let’s be honest, if you’re purchasing a f/2.8 lens its because you really want or will have a true need to use it at 2.8. No one buys a f/2.8 lens just to shoot it at f/11.  If you only needed f/5.6 or even just f/4 at 200mm there are other better (not to mention cheaper) options for that.

I wanted this lens for its reach in low light so I needed its performance at f/2.8 to be acceptable. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was indeed acceptable at f/2.8. Things got even better at f/4.0 (which was as expected) and completely tack sharp at f/5.6. All of my pictures seemed to be pretty sharp throughout the range from 80 to 200mm. I didn’t notice a general softness at either extreme of the zoom which is a nice thing to have. Some lens perform poorly at the wide end or at the extreme long end of the zoom. I didn’t go to the trouble of trying to measure distortion or CA because I didn’t have access to a studio with controlled lighting and unless you have the setup to perform those types of tests correctly I believe the tests will be fundamentally flawed.

This is a fine lens for candid portraits, low light, and general purpose photography. Probably not quite up to the more rigid requirements of landscape photography but then again I’m not a fan of using a 70-200mm zoom for landscape work, certainly if you had this lens in your bag and needed that range you wouldn’t be disappointed. 

Conclusion

Great value for your dollar, a similar lens with automatic focus would probably set you back about $400 more then you would spend on this older lens. As far as image quality it equals anything put forward by its AF contemporaries, the main reason to spring for the extra money would solely be for the ease of AF. After having this lens for a few months now I can say I underestimated the downside of going completely manual. Changing all your settings (ISO, aperture and shutter speed) depending on where the day suddenly gets cloudy or you step in some shade or indoors gets to be a pain. If you can live with the maintenance this lens is a stellar performer and will give you all the sharp pictures you care to take.