Nikon shooters finally get what Canon owners have had for a few years now—a fisheye zoom lens with circular coverage at its widest angle. The AF-S Fisheye Nikkor 8-15mm f/3.5-4.5E ED ($1,249.95) matches the Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye USM in price, function, and quality. It's expensive, but a solid choice for fans of fisheye images. However, if you're willing to give up the zoom capability and autofocus, and live with images that aren't as technically perfect, you can save a ton of money by opting for the $300 Lensbaby Circular Fisheye instead.

Design

The Nikkor 8-15mm ($1,246.95 at Amazon) is a squat lens with a bulging hemispherical front element. It measures 3.2 by 3.0 inches (HD) and weighs just over a pound. You can't use front filters with it, par for the course with fisheye designs, but rear filters are supported. Like other modern Nikkor lenses, the barrel is black polycarbonate with gold accents.

A lens hood is included, along with front and rear caps, but you'll need to remove the hood (and use the lens with a full-frame camera) in order to capture circular images. Thankfully the hood and front cap can be removed and installed together. They twist on and off; there's a lock, set free with a push-button mechanism, so it won't fall off accidentally.

The front and rear elements are coated with fluorine. This is something we're seeing in more and more lenses. The coating repels grease and moisture, so it's easier to keep the lens clean and to clean it off if you do accidentally fingerprint it. It's especially a benefit with a fisheye, as the big front element is typically exposed during use.

The zoom ring sits toward the base of the lens. It's covered in rubber and marked at the 8, 10, 12, 14, and 15mm positions. There's an additional mark between 10 and 12; it indicates the position at which the image circle first fills the frame from corner to corner on a DX (APS-C) camera. Full-frame shooters will need to zoom all the way to 15mm to eliminate the circular vignette.

The manual focus ring sits behind the front element. It's also finished in rubber, and can be used at any time, even when the lens and camera are set to autofocus. There's a switch on the barrel to change focus modes. As with many ultra-wide lenses, the Fisheye focuses close, to 6 inches (0.16-meter). Despite its wide swath of coverage, it can project objects onto the image sensor at 1:2.9 life-size when focused as close as possible at 15mm.

Image Quality

Normally we test lenses using a resolution chart and Imatest software. But a standard lens chart doesn't play well with fisheyes. The real point of this lens isn't absolute perfect image quality. Sure, it delivers images of the quality you expcect from Nikon, but it's the ultra-wide field of view and fisheye look that are the stars here.

See How We Test Digital Cameras

For wide-angle shots, I took a really close look at images I shot in the real world with the lens, paired with the 45.7MP D850.

Details are crisp throughout the frame, even at f/3.5, but I did see some evidence of chromatic aberration, in the form of modest purple color fringing, toward the edges of the circular image. You may also be turned off by a slight ring of color around the image itself, and occasional flare leaking out of the image circle. However, adding a circular mask in Photoshop is an option if you want to set shots against a pure black background if that's what you want.

At 15mm I was able to feed data into Imatest. At f/4.5 the lens notches 3,257 lines on average, a solid result. Stopping down to f/8 bumps the score to 3,709 lines, and image quality remains solid at f/16 (3,291 lines). But keep in mind we can only test a portion of what the lens captures—due to the extreme barrel distortion at 15mm (28 percent), the edges of our chart are too curved to be examined by software. Real world shots show that details are strong at 15mm, even toward the edge of the frame, especially when stopped down. And we didn't see any color fringing at the maximum zoom setting.

Conclusions

A fisheye zoom isn't a lens you're going to use every day, or even every month. But it's a fun tool to have in your bag, especially if you shoot weddings or do a lot of travel photography. At $1,250, the Nikon AF-S Fisheye Nikkor 8-15mm f/3.5-4.5E ED is priced like the pro-grade tool it is, and like the Canon equivalent, I think it's a little expensive for a lens that isn't likely to get a huge amount of use. That said, it's a very good performer, and will get you images that you simply won't get with a traditional rectilinear wide-angle optic. If you have the budget, and want the lens, get it. For budget shoppers, the Lensbaby Circular Fisheye is a steal, but you'll only be able to shoot circular images with it, so it's not as versatile, and it doesn't have the Nikkor's pro build or autofocus capability.

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