I have an old Nikon AI-S 50mm f/1.8 lens that must be twenty years old that I sometimes use with a reversing ring with my Nikon DSLR’s for close-up work. One of the good things about the Fujifilm X-E2 that I recently bought is that with the aid of a convertor you can use various other marques of lens on the camera.
I therefore purchased a Nikon F convertor for the AI lenses from Amazon. There are a lot of convertors out there varying in price from over a hundred pounds to ten. I decided to get one, but as this was an experiment I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it so I bought one that cost £9.99. It had over twenty reviews and an average review of 4 and a half stars. The description said it was made of brass and aluminium so I figured for £10 I could give it a go.
Well it arrived and I must say I was impressed. It felt solid and the quality felt very good. It fit on the X-E2 perfectly and the Nikon AI-S lens also fit the convertor very well.
There are no electrical contacts on the convertor (there are none on the lens anyway) so everything is manual. The lens can be used in aperture priority or fully manual only with the convertor as the aperture has to be set by the ring on the lens. This means that the camera has to be used in ‘stopped-down’ mode.
I set the focus selector on the X-E2 to manual which meant that the manual focus aids in the camera such as focus check, focus peaking and split image were available. I like the focus peaking method so I’m using that.
The lens works perfectly. The only downside to having to use the lens manually is that no aperture information is giving in the viewfinder, it simply says ‘F0’. The lens is 50mm full frame but 75mm at APS-C, so on the X-E2 it is a short telephoto – very useful.
I’m looking forward to giving the camera a good workout at the weekend.
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