A creative and versatile tool for mirrorless full-frame photographers, the Nikon Z-mount 85mm f/2.8 Macro Tilt Lens from AstrHori doubles as a fast, telephoto prime lens for portraits and a macro-tilt lens for exploring new perspectives. The lens offers up to ±8° of tilt, which achieves its best results in APS-C mode, unlocks the focal plane as a site of artistic control. Whether you're capturing details at a 1:1 magnification ratio from as close as 9.8" or manipulating the focus on distant subjects, this lens maintains excellent image quality across the frame thanks to a design that features 11 elements in eight groups, including two extra-low dispersion elements and one high refractive element. The all-metal construction is durable, and its 55mm filter thread allows the use of light-shaping filters to adapt to any shooting scenario. The lens's focus and settings are fully manual, making it ideal for learning and mastering manual settings and encouraging photographers to explore, experiment, and develop their skills.
- Full-Frame | f/2.8 to f/16
- Telephoto Macro Tilt Lens
- ±8° Tilt
- 1x Magnification, 9.8" Minimum Focus
A trHori 85mm f/2.8 Macro & Tilt Overview
A trHori 85mm f/2.8 Macro & Tilt Specs
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| Tilt-Shift | |
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| Magnification | |
| Optical Design | |
| Aperture/Iris Blades | |
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A trHori 85mm f/2.8 Macro & Tilt Reviews
Good Value for what it is
Just going to preface this with I've been told I can be a bit of curmudgeon so I apologize if I seem overly critical of a $300 lens. Positives: -Price Hard to complain about the price. You won't find another 85mm tilt lens for Nikon unless you spend around $700 for the PC-E Nikkor 85mm F2.8 -Build Its solidly built. Its on the heavy side, but that's to be expected for an all-metal and glass construction. I don't feel like its flimsy at all even when I'm rotating or tilting it. -Bokeh & Sunstars I like the creamy bokeh the lens gives as well as the sunstars it can create with 12 aperture blades Negatives: -Vignetting The vignetting shows up even when I set my Zf to DX mode if I tilt fully. The closer you focus, the less it shows up. -LoCA The longitudinal chromatic aberration (LoCA) is pretty bad. You can see in the building images where there is strong green aberration at the top and strong purple aberration at the bottom. This remains until about F8. I can live with this is most cases by correcting it in lightroom. I left it in the images as an example. -Focus rotation The focusing ring for macro feels kind of like an afterthought. Its a little on the stiff side which wouldn't be bad if it didn't only rotate 135 degrees making nailing your focus difficult. Increasing the rotational distance would be a huge improvement for this lens Other Thoughts: I bought the lens for Macro and Miniaturization photography and it works well for both of these things as you can see in the images. I hope AstrHori continues to refine this lens in future versions.
Projection circle too small - limits tilt function
Having used view cameras, I am familiar with the Scheimpflug principle and like the idea of being able to control the angle of the band of focus the rather shallow DOF of a macro lens affords. However, as can be seen in the attached photo, because I had tilted the lens to its maximum as well as spun the lens about 45 degrees, the upper left corner of the image has vignetted out. This was using a Fuji X-T5. Back when I had full frame Nikon DSLRs, I also had the Nikon PC-E Micro-NIKKOR 85mm f/2.8D Tilt-Shift Lens and do not recall it as having this issue. Of course, for four+ times the price that is to be expected. The other thing I realized is that with the relatively small format of a DX imaging chip - compared to an FX imager and certainly as compared to 4x5 film - the actual effect was not all that noticeable. The lens is built well enough and I will keep it to play around, but that vignette when tilted is rather a disappointment.