Cleaning, Repairing and Servicing a 50mm f/1.4 AI

The 50mm f/1.4 AI and its optical formula was inheritted by its successor and beyond which meant it was in production from the late 70s to 2025 so this lens as an option comes with a well known optical performance and can be found a slightly lower cost than its succesor. The f/1.4 AI ran from 1977-1981 so servicing is a must, with my copy having sticky and unusable focus as well as being very dirty.

Just One More: 50mm f/2 AI

Having serviced and owned a number of Nikkor 50mm I asked myself how many 50mm do we actually need? It turns out that just one more in the shape of a 50mm f/2 AI.

Regreasing an overly dampened Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AI-S

My Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AI-S was a favourite for many years and was one of my first manual focus lenses and the dampened, but not stiff, focus ring was a nice change from my plastic AF-S lenses. The major benifit at the time with the level of dampening was it helped with precise/limited movement for focusing at wide open apertures.



However with regreasing a number of other Nikkors I've started to prefer a softer focus feel - these are my notes for how to regrease/lubricate a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AI-S.

The final pancake - the plastic 50mm f/1.8 AI-S pancake

The final 50mm f/1.8 AI-S manual focus lens, with its 0.6m minimum focus distance and missing rabbit ear/coupling prong, was a lens that was following the times and a shift away from previous Nikkors and their mostly metal construction. Whilst there was an earlier 50mm f/1.8 AI-S pancake which could focus down to 0.45m like the long nose version, that version was only available in Japan and short lived whereas this 50mm pancake superceded both the Japanese pancake and the long nose. Identifying the latter pancake can be done via the serial numbers (starting 4xxxxxxx) and the distinct shiney plastic-ness, particularly of the aperture ring and the additional bump on chrome index/grab ring - this bump was supposedly to help users to quickly orientate the lens, given the missing rabbit ears of earlier AI/AI-S lenses.



So what's this pancake like?

How many 50s do we need: 50mm f/1.8 AI-S "long nose"

The 50mm was the "standard" kit lens in the 1970s and there were a number of iterations across the AI and AI-S variations from the 1980s, ultimately leading up to the plastic 50mm f/1.8D. With so many iterations available of the f/1.8 AI-S, what are the key differences when looking to pick one up, especially the earlier AI-S "long nose"


^{Nikkors f/1.8D | f/1.8 AI-S "long nose" | f/1.4 AI-S}