Nikon has absolutely nailed it with this lens. A modest sum gets you exactly what you need in a lens, nothing you don't, and it works beautifully. It is relatively feature-rich at its price: cheap lenses, even from Nikon, often lack important features - but not here. Unlike other recent DX bargains this lens has Nikon's M/A focus setting, which allows automatic focus with instant manual over-ride. This is a simple and intuitive method of combining the ease and accuracy of AF with sometimes-necessary manual control, and Nikon has done users of this lens a great favor by including it, despite the low price. It also features, less importantly, a proper metal mount and a gasket to keep dust ingress from occurring through the camera/lens interface. A couple of items do remain absent: there is no focus distance scale, and as a consequence there is no depth-of-field scale, an unfortunate omission that is nevertheless justified at the price point. This is a bargain lens, a no-brainer for any photographer aspiring beyond the point-and-shoot level, and the lack of distance and depth scales are a reasonable trade-off.
What is clear to me in using this lens is that Nikon has put its money in exactly the right places to make this lens a star despite its price. There may be nitpicks here and there, but the optics, the coatings, the engineering, and perhaps most importantly the quality of the focusing system, are exactly what they need to be to allow this lens to make photographs that are the equal of those made by professional zooms costing in the thousands.
The important thing to keep in mind with this lens is that it is a relatively fast prime lens, and the most important quality of a fast prime is its ability to take photographs using a large aperture: without this ability there are any number of excellent consumer and professional zooms that are capable of doing the same job. Its essential distinguishing quality, then, is its ability to make images at apertures wider than f/2.8 or so, and at such large apertures there are two hurdles that a lens must overcome. The first is simply a matter of optics: most lenses, historically at least, have been made from an assemblage of spherically-ground lens elements. Spherical elements do a good job of approximating the perfect shape for a lens at smaller apertures and are used because they can be manufactured inexpensively - but at larger apertures, their spherical nature varies optically from perfection, leading to something called spherical aberration. This results in a lack of acuity, and sharpness, in the resulting image. The 35/1.8 uses an aspherical element (actually a hybrid aspherical for what it's worth) to correct this imperfection. The result, in this well-engineered example, is a lens that performs nearly as well at a wide-open f/1.8 aperture as at an optimal f/5.6 or f/8 aperture.
What is clear to me in using this lens is that Nikon has put its money in exactly the right places to make this lens a star despite its price. There may be nitpicks here and there, but the optics, the coatings, the engineering, and perhaps most importantly the quality of the focusing system, are exactly what they need to be to allow this lens to make photographs that are the equal of those made by professional zooms costing in the thousands.
The important thing to keep in mind with this lens is that it is a relatively fast prime lens, and the most important quality of a fast prime is its ability to take photographs using a large aperture: without this ability there are any number of excellent consumer and professional zooms that are capable of doing the same job. Its essential distinguishing quality, then, is its ability to make images at apertures wider than f/2.8 or so, and at such large apertures there are two hurdles that a lens must overcome. The first is simply a matter of optics: most lenses, historically at least, have been made from an assemblage of spherically-ground lens elements. Spherical elements do a good job of approximating the perfect shape for a lens at smaller apertures and are used because they can be manufactured inexpensively - but at larger apertures, their spherical nature varies optically from perfection, leading to something called spherical aberration. This results in a lack of acuity, and sharpness, in the resulting image. The 35/1.8 uses an aspherical element (actually a hybrid aspherical for what it's worth) to correct this imperfection. The result, in this well-engineered example, is a lens that performs nearly as well at a wide-open f/1.8 aperture as at an optimal f/5.6 or f/8 aperture.
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