As the former owner of two examples each of the 75-150/3.5-E and 50-135/3.5 AIS, I have to comment about perceptions of these lenses. First, I found both of them excellent by any reasonable standard. Unless a present-day buyer has specific needs that would be addressed by one or the other, the choice should probably be governed by cost. By this measure, the 75-150 is the clear winner. I don't think it's been mentioned before in this thread that there were/are two versions of the 75-150: The latter version, which is the more desirable of the two, has a bright chrome knurled grasping ring just forward of the aperture ring. It came new in a box that had a green dot in the lower right corner of the front panel (and perhaps other places). The earlier version -- which I have seen but never used -- has a black grasping ring. It had the reputation of beeing weak structurally. Don't know about optical performance. As has been mentioned here, the 75-150 is incredibly sharp. With one exception, I consider it the equal of any of the fixed focal length lenses, stop for stop ,in that focal length range that I had then. The exception is the 85mm f/1.4 AIS. It is an extremely flexible lens, having a fairly close (~24" or so, as I recall) close focus distance. Its performance with the 3T and 4T closeup attachments is excellent, and with the addition of the TC-14A extender, the 75-15 can achieve nearly 1:1 reproduction ratio. As to hoods, Nikon's folding rubber hood HR-1 is still available and works quite well. On the negative side, the 75-150 simply isn't as strong, structurally, as are the other AIS zoooms. Anyone I ever knew who used these lenses professionally had two of 'em, just for this reason. I never had a problem with mine, but I'm not as hard on gear as are many others. The often-heard complaints about loose zoom barrels are probably legitimate. One of mine was significantly less tight than the other. It's front filter ring rotates, making it difficult to use with a polarizer or with a split-density filter. Finally, the 75-150 - mine anyhow - exhibited a very slight cyan tinge on film. For this reason, I used these lenses with a skylight filter for general-purpose work when no other filter was in place (very infrequent). The 50-135 is an excellent lens, but I never could get to like it. I found it neither short enough for many situations, nor long enough in others. Neither of the two examples I had were as sharp as I wanted, and one of them had a distinct misalignment optically, which rendered one side of the frame less sharp than the other. The single feature that distinguishes it is its non-rotating filter attachment. For this feature alone, I put up with the lens for a lot longer time than I should have. As a parting shot, I'd like to say that neither of these lenses, 75-150 nor 50-135, exhibit anything like the pronounced (to my eye, anyhow) vignetting characteristics seen in recent Nikon efforts. I have in mind particularly both of the current versions of the 80-200. Jim [EMAIL PROTECTED]
