Tokina AT-X PRO 12-28 F4 DX Lens : A great little wide-angle lens

February 11, 2020

Tokina AT-X PRO 12-28 F4 DX Lens : A great little wide-angle lens

This lens is not suitable for full frame canon cameras, the vignetting is heavy, can’t crop enough to work with the images. However, the smaller sensor cameras will do well with this lens, the focus is very smooth.

If you want this lens at a lower price (with amazon) look at the tokina at-x pro dx macro lens with bh 77b hood for nikon camera, as its actually the same lens, but comes from germany. I got one for £361 in late october, 2015. It seems about the same in terms of sharpness as the sigma 10-20 f4-5. 6, though a bit better at 20mm. The corners are slightly softer. At 16mm it is sharper than the nikon 16-85, about the same at 20mm, but a bit worse at 24mm. It is not good at 28mm, and therefore does not seem to be designed to ‘stretch’ from the old 12-24mm. It has a bit of ca, but this is easily corrected in camera raw. I have also found, as have others, that it seems to overexpose as you increase the focal length, which is odd, and like nothing i have seen before. The aperture blades seem to be working ok, and if you change aperture at any given focal length, the exposure stays more or less the same.

I’m using this with a nikon d7100 bought mainly for landscape and close up crazy stuff. It’s really well put together and according to exif data recognised as the correct model, always a concern with 3rd party lenses. I was interested when i read the review about over-exposure with the same camera as mine. I took a practice shot of a dark object against a bright window – fine at 12mm but blown out at 28mm with an iso of 1400. So i took my meter reading from the window and re-focused and the shot was perfect – i wouldn’t call it a fault more a peccadillo of this lens. The only other thing i’ve noticed is that the colour temp is on the cool side – inside or out – but i shoot in raw so it’s easily corrected in post. What i cannot fault is how sharp this is. Looking forward to making many more pictures with this lens.

A great little wide-angle lens. Not too heavy and very compact. Some vignetting when zoomed right out but to be expected really. {icture quality is excellent.

Borzani has been extremely unlucky with his lens sample because i can’t find a sniff of ca on my images. I bought the lens two weeks ago and being newly retired have had the opportunity to take more than 1,000 images with it on my nikon d90 in that time. For the life of me i cannot detect any colour fringing on trees or anything else – red, purple or otherwise. Nor have i suffered any problems with flare except where i’ve misjudged the angle of the sun. Nor is my manual focus switch difficult to operate and nor is the af motor noisy. So i’m baffled by his review – he really must have bought a dog which surprises me as tokina lenses are normally very reliable; i also had an 80-400 which was faultless. And no, i don’t have any connection with tokinait’s a cracking lens, very sharp from front to back (only my nikon primes are fractionally sharper), with minimal distortion and excellent colour rendition. The only problem i’ve had has been with vignetting at 12mm where i’ve used two screw-in filters. No great surprise there and simply eradicated by pulling back to 13 or 14mm.

Very wide and useful for landscape photography. It is well built, reassuringly chunky and the rubberised zoom ring is very smooth with just the right amount of feedback. Push/pull switch for auto/manual mode at first feels odd but easy to get use to. Sharpness seems fine and for a 12mm lens, the amount of distortion at the edges is acceptable. One major problem with this lens is sun flair – it is overly easy to accidentally introduce this into your photo – sometimes the effect is nice but most of the time just irritating. Odd thing about it is that it is easy enough to get rid of this by using my hand to block the sun, which suggests if you get a hood with longer brims then this may not be a problem. Not sure if this is common to all tokina lenses but 6 canon and 2 sigma lenses (and also two sony e-mount lenses) i use regularly never have this problem. In fact i don’t ever remember intruding flares accidentally with other lenses on my canon 80d.

As with all wide angle zooms there is a compromise/s, but having exhausted all the reviews in this class of lens i decided on this tokina 12 – 24. Chromatic aberation is mentioned as a fault with this lens but after an intensive first month of use it has yet to raise its ugly head. The reason above all else that i purchased this lens was the constant sharpness at both extremes something in most other similar lens that is a trade off especially in my last two wide zooms at the wide end, so i am pleased to say in this respect it has lived up to its reputation. You can always get a bad copy , i myself had one one with a tamron 17-50, but the replacement was good and the lens served me well for years so you cannot dismiss a lens on the strength of a bad un. For the price the build quality is fine with nice smooth adjustment rings, in fact in this area it is better than many manufacturers lens at higher prices. I would have liked a longer range, but with that come more compromises and as it is used mainly for landscapes f4 is plenty fast enough in 95% of situations i will encounter, so far then very pleased, it has lived up to all those dxo and other reviews. Just an added problem after extensive usage, autofocus is not always that accurate, i have heard of this problem in other reviews but it only really appeared in some close up shots, focusing manually solved the problem. After some usage the autofocus has become so unreliable that i tested on a static subject, if you changed the shutter speed and nothing else on a tripod the lens would change focus well over half the images i took were out of focus, the other thing that shows up is lack of sharpness in corners above and beyond what it should be and colour changes when shooting with thelight anywhere than coming from behind, many reviews have shown up the shortcomings since i purchased and after a fair amount of use i have found the same problems. I think the newly released model v has attempted to address these problems, but i have sold my copy and gone back to canon, sbame as it is well built but to many downsides.

Did an exhaustive test on several lenses before making the decision on the tokina for my nikon d7100. I would have initially been interested in the nikon 10-24 but did not want to pay the high price for a lens i was unsure that i would use a lot. Initially looking at both versions of the sigma 10-20 as these are about half the price of the nikon and found them to be very good, with the cheaper f4-5. 6 version coming out slightly sharper. I then tried the tokina against the sigma and initially looking at the centre of the frame could notice very little difference between the 2. However, at the edges there was a huge difference with the tokina staying sharp into the corners whilst the sigma became very unclear. Looking at a tree for example-on the tokina you could make out the leaves, on the sigma it was just a green something. My other issue with the sigma is that it only goes up to 20mm, so it would be difficult to leave on my camera all the time. I therefore went for the tokina due to the sharpness and extra zoom range. I subsequently took it away on holiday and shot over 1,000 photos with it.