A couple test shots comparing these two lenses at F2 and F/5.6. Straight out of the D200 camera NEF, converted to JPG via Capture NX V1.1 with highest quality and no changes to in camera settings. In camera Sharpening +2 (High). These images are 100% crops; I cropped out the top half because it was just blue sky and wanted to keep the files reasonably small. Both lenses had a Hoya ND4 filter installed in order to get correct exposures at the wider apertures.

6-5-2008 - Added a montage of 100% crops from a full set of aperture brackets, from the same run as the 4 original crops in this gallery. For these montages, I rendered the NEFs from Capture NX 1.2 using USM 5-5-3 into TIFs, prepared the composite as a .psd and saved as a quality 12 JPG using PS CS. The large image is 70% of the original size. I could never guarantee perfect focus here but it was the best I could do with a Katz Eye screen. For the wider apertures this may not be the fairest test of a low light lens. These lenses seem to prefer lower light wide open, reducing internal flare a bit. I have, for example, gotten better low light images from the 35/1.4 wide open. This montage includes imges from a 50/1.8 Ai-S early/longnose.