A while back, I picked up a Nikon TC-16A teleconverter as part of an ebay auction. It seemed like a nifty little widget. It’s an older piece of hardware (1985), from when Nikon first came out with Autofocus bodies, but still hadn’t caught up with their lens line. It allows you to mount a fully manual lens on an AF body, and get about 5mm of autofocus (get the full rundown at mir). Since I have a lot of Manual lenses at this point, it seemed like it could be pretty useful, if not just a great novelty.
It turns out however, that this widget only works on the cameras from that era, and 2 modern day DSLRs, the D2H and D2X. If you’ve been watching prices on either of those, the minimum buy in for this thing to work is about $1300. So it has sat on the shelf.
Yesterday, everything changed. I was reading the Nikon forums on photo.net, and ran across a link to this page on converting a TC-16A for use on a D200. The step by step instructions made things look not-too-difficult, and it was just sitting on the bookshelf, so I broke out the tools. A couple hours later (lots of time looking for springs on the floor), I had a semi-working TC-16A. It does AF, as advertised, but it doesn’t handle aperture settings. It has a CPU, so you can actually shoot in A on a D50 with a manual lens, but the chip reports the min/max aperture as f/1, and the focal length as 8mm, so EXIF data is pretty messy.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a great hack, and I think it can be a pretty useful addition to the camera bag. It’s small, it allows one handed shooting (with the other holding a light or beer), and for the most part, it works. I even got to test it and my portable strobist kit last night at EN. I think this shot of Frank drinking came out the closest to what I was looking for.
matt, i’m on the point off buying a convert,
seen one on an auction site.
curious if you are still happy with the converter.
want to use it on a 80-200 2,8.
john
I like it, but I rarely use my teleconverters now. I was out hiking and put it on my 300mm f/2.8, but it actually gave me too much reach, and instead found myself using an extension tube to cut down my focusing distance. I think if my AF was faster (I shoot with a D50) it might be more interesting, but I’ve found shooting in MF, either it’s totally out of focus or sharp like a tack. With AF, I’ve gotten too much soft focus and it drives me crazy. If you need a little bit more reach (but not 2x), it’s not a bad teleconverter, but if you can get a 1.4x at the right price, I’ve heard they’re much better optically.
Hello Matt. I’ve also acquired recently a TC16a off the eBay and mounted between MF lenses and F4s … auto-focus great. As I also have a D100 (not D80 or D200 yet, one day in future maybe) as well as F100 but not tried yet as I intended to use it for film bodies (mainly my F4) in the first place, of course it’d be very likely mounted on F100 some time for sure, so just curious after reading your article about modification of the TC as able to use with modern F/DSLRs (great!) … what if connect both pin 6 and 3 together with an extra pin (from an abandoned lens or ask Nikon for a part) added on to the same point of the IC (original contact of the pin 3), then both old AF bodies like F4s/N8008/N90 series and most advanced F100/F5/F6 and D100/200/80 … would all work in AF with manual lenses … ’cause I’m not sure if relocating pin 3 to 6 along would cause F4s not auto-focus mf lenses anymore?!
Jay
California
I’d be a little worried about shorting pins 3 and 6 on my D50, but that’s just because I’m not really sure what they do. It might work, it might do nothing. I do kind of doubt it would break the camera. Let me know if it works!