Nikon has two new full-frame lenses for you, and both are pretty exciting. Upon reading that there is now a 24mm ƒ1.4G ED prime, you will first shout "ƒ1.4? Holy hell! I want one!" Then, after calming down slightly, you will murmur "Wait, ƒ1.4? That thing's gonna be big. And expensive. And I still want one."
You would, of course, be correct. The lens is indeed chunky, at around three-and-a-half inches in all directions (and 22 oz in weight), and expensive, at $2,200. But imagine the pictures you could take in almost darkness, with that super-wide aperture coupled with a wide-angle (which makes camera shake less of a problem) fixed onto a see-in-the-dark Nikon full-frame body.
The 24mm also has a built-in AF (Silent Wave) motor, a choice of mixed auto/manual or just plain manual focussing, a nine-blade aperture diaphragm for smooth out-of-focus highlights and a bevy of coatings to keep the light where it should be.
Nikon's other new optic is a wide zoom, the 16-35mm ƒ4 VR. It costs $1,260, and gives a range of focal lengths normally seen in DX (crop frame) lenses. At these focal lengths, that relatively small maximum aperture isn't such a problem, as you don't get much camera shake (especially with the addition of anti-shake), and wide-angle lenses give a huge depth-of-field even wide open, so you can't do much to throw backgrounds into a blur anyway.
Both lenses will still work on DX bodies, but you will lose much of the point of them. The 24mm will be in shops in March, the zoom in February.
24mm ƒ1.4G [Nikon. Thanks, Geoff!]
16-35mm ƒ4G ED VR [Nikon]
