A few months ago, I bought a used Nikon 17-35. It's an old enough lens that it still has the old style lens cap on it, so I'm pretty sure it's from the 90's. The seller told me that it had been in the bottom of his bag unused for several years. It's a fantastic lens. Except....I have a weird problem where, when I first put it onto my camera, it won't autofocus. The camera (D800) doesn't recognize that it has an autofocus lens mounted. The displays all show that I have a manual focus lens mounted. No amount of button pushing or lever flipping helps. Then, after about 5 minutes of frustration, it wakes up and starts working properly. And continues to work for as long as I have the lens mounted.
It had the problem when I went to buy it, and the guy who I bought it from had the exact same problem with the lens mounted on his F5. But I got a good enough deal that I figured that I could pay to have it repaired if I needed to, so I went ahead and bought the thing. I've been waiting for the problem to get worse before I spent the money to get it repaired, but with a couple of trips coming up, I'm thinking I should probably get it fixed before it totally breaks in the field somewhere. The thing is a pain to manually focus.
Has anyone ever heard of something like this? I'm planning on getting it repaired, but I thought I'd see if anyone had any ideas what was going on before I took it in and spent a bunch of money on it.
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