He He, there was a lot of my "dinosaur-opinion" about how a lens should look and feel in this statement, Sorry. :) I wouldn't buy one because they don't have an aperture ring and so they won't work with mechanical Nikons, like the FM2 or FM3A. (I'm still planing to get me one of them) Futhermore even their mount are made of plastic and I dont like this at all. But that's just me! If the lense performes well, you only want to use them with newer AF cameras and you don't expect them to be build for eternity, why not? As for the microchip, every "G" as well as every "D" lense has this microchip. The only purpose of this chip is to give distance information for the 3D matrix metering and the 3D TTL-flash metering. cheers Thomas Oh, and I found another good Nikon site with a brief description of all these signs: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech.htm http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/nikortek.htm