Woody, they are really tack sharp, within the shallow 300mm DOF. The second 300mm one shot at 1/320 sec. according to the exif - you definitely have a more steady hand than I have.
Ray, you are absolutely right about the 85mm MF lens being difficult to accurately focus with the D300. I took several shots at each aperture and just picked the best ones to show here. And unfortunately the D300 matte screen isn't designed to be easily interchanged by the end user. This is exactly where the coming Leica DSLR comes in. "Wide open" optimized optics plus a Manual Focus optimized viewfinder (hopefully) ? Seems nowadays to be the last chance company for that in the 35mm arena ...
(You really sold the 2/35mm, isn't it considered one of the top two or top three ZFs ?)
It would be very interesting if Nikon announces a new 85mm AF-S in a few days from now.
Neil, thanks for the advice about the postprocessing, very usefull information and inspiration. So far I've been too chicken to even try to crank up the sharpening as much as you suggest. I'll try it out for sure. We (or at least: "I") need a thread about good postprocessing suggestions of these files.
I use Nikon Capture NX. I still hope to be rescued by Lars Vinbergs "Joey" program concerning post conversion processing
By the way, I just realized that unfortunately I loaded up the wrong files for the actual pixel crops of the above rose shots. Crops yes, but not at all 100 %. It's a bit of a pity that the "Edit" option disappears in the posts ?
Nevertheless, I won't bother you with posting new actual pixel crops, the full res jpeg samples are temporarily uploaded to a webpage as mentioned in post # 5 if you want to peep the rose shots - anyway it's not all that important, in no way controlled examples.