In article <56fj4e$nbd@mozo.cc.purdue.edu>, tujf@ecn.purdue.edu@ says...

>I am still a fan of all manual photography. Occasionally, I look at the
>used lenses and notice that the prices of series E lenses are considerably
>lower than Nikkors.
>Can anybody comment on the quality differency between these lenses?

The primes used mostly plastic parts in their barrels (Sound familiar?
Though they seemed low-quality physically when they came out, the second
version style lenses [with the chrome ring] now seem down-right luxurious
compared with most AF lenses! ;-), and the zooms used mostly metal parts.
Optically, they were mostly good, with some that were outstanding.
For the particulars of their optical performance, I refer you to my
"SUBJECTIVE Lens Evaluations (Mostly Nikkors)", version 5a, which
includes a listing of all Nikon SLR lenses ever made (with a *SUBJECTIVE*
evaluation of many of them, a general description of Nikkor lens
performance characteristics by lens-type groups, and comments on
particular lenses when the general descriptions plus the subjective
evaluation numbers are not sufficient to describe performance), which
can be found at these sites:

-- Jan-jaap Aue: (nice text format)
http://www.phys.rug.nl/mk/people/aue/nikon/david.html
-- Quang-Tuan Luong: (nice text format)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~qtluong/photography/35mm/nikon-neuman.html
-- Niklas Nikitin: (nice table format)
http://www.cs.hks.se/~nicke/private/photo/lenstest/david.html
-- Leo Verwoerd (plain text and table formats)
http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/leover/nikkor.htm
-- Bo-Ming Tong: (plain text format)
http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/bmtong/nikon/c.html
(number 13 in table of contents)

Hope This Helps