Nikkor Z 24mm f/1.8 S

This wide-angle lens doesn’t disappoint

Looks like Nikon has come up with another winner for its mirrorless camera range

The Nikkor Z 24mm f/1.8 S has pretty modestsounding specifications by today’s standards, but there’s nothing wrong with that. While some lens manufacturers have been bulking up their offerings and creating heavyweight f/1.4 optics and even faster glass, Nikon has stuck mostly to a more modest f/1.8 aperture rating for the prime lenses in its Z mount S-line stable.

Sharing the same 72mm filter thread as the Nikkor Z 24-70mm f/4 S standard zoom, the 24mm has a very similar size and weight overall. As usual for Z-mount prime lenses, there’s a switch for auto/ manual focusing, and the large manual focus ring is electronically coupled to the stepping motor that drives autofocus.

The optical path is based on 12 elements in 10 groups, and includes four aspherical elements and an ED (Extra-low Dispersion) element. The overall aim is to maximise sharpness and contrast while keeping distortions and chromatic aberrations to a minimum.

As is typical of full-frame compatible Z-mount lenses, there’s no optical Vibration Reduction: the lens relies instead on five-stop, five-axis stabilisation built into Nikon’s full-frame mirrorless camera bodies. That’s perfectly acceptable if you’re shooting on the Z 6 and Z 7, but it means no stabilisation is available if you shoot with the DX-format Z 50.

Performance

The Nikon Z 24mm delivers spectacular sharpness and contrast even at f/1.8, right across the frame. It reaches even dizzier heights of sharpness at apertures of between f/2.8 and f/5.6, returning to similarly excellent values from f/8 to f/11. There’s a bit of a drop-off at the narrowest aperture of f/16 due to diffraction, which is only to be expected.

We wouldn’t normally comment on bokeh in such a wide-angle lens, but it’s actually pretty good here. Colour rendition is immensely pleasing, too. Matthew Richards