Nikkor Z 50mm f/1.2 S

A properly fast prime for Nikon Z cameras www. nikon. co. uk

Could this be another top-drawer optic for Nikon’s full-frame mirrorless ecosystem?

There are two reasons you might want this lens: fast shutter speeds and a tight depth of field. For anything else, there’s no point lugging around a big, heavy chunk of glass that’s nearly three times the weight of the Nikkor Z 50mm f/1.8 S, and as much as five times the price. The f/1.8 S lens might look basic, but it delivers superb sharpness with negligible colour fringing and distortion, and is a top performer in every way. So the question is, how much do you really need an extra 1.33 stops of aperture width?

The optical path is quite complex for a standard prime, featuring no less than 17 elements. Of these, there are two ED (Extra-low Dispersion) elements and three aspherical elements. Handling is enhanced by an OLED display and a customisable L-Fn button.

Performance

The Z 50mm f/1.8 S sets the bar high for sharpness, but the f/1.2 lens beats it at pretty much all directly competing aperture settings. Even wide-open, the f/1.2 lens delivers incredible sharpness and contrast for such a ‘fast’ lens, with sharpness only really dropping off a bit at the extreme edges and corners of the frame. Even corner-sharpness picks up very well by f/2.8 and remains excellent all the way through to f/16.

Vignetting is comparatively pronounced when you shoot at or near the widest aperture but this can actually enhance images when you’re trying to focus the attention on the central region of the frame. Either way, automatic in-camera corrections are available for both distortion and vignetting.

For an f/1.2 lens, the quality of bokeh can be more important than sharpness. At f/1.2, the bokeh of this lens is beautifully smooth and the transition between focus and defocused areas looks entirely natural. Our only slight criticism is that bokeh discs (caused by defocused bright spots or lights) can tend to take on quite an irregular shape towards the edges and corners of the frame. On the plus side, there’s virtually no ‘onion ring’ effect in defocused lights, which is often a problem with fast lenses. Overall, the Z 50mm f/1.2 S delivers beautifully creamy bokeh. Matthew Richards

As you’d expect from a modern lens at this price, the 50mm f/1.2 S is weather-sealed, and its overall build quality feels very robust. The barrel parts are plastic rather than metal, but are reassuringly solid. As with other upmarket Z-mount lenses, premium features include an OLED display with a button that enables you to switch between aperture setting and focus distance, the latter coming complete with digital depth-offield markers. The control ring has a limited range of custom options, but is particularly useful for applying stepless aperture control while shooting movies.