The Nikon Z 50mm f/1.8 S enters the market, but is it better than your existing nifty fifty?
Nikon’s Z-mount lenses may come bottom of the alphabet, but they score straight As for performance – does this 50mm follow suit? Ben Andrews finds out…
As far as headline specs go, the Nikon Z 50mm f/1.8 S seems like just another 50mm standard prime, if a wellspecced one. The 12-element optical stack includes two ED glass elements as well as two aspherical elements to boost contrast and vibrancy.
Features
With a large maximum aperture comes shallow depth of field effect, so nine rounded aperture blades shape passing light as smoothly as possible for attractive bokeh in out-of-focus areas.
At 87mm long and 76mm in diameter, the Z 50mm is noticeably bigger than a good old F-mount AF-S 50mm f/1.8g, but compared with some F-mount 50mm alternatives from Sigma and Tokina, it’s still pleasingly portable. The 415g weight is also reasonable, especially since the overall build quality is excellent and the lens feels like a high-quality addition to your kit bag. The front element doesn’t rotate when focusing, which is useful when mounting something like a circular polarizing filter to the relatively compact 62mm filter thread. This is also very much an all-weather lens, as Nikon has sealed every possible water ingress point. The front element benefits from a fluorine coating to better shed water droplets, dust and dirt.
The lens barrel features just a single AF/MF switch, but the wide, tactile and precise manual focus ring isn’t redundant if you’re using autofocus, as it can also be set in-camera to
adjust exposure compensation or ISO sensitivity. The electronically coupled manual focusing system is also speed-sensitive, making it easier to make fine focusing tweaks when exploiting the 40cm minimum focusing distance.
Performance
Nikon has made much noise about how it has shortened the distance between lens flange and image sensor from the F-mount’s 46.5mm to just 16mm in a Z camera. Combine this with the larger 55mm inner diameter of the Z mount itself and the result is less distance for light to travel from lens to sensor, and more room for a larger rear lens element. But this isn’t just theoretical marketing hype. The Z 50mm f/1.8 S is sharp, only fractionally down on the pricier Z 35mm f/1.8 S, and that’s the sharpest lens we’ve ever tested.
Aberrations are practically nonexistent at any aperture, and we couldn’t induce any sign of distortion. Of course achieving maximum sharpness when working with such a tiny depth of field available at f/1.8 requires super-accurate autofocus, but in our testing with both Nikon’s Z 7 and Z 6 bodies, the Z 50mm never missed its mark and consistently delivered maximum sharpness with no focus hunting.