Using F-mount lenses

CRUCIAL to the Z 7’s appeal is its ability to work with F-mount lenses via the FTZ adapter. This costs £269 on its own, or just £100 when included with the camera, which is surely the route most Z 7 buyers will take. It allows you to use any of your SLR lenses, regardless of vintage, but compatibility is complicated.

The adapter is fully compatible with AF-S and AF- P lenses that have built-in focus motors, supporting AF, in-lens VR, and automatic aperture control. However, it doesn’t have its own screw- drive focus motor, so with D-type lenses you have to focus manually. In this case the camera will show a digital rangefinder display in the viewfinder, with left and right arrows indicating which way to turn the focus ring.

When correct focus has been achieved, the focus point will light up green. I found this gave one of the best manual-focus experiences of any mirrorless camera. Older manual focus lenses will still work quite happily, but as the adapter doesn’t have an AI indexing tab for detecting the aperture, they’re limited to being used in manual or aperture priority exposure modes, with the aperture controlled using the ring on the lens. The aperture setting can’t be displayed in the viewfinder or saved in the EXIF data. To aid accurate focusing, you can activate a focus peaking display or magnified view: I assigned the latter to the OK button. However, I found that the huge, high-resolution viewfinder made accurate manual focus remarkably easy even without such aids.

To get the IBIS system to work properly with pre-AF lenses, the camera needs to know the focal length of the lens you’re using. So you need to program all of your lenses into the Non- CPU lens data sub-menu, and recall the correct lens every time you change. This function can be assigned to a custom button for quick access, with the selected lens written into the EXIF data too.