Nikon NIKKOR Z 24-120mm f/4 S

Product Information

The Nikon Z 24-120mm F4 looks like another home run for Nikon. If you are looking for an everyday lens, this could be it.

Vignetting: At 24mm the image circle area stays bright out through the top/bottom frame edge, leaving only the corners to darken, and they don't do so by a lot (~2 stops). Stopping down a stop makes the vignetting mostly ignorable except for the extreme corners, which always show some cutoff. The in-camera corrections, ironically, don't do a lot at 24mm at Normal value. There's some mild barrel and pin-cushion distortion at either end of the focal range in both the JPEG and Raw files, but it's not too pronounced. As for size, the older lens appears to have the advantage. However, once you factor in the FtZ adapter, the older lens grows an additional 30mm and carries an additional 135 grams around its waist. The Nikon Z 24-120mm f4 S Lens features an advanced optical construction that is optimised to offer exceptional image quality through the entire zoom range. The barrel of the lens is equipped with 16 elements arranged into 13 groups. This includes 3 ED elements, 1 aspherical ED element, 3 aspherical elements, elements with Nano Crystal and ARNEO coats, and a fluorine-coated front lens element. Combining these specialised elements and coatings, the lens is able to significantly reduce chromatic and spherical aberrations as well as incidental light from diagonal and vertical directions. Furthermore, these optics offer an incredible level of detail and colour depth, capturing edge-to-edge sharpness from its wide 24mm to tele 120mm. AF Performance

Overview

Any vignetting under one stop is negligible in my book, and anything under 1.5 stops doesn’t need to be corrected in post-processing most of the time. Wide open at f/4, the Nikon Z 24-120mm f/4 S does well at every focal length except 24mm, where it has more vignetting than I’d like. Stopping down to f/5.6 and especially f/8 makes vignetting a non-issue. Shooting with the lens proves it to have almost unerringly accurate and rapid autofocus in the majority of situations, with barely any hunting at all. It’s also impressively quiet, too. A smaller difference is that the Nikon Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 has vibration reduction, while the 24-120mm f/4 S curiously does not. This isn’t a big deal considering that Nikon’s in-body image stabilization works really well with the 24-120mm f/4 S. Using both lenses side by side, I don’t notice any difference in stabilization quality between them, even at the longer focal lengths above 100mm, on a Nikon camera with IBIS. Thankfully, both lenses improve dramatically upon stopping down and/or zooming in from 24mm. At landscape apertures like f/8-16, I have no real issues with either lens. Remember that most post-processing software directly reads information from the in-camera vignetting setting on your Nikon Z camera. So, if you want this distortion to be removed automatically in post, make sure to set Medium or High vignetting correction on your camera. In any case, here are 100% crops from both the center and corner, starting with the center at 120mm and f/4. (The excerpted area is the same size as the infinity focus photos above): Close focus @ 120mm f/4; 100% crop from center

That said, I’m partial to plastic construction anyway. It saves weight compared to metal, doesn’t get as cold in chilly conditions, and (depending on the lens) can be more durable/resistant to dents and dings over time. The Z 24-120mm f/4 S’s plastic feels reassuring in-hand and didn’t scratch easily during my months with the lens. The Nikon 24-120/4.0G VR shows it’s age in this comparison: It simply cannot hold up to Nikon’s new design. Even its current (lower) street price would not make me recommend using the F-Nikkor on a 45MP full-frame sensor. It is less sharp throughout the zoom range than the Z 24-120mm f4 S, is more prone to flare and glare, has higher colour aberrations, a slower focus, stronger focus breathing, and a less thorough weather-sealing. Even its optical image stabilization is not a real benefit – unless you use the lens on a Z fc or Z 50: The vibration reduction built into Nikon’s Z full-frame cameras is good for 4 stops. So the Z 24-120mm f4 S is clearly the better choice. Compared to the older lens, the Nikon Z is superior in almost every way. And once you add on an FtZ adapter, the older lens is larger and heavier.Right frame edge 100%. If there's any difference in acuity here, it would be because I'm not perfectly parallel to the art, but there's really little difference I can see. There can be a tiny bit spherochromatism, which can cause color fringes on things that aren't in perfect focus at large apertures. Spherochromatism is a completely different aberration in a different dimension than lateral color fringes. This lens has a 9 blade diaphragm which creates an attractive blur to the out-of-focus areas of the image and it has a dust and drip resistant design. If you’re already familiar with the Nikon Z system, there’s not much to say about the Nikon Z 24-120mm f/4 S’s focusing performance. It’s just as fast and accurate as expected – which is to say, excellent on both counts. Whether because of the camera, the lens, or both, Nikon’s mirrorless system provides better pixel-level autofocus precision than Nikon DSLRs ever did (even if both are used in live view). NIKON Z 7 + NIKKOR Z 24-120mm f/4 S @ 77mm, ISO 64, 1/50, f/5.6

What about close-focus distances? There, sharpness remains excellent in the center at every focal length, including at f/4. Corner sharpness at macro distances is definitely weaker, although that’s rarely a concern for close-up photos, where your corners are likely to be out of focus and/or unimportant. What about sharpness on more distant subjects? I find that performance is similarly high at infinity focus across all the focal lengths. It may be slightly less sharp at 105mm and 120mm in the corners compared to the corners at other focal lengths, but not by much. If this 1,200×900 pixel crop is about 6" (15cm) wide on your screen, the complete image would print at a hugHere’s the results: With VR=on images down to 1/30 sec (2 stops) were clearly sharper than the average sharpness at 1/120 sec with VR=off – except for one outlier in 20 shots. At 1/15 sec (3 stops) I had 20% outliers. Interestingly I had no outliers over 20 shots at 1/8 sec (4 stops) although 5 images (25%) showed a little softness. But at 1/4 sec (5 stops) results become very erratic with only 30% usable images. This is an advantage from the VR image stabilization in the camera of 4 stops.

Note that there is no image stabilisation system built into this lens, instead relying on the camera body. Although true macro photography is 1x magnification or greater, less demanding manufactures sometimes call their lenses “macro” if they reach just 0.5x magnification. Nikon (correctly) doesn’t label the 24-120mm f/4 S as a macro lens, but it still has great potential for close-up photos. NIKON Z 9 + NIKKOR Z 24-120mm f/4 S @ 120mm, ISO 800, 1/2000, f/4.0On DX cameras the liability of the 24-120mm f/4 S is obvious: no VR. That makes the 18-140mm f/3.5-6.3 VR DX lens the better choice for this focal range on the Z50 and Zfc. The middle ring is the rather stiff zoom ring, which we hope will loosen up a little with use. It has focal lengths marked at 24, 28, 35, 50, 70, 85 and 120mm. Better than any other brand, even if you're in AF-C and grab the manual-focus ring, it just swaps to manual focus instantly and stays in manual focus. Other brands will try to fight you for focus if you're in continuous AF, while this lens just does what you tell it to do. This Z 24-120mm f/4 is best for people who want a reasonably fast, sharp and great-handing all-around lens. Getting to 120mm lets you do many things, like portraiture and landscapes and product photography, far better than the very limiting 70mm ends of older lenses like the Z 24-70/2.8 and Z 24-70/4. 120mm lets you stand almost twice as far away for superior perspective rendering of three dimensional things.