Nikon NIKKOR Z 85mm f/1.8 S

Entry Date: 2/2/2024

In all honesty, this is the one lens that I did not expect myself to buy, but a series of interesting circumstances got me to purchase it during the New Year sale last month, which also coincided with Nikon’s cashback campaign period.

85mm always felt a little tad short for me, as I preferred the slightly longer 105mm focal length - one of the reasons why I sold off the Sigma 85mm f/1.4 (non-art) for the Nikon 105mm f/1.4E.

When the Z 85mm f/1.8S was announced, although impressed with its performance and reviews, I did not feel any urge to purchase this lens as I was (and still currently am) very satisfied with the performance of my 105/1.4E.

But 2023 saw me traveling around domestically more for shoots, and the 105/1.4E is not what I would exactly call a travel friendly lens so I started playing with the idea of getting the Z 85/1.8S as a compact telephoto option for travels as well as for casual moments.

I happened to get a week’s worth of free rental from one of the camera equipment rental stores, and I decided to try out the Z 85/1.8S and see how it performs. I was definitely amazed by it during the rental period, but it is not a budget lens so to speak so I wanted to see if prices would come down.

At first I was looking at the used market, but the prices were not compelling enough so I just sat on the idea for a long while. Ultimately during the New Year’s sale, when coupled with the official cashback campaign, a new lens could be purchased at a lower price than a used piece, so I just decided to go ahead with it and see if it would really fit into my personal use case or not.

When coupled with the Z7 it does achieve my primary objective of a compact telephoto set - definitely much leaner than the Z8+FTZ+105/1.4E.

The autofocus is definitely not the snappiest I have used - definitely nowhere near the Z 70-200/2.8S and closer to the 105/1.4E. You can see the lens shifting its focal plane as you try to focus from infinity to close distances and vice-versa. Though that said, it does focus quite confidently and does not hunt much even on the Z7, and once an AF lock is acquired slight focus shifts in AF-C are quick and responsive. However, the Z7’s processing limit do mean that subject detection and autofocus might be slightly out of sync for moving objects (i.e. subjects walking towards camera are slightly back-focused), and switching to single-point AF does negate the problem pretty well for most situations.

Typical of an S-line lens, the lens delivers spectacular sharpness wide open with soft bokeh and nice gradual transitions. Distortions look well controlled and I do not have to really apply distortion profile corrections in Capture One for most cases. Chromatic aberrations are also pretty much non-existent, which I am definitely thankful for since green/magenta CA correction is one major weak point of Capture One.

One detail that I was quite surprised at was actually how deep the lens hood was - I would have expected the Z7+85/1.8 with its lens hood in shooting position to be able to slide into my Hadley Small horizontally (grip facing the top) without issues, but it is just a bit too tight for that so I’m fitting it in top-down as usual instead. Guess I could always grab a generic 67mm screw-in hood to make a it even more compact if needed.