Personal Impressions on Nikon Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR S Lens
So right now it is pretty much Sports Day season in most schools in Japan, and my daughter had hers last weekend. I decided to rent a copy of the Nikon Z 100-400/4.5-5.6S lens last weekend to cover the event since I doubt my 70-200/2.8S would provide enough reach for me (and am indeed thankful I went ahead with the rental!).
It was my first time handling the lens outside of the shop demo context, and there were many new interesting observations that I made when using the lens this time round that I did not notice when I played with it in the camera shops/showrooms in the past:
The weight and physical length of the lens at 100mm is pretty similar to that of the 70-200/2.8S, so I got accustomed to the lens’ weight distribution pretty much the moment I picked it up.
The wider girth of the lens, together with the more forward placement of the control ring, did make me accidentally hit either the manual focus ring or the control ring more often than I would like - I had to turn off both the MF in AF mode option and the custom control ring function to prevent any accidental setting changes.
AF locks on very fast, even on the Z6II I was using it with.
AF accuracy, however, did have some interesting quirks - when shooting a burst of slightly static (i.e slow moving) subjects while testing, usually in a burst of 5 shots in AF-C single point mode there would be 1 or 2 shots in the middle of the burst that lost focus. I thought this would be caused on the VR recentering itself in VR normal mode, so I changed to VR sport mode and accuracy got better, although still not at 100%.
For portraits at 400mm Eye-AF worked better than single point AF, as I guess any minute vibrations that caused framing changes would be compensated by the subject detection shifting the AF points via subject detection.
At portrait distances the lens renders very nicely with crisp details, regardless of focal length chosen, both wide open or using it as a “constant 5.6” lens.
At longer “sports distances”, and using it nearly exclusively as a 400/5.6 lens, the lens does exhibit some sharpness drop, and some slight AF accuracy drop. Though in all honesty it could also be due to user error on my side too as I could not pan the camera fast enough for the AF to lock properly.
And finally I also learned that 400mm is indeed hard to control!
It was definitely a fun experience shooting with that lens, especially more so when watching the little one playing around too.
The lens is also every bit as phenomenal as I expected it to be, albeit with some handling quirks, and I am glad that I went on ahead to rent it for the event as my 70-200/2.8S would never be able to provide enough range.
That said, my experience this time also reinforced the idea that I am not suited to be a sports photographer lol.
** Side Note:
For anyone looking for short-term camera equipment rentals in Japan, I definitely recommend checking Map Rental out! Their pricing is reasonable and have a very wide selection of equipment to choose from.
A handful of kits also qualify for monthly rental special rates, which could prove to be cheaper than going by daily rates when renting for a more than 2 weeks or so. However, for equipment that do not qualify for the special rates, the daily rates do stack up quite a bit for longer rentals, so other services that offer “monthly rental” or “monthly subscription rental” might prove to be more wallet friendly though!
(I am not affiliated with them in any way, just wanted to share this information from my good experience with them)