Nikon Nikkor Z 35 mm f/1.4
11. Summary
Pros:
- closed, weather-sealed mechanical construction,
- good resolution in the frame centre,
- slight longitudinal chromatic aberration,
- nice out-of-focus areas,
- moderate vignetting on the APS-C/DX sensor,
- sensible performance against bright light,
- silent and fast autofocus,
- low level of focus breathing.
Cons:
- weak image quality on the edge of the frame near the maximum relative aperture,
- huge coma,
- very high distortion,
- distinct vignetting on full frame,
- noticeable astigmatism.
The optics constructors gave up on distortion, coma, and vignetting correction completely and, at the same time, neglected a bit astigmatism and lateral chromatic aberration correction. They also left a noticeable level of spherical aberration. As you see there are a lot of compromises here and we are not sure what they give us in return.
You can say this performance doesn't differ from the performance of older constructions that are even several dozen years old. The weather-sealed, closed barrel that doesn't change its dimensions and is optimized when it comes to video recording, because its focus breathing is low, is the only gain we were able to notice.
Please Support UsIf you enjoy our reviews and articles, and you want us to continue our work please, support our website by donating through PayPal. The funds are going to be used for paying our editorial team, renting servers, and equipping our testing studio; only that way we will be able to continue providing you interesting content for free. |
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The Nikkor Z 35 mm f/1.4 is a bit redeemed by its price, amounting currently to $600, that makes it one of the cheapest lenses of such parameters and it comes equipped with an autofocus to boot. On the other hand the Samyang AF 35 mm f/1.4 FE II costs only $50 more. It's true that we didn't manage to test the II version but we looked closer at the first construction that optically doesn't differ from the second one and it fared better than the Nikkor, tested here. The Samyang showed that it is possible to produce a lens noticeably cheaper and optically better.
To sum up, as the Nikkor Z 50 mm f/1.4 can be considered a very serious rival of the Nikkor Z 50 mm f/1.8 S, presented earlier, in case of the 35 mm focal length I personally would rather pay $100 more and buy the older Nikkor Z 35 mm f/1.8 S that is optically excellent, even if a bit slower.
