Nikon Z 135mm f/1.8 S Plena Review

Focus Speed and Accuracy

Fast Nikon primes haven’t always been fast – at least, not when it comes to focusing. Back in the day, the Nikon AF-S 50mm f/1.4G and 85mm f/1.4G were hardly speed demons. I even found this to be true (to a lesser degree) with the Nikon Z 50mm f/1.2 S when I tested it.

According to Nikon, the 135mm f/1.8 S Plena has a “multi-focus system that incorporates two separate AF drive units, which are synchronized to deliver particularly fast and accurate focusing.” This raises hopes that things might be different here. But is it really?

Maybe it’s because I’m spoiled by Nikon’s telephoto lenses, whose focusing is blazing fast, but the Plena didn’t give me quite that impression of speed. It wouldn’t be my first choice for photographing a sprinter running toward me. If you need fast focus speed at this focal length, go for the Nikon Z 70-200mm f/2.8 S instead.

It’s simply the case that the Nikon Z 135mm f/1.8 Plena is optimized for focus accuracy rather than focus speed. This is thanks to the lens’s large focus throw, which allows you to get perfect focus even at f/1.8.

That said, the 135mm Plena handled any portrait subject with ease. This included a time when the subject was jogging and another time when the subject was a fire dancer in low light, as you can see below. In other words, it isn’t too slow for the subjects that most of us would shoot with this lens.

Distortion

The Nikon Z 135mm f/1.8 Plena has a small amount of pincushion distortion, 1.62% as measured in the lab. Although it’s not zero, it is rarely necessary to correct this level of distortion even when photographing scenes with straight lines.

Here’s a simulation of 1.62% pincushion distortion:

Vignetting

This is where the 135mm Plena started to blow my mind. Despite being an f/1.8 lens, there is hardly any vignetting on the Nikon Z 135mm f/1.8 S Plena, even wide open and focused at infinity. Here’s a full chart of vignetting levels:

This is record-breaking quality for an f/1.8 lens. We have never seen anything like it at Photography Life before.

Simply put, there is no need to correct vignetting on the 135mm f/1.8 Plena. Far more often, you’ll find yourself needing to add some vignetting with this lens rather than take it away!

Chromatic Aberration

There is no visible lateral chromatic aberration on the Nikon Z 135mm f/1.8 S Plena. It is a phenomenal performance once again and one of the lowest chromatic aberration measurements that we’ve ever recorded in the lab.

Anything under about one pixel is almost impossible to notice in real-world images, even with chromatic aberration corrections turned off. The Nikon Z 135mm f/1.8 Plena never even comes close to that bar. You don’t need to worry about keeping CA corrections enabled with this lens.

Sharpness

Continuing the trend of perfect performance is the sharpness of the Nikon Z 135mm f/1.8 S Plena. It is simply flawless:

Even at the maximum aperture of f/1.8, the sharpness here is extremely high. What strikes me is that not just the center is sharp, but all the way out through the edges. In fact, the Nikon Z 135mm f/1.8 Plena has the sharpest corners of any lens that we have reviewed yet at Photography Life, measuring over 3000 LW/PH at both f/4 and f/5.6.

Beyond the pure sharpness numbers, I am happy to report that there is no significant field curvature or focus shift on the Nikon Z 135mm f/1.8 Plena. It’s as close as we’ve ever seen to an optically perfect lens.

One interesting thing about the 135mm Plena is that the corners are so sharp as you stop down, that it would make an excellent choice for landscape photographers who are willing to deal with the lens’s high price and weight. For example, you can take multi-image panoramas with the 135mm Plena without worrying about vignetting or corner sharpness issues in the overlapping frames. Here’s one such panorama…

…and here’s a 100% crop taken from the corner of one of the six component images, default sharpening only. You can click the image below to see it full size on a desktop, but I’m warning you – do so at your own peril. If you are trying to convince yourself not to buy this lens, this image quality might make it hard to resist.

Does this high level of sharpness mean that the 135mm Plena is, paradoxically, bad for photographing portraits? You probably don’t want to show every pore of detail on your subject’s face. And indeed, the Nikon Z 135mm f/1.8 S does occasionally reveal more details than you might prefer. However, I find that by shooting at f/1.8, the shallow depth of field creates enough softness that very little of your subject is actually in focus. The narrow portion that is in-focus will be very crisp, but the total effect is not overly sharp for my tastes. You can see that in the crops below.

Personally, I don’t find this to be objectionable so long as you shoot at f/1.8. As you stop down, there is more of a chance that you will want to soften it in post-processing. That said, it’s very easy to decrease detail in post-processing software – and impossible to add detail that wasn’t there in the first place. For that reason, even for portraiture, I prefer my lenses to be on the sharp side.

Bokeh

The 135mm f/1.8 Plena doesn’t have a special ring like the Defocus Image Control that was found on Nikon’s 135mm f/2 DC lens. Instead, everything is left to the aperture blades and the design of the lens itself.

However, if you look at Nikon’s press release, the overview of Plena’s primary features begins with the words “Beautiful, well-rounded bokeh is achieved throughout the frame.” So, what do the out-of-focus areas look like?

From my subjective point of view, beautiful. The combination of a relatively long focal length and a wide aperture manages to make backgrounds look dreamy. The specular highlights in the background appear as smooth circles with no distracting internal texture, even at the edge of the frame. Some lenses will distort circles in the corners into a cat’s-eye shape – not the Plena! The fully round background blur on this lens is the result of the 135mm f/1.8 Plena’s large image circle, which is certainly larger than what is necessary to cover full-frame.

However, I should mention a few exceptions to the aforementioned exceptional bokeh. If a bright spot in the background is too strong, it occasionally gets a more defined edge – you can see that in some of the crops throughout this section. Also, if you happen to have out-of-focus specular highlights in the foreground, they may be rendered sharper than desired (see the example below). This happens because the Plena is optimized for the quality of its background blur more so than its foreground blur.

Overall, however, the bokeh of the Plena lens is of an extremely high standard. Very few lenses would have better bokeh in such conditions. Perhaps only the original Nikon AF DC-NIKKOR 135mm f/2 D from 1990 would, since it had the option to prioritize foreground blur rather than background blur, depending on the direction you spun the Defocus Control ring.

Ghosting and Flare

Nikon has applied many of its most advanced technologies to suppress unwanted ghosting, This includes the use of Nano Crystal and ARNEO Coatings, which Nikon only applies to its most expensive lenses. Interestingly, even the Nikon Z 85mm f/1.2 S doesn’t have ARNEO Coat. How do all these technologies work in practice?

The 135mm f/1.8 S Plena is one of those lenses that you don’t have to worry too much about when shooting in backlight. As long as its intensity of the light does not exceed a certain limit, the resulting images will have excellent contrast and be free of distracting flare.

That said, even the most advanced coatings can’t work miracles. If the sun is directly in the frame, it can cause a loss of contrast. In one case, I even managed to achieve a large patch of flare in the photo. Telephotos tend to have a harder time when the bare sun is in the frame, and the Plena is not an exception to this rule. It’s still better in backlight than most telephoto lenses, but hardly perfect.

The next page of this review compares the Nikon Z 135mm f/1.8 Plena against other prominent Nikon Z portrait lenses. So, click the menu below to go to “Lens Comparisons”: