Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 S Review

Focusing Performance

The 14-30mm f/4 S autofocuses quickly and almost silently, with very impressive accuracy both in the viewfinder and in live view (and with more precision than we see in F-mount glass). This is as much due to the camera as the lens, but either way it’s great to see the trend continue on the 14-30mm f/4.

In terms of manual focus, Nikon has fixed all the real issues of the focus-by-wire system over the years, and it’s now possible to focus linearly with this lens rather than having manual focus depend upon the speed at which you turn the focusing ring. This makes it a lot easier to focus on the stars at night, which is something I do with this lens pretty frequently.

As for close focusing, the 14-30mm f/4 definitely isn’t a macro lens. At 30mm, you can get a maximum magnification of 1:6.3. That’s enough to fill your frame horizontally with an object 8.8 inches across (22.4 cm) – not terrible, but not great. However, I doubt that many photographers were ever seriously considering this lens for close-ups anyway. If you want an ultra-wide macro lens, you’d be better off with the Laowa 15mm f/4 Macro or the Venus Optics 24mm f/14 Probe Lens (both of which are F-mount lenses that would require the FTZ adapter for use on Nikon Z).

Distortion

The 14-30mm f/4 S has extremely high amounts of distortion throughout the zoom range, and the level at 14mm is especially extreme. You can see our distortion graph below, which is based on the uncorrected raw files from this lens:

As you can see, the distortion at 14mm is nearly 8% barrel distortion, which is insane! How does this look in practice? Here is an uncorrected test chart image at 14mm demonstrating the near-fisheye quality of the 14-30mm f/4:

And here’s a real-world example – note the curvature in the stairs along the bottom of the photo!

Interestingly, many photographers may never realize that this lens has so much distortion in the first place, especially Adobe Lightroom and Nikon Capture NX-D users. That’s because Adobe and Nikon apply built-in lens profiles for the 14-30mm f/4 that you cannot remove at all. Not to mention that Nikon designed this lens to be 14mm after distortion correction (closer to 13mm beforehand).

In some sense, I’d say it is a good thing that Lightroom and Capture NX-D hide the distorted version of the photo. However, that correction does come at a cost. Apart from the compositional issues, there is also a modest loss in corner sharpness that occurs when stretching and upsampling the pixels in the corners of the frame. It’s still a sharp lens, though, as you’ll see in a moment.

Vignetting

The 14-30mm f/4 follows a pattern we’ve seen before in small, sharp zoom lenses: It has high levels of vignetting. Take a look at the following chart (with “CF” meaning close focus and “IF” meaning infinity focus). Note that these numbers are from uncorrected images – meaning that distortion was also left uncorrected. When you fix the distortion, which you almost always will be doing, it crops out the worst of the vignetting.

The results here definitely aren’t great, with about 2.5 stops of vignetting at 14mm and f/4. By comparison, this lens’s predecessor (the Nikon 16-35mm f/4G VR) maxes out at 1.65 stops. Nikon’s other ultra-wide lenses for the Z System also measure better than this. For example, the Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 S reaches 2.05 stops, the Nikon Z 17-28mm f/2.8 reaches 2.14 stops, and the Nikon Z 20mm f/1.8 S reaches 2.01 stops.

The good news is that you can improve things significantly by zooming into 16mm and beyond with the Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 S. At those focal lengths, it has no more vignetting than a typical lens, and actually less than many of the alternatives. Plus, again, correcting the massive 8% barrel distortion goes a long way to making even the 14mm numbers look reasonable – the vignetting is shaped with a very sharp drop-off immediately at the corners, so the numbers here make things look worse than they really are.

More good news: Adding a slim 82mm filter does not change vignetting too much on this lens, even at 14mm. The following images are exported from RawDigger with no distortion or vignetting corrections, so you can judge for yourself.

Sure, the filter darkens the corners a bit. But again, the images above have not been corrected for distortion or vignetting at all. When you correct for distortion, the dark tips of the corners are completely cropped away. The takeaway is that you can use a slim 82mm filter with the Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 without a problem. Using a thicker filter or stacking filters, however, is not something I would recommend.

Lateral Chromatic Aberration

The Nikon 14-30mm f/4 has a bit of lateral chromatic aberration, easily correctable in post-processing software. The greatest amount occurs at 14mm and f/4, as you can see below:

Although the lens has some chromatic aberration, it’s not a big deal at these levels. Anything under the 1-pixel mark in our tests is usually invisible even with CA corrections turned off, and anything under about the 2-pixel mark can be removed in post-processing without any lingering artifacts.

Sharpness

The moment you’ve been waiting for – how sharp is the 14-30mm f/4?

To answer that question, take a look at our sharpness graphs below. They will be more meaningful on the next page of this review, where we compare the 14-30mm f/4 against some of its competitors, but you can already tell that the lens’s performance is pretty strong overall:

The weakest numbers occur in the corners at 14mm wide open, which is no surprise. Stopping down improves things a bit, but the corners at 14mm never quite get great. As with all lenses, diffraction starts to rob sharpness at the narrower apertures throughout the zoom range, especially f/16. (Though you may need to use f/16 more than you would expect in order to get enough depth of field.)

By zooming in, even to 16mm, corner sharpness noticeably improves, while center and midframe sharpness remain about the same. The overall sharpness decreases a hair as you zoom in further, but it’s still strong. Overall, the best apertures on this lens are f/5.6 through f/8 if you need to maximize your corner sharpness and the scene doesn’t require too much depth of field.

There is a little bit of wavy field curvature on the Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 S, which is why the midframe sharpness is occasionally weaker than the corner sharpness in the tests above. This can potentially be harm your photo’s sharpness if everything is the same optical distance away (such as an overlook where the whole image is at infinity focus).

I tested two samples of the Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 S in the lab, and unfortunately, one of them had some significant decentering. Take a look at the following crops, captured at 14mm and f/8 – an aperture where you would hope for reasonable performance on any lens. First, I focused in the center, which was completely sharp on both copies. This is how the center should look (100% crop):

Unfortunately the corner performance was pretty bad on one of the two copies:

The good news is that this is the only copy out of four that I have tested to exhibit any decentering issues. With the sheer number of lenses that pass through my hands at Photography Life, it’s no surprise that I’ll occasionally test one with significant decentering. Even so, I believe that it’s worth pointing out when I do experience a decentered copy, if for no other reason than as a reminder for you to check your own copy of the lens. You can read more at How to Tell If Your Lens Is Decentered.

Coma

The Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 S has very good coma performance – bright points of lights in the corners of the image look nice and sharp, without any noticeable smearing, even at 14mm and f/4.

Even though f/4 isn’t ideal for something like Milky Way photography, I very often use the Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 S when I’m taking nighttime landscape photos. Given how good today’s camera sensors are at high ISOs, especially with modern noise reduction algorithms, you don’t need to totally avoid this lens just because it’s not an f/2.8 or f/1.8.

One trick to getting good Milky Way photos with any lens, even an f/4 or f/5.6 lens, is to use the technique known as star stacking. It even works on complex foregrounds like the photo below, which is a combination of 14 images each at 10 seconds, to mimic the image quality of a 140-second exposure (without the blurred stars of an actual 140-second exposure). I encourage you to give star stacking a try if you’ve never tried it before, as you might find that even a humble f/4 lens is more than enough for high-quality Milky Way photos.

By the way, here’s a crop from the above image to show the low levels of coma on the Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 S:

Flare and Sunstars

The Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 S is very resistant to flare – which is a welcome and fairly unusual sight for such a wide lens. At 14mm, I sometimes get a few green or magenta dots of flare, which change in shape and brightness while composing the sun differently (including slightly out of frame). At 30mm, the flares become slightly bigger, fainter blobs. None of it is objectionable, especially compared to other wide-angle zooms on the market. The F-mount Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G lens, for example, was well-known for its high levels of flare.

If the bare sun is in your frame, you’ll get some red dot flare at narrow apertures, which is no surprise on a mirrorless camera. Note that apart from the red dot flare, there is hardly any flare with this lens, which is amazing performance when photographing the bare sun!

Also, as you can see from the photo above, you can get a bit of a sunstar with the Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 S when shooting at narrow apertures like f/16, but it’s not quite as defined as you may like.

On balance, the 14-30mm f/4 S is one of the best ultra-wide lenses that I’ve seen when you put the sun in the frame. Nikon’s Nano Crystal Coating and Super Integrated Coating certainly do their job well here.

The next page of this review dives into the sharpness numbers a bit more, with some comparisons against other lenses that Nikon users may be considering. So, click the menu below to go to “Lens Comparisons”: