Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S Review

Focusing Performance

Autofocus on the Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S lens is nearly silent. The lens also autofocuses very quickly, with an excellent degree of accuracy.

For manual focus, the Z 24-70mm f/4 S is akin to one of Nikon’s AF-P lenses – in other words, the focus ring isn’t mechanically coupled to anything. This may take some time to get used to if you’re familiar with Nikon’s F-mount lenses, most of which are mechanically-coupled.

Even so, Nikon has steadily improved their focus-by-wire system over time. There is now an option on Nikon Z cameras to retain the focusing distance when the camera is turned off, and another option to focus the lens linearly rather than based upon how fast you turn the focusing ring in manual focus. These two firmware updates fixed my biggest problems with focus-by-wire, and I’ve grown to appreciate how quiet, fast, and accurate the system is.

Although not a macro lens, the 24-70mm f/4 S has an impressive maximum reproduction ratio of 1:3.33. This means that you can fill the entire uncropped photo with something as small as 12 centimeters (4.7 inches) across. The magnification is highest when you zoom into 70mm, and by using manual focus, you can get a hair closer than what autofocus usually allows.

Take a look at the samples below, both taken at the lens’s closest focus distance:

That is quite close! I think that most photographers will be quite happy with the 24-70mm’s performance for close-up photography. Unless you get a dedicated macro lens like the Nikon Z MC 105mm f/2.8 VR S, or you use Nikon’s secret macro lens, you won’t get much more magnification than this.

Distortion

The Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S has high levels of distortion at both 24mm and 70mm, with less distortion at the middle focal lengths. Here’s a full chart of the distortion levels as measured in the lab:

The barrel distortion of -4.22% at 24mm is definitely on the high side, and the 4.43% pincushion distortion at 70mm is even higher.

Granted, distortion is comparatively easy to fix in post-processing software. Some software like Lightroom even corrects it automatically, and it may not even let you see the uncorrected photo! (Even though the distortion looks unsavory in certain cases, I would prefer at least the option to disable corrections – but I’m not an Adobe or Nikon employee, so I don’t get much of a say in these things :)

By the way, as a side effect, this auto distortion profile also makes the extreme corners of an image look less vignetted, since you are essentially cropping out the darkest portions. My opinion is that this distortion correction is one of the reasons behind the differing opinions online about whether the Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 has normal vs high levels of vignetting.

Here’s an uncorrected photo to show you the distortion at 24mm:

Vignetting

There is moderately high vignetting on the Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S when shooting wide-open at f/4, particularly at 24mm, but also at 70mm when focused at infinity. Here is a chart showing the stops of vignetting at each focal length and aperture, both close focus (CF) and infinity focus (IF):

While we’ve certainly seen higher than 2.01 stops of vignetting on other lenses, this is high enough that you’ll surely notice the vignetting on the Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S unless you correct it in post-production. Note that some software like Lightroom can correct vignetting automatically based on the vignetting setting in your camera. For this reason, I recommend keeping your camera set to “Normal” or “High” vignette control, even when shooting RAW.

In practice, an image with uncorrected vignetting at 24mm and f/4 – the worst levels – looks like this:

Using a slim polarizing filter is not a problem with the Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S. Many of the images in this review were taken with a polarizer attached.

Chromatic Aberration

The Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S has hardly any visible chromatic aberration, even when left uncorrected. It takes up just a pixel or so at most, which is small enough that automatic correction in post-processing software will not leave any lingering artifacts.

Here is a graph showing the focal lengths and apertures with the highest levels of lateral chromatic aberration (red/green fringing):

The following 100% crop is a worst-case scenario: extreme corner, 36mm, f/4, sharp-edged subject. Even then, chromatic aberration is minimal:

Sharpness

We tested four copies of the 24-70mm f/4 to check for differences in sharpness numbers. The sample variation from copy to copy was impressively small, among the lowest deviation we have ever seen in a zoom. The sharpness graphs shown below are from the sharpest of the four copies, but even the “least sharp” copy was essentially indistinguishable from this.

Here are our charts as measured in the lab:

As you can see, the lens resolves a lot of detail in the center at every focal length, even at f/4. Stopping down to f/5.6 helps a little, although not by enough to notice in real-world photos.

The midframes improve at every focal length as you stop down from f/4 to f/5.6, although they’re never bad even wide-open. These correspond to the portion of the frame that would be in the corners on a DX camera.

As for the corners, that’s a bit more of a mixed bag. They’re decent at 24mm but don’t really improve as you stop down. The best corner sharpness occurs at 35mm and f/5.6. Zooming into 50mm, and the corners at f/4 start to look relatively weak, although at least they improve substantially by stopping down to f/5.6 through f/8. Meanwhile, the story is similar at 70mm, which has the weakest corner performance wide-open, but improves nicely at landscape apertures like f/8.

At all focal lengths, the performance at f/11 and f/16 starts to diminish, but that’s no fault of the Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S. All lenses are weak at narrow apertures due to diffraction, which is a physics problem and not a lens problem! (And even then, it’s easily worth the tradeoff to shoot at such apertures any time that you need significant depth of field.)

What about other sharpness issues? The good news is that the Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S has essentially no focus shift regardless of focal length. Meanwhile, there is some mild field curvature, although it is not especially objectionable.

In-Body Image Stabilization Compatibility

Although the 24-70mm f/4 S does not have vibration reduction lens elements, it does work with the Nikon Z camera sensor to produce better in-body image stabilization (IBIS) results than with non-native lenses.

Specifically, Z-mount lenses allow Nikon Z cameras to use all five axes of stabilization: pitch, yaw, roll, X, and Y movements (whereas adapted lenses only allow pitch, yaw, and roll). The result? Nikon claims up to five stops of image stabilization, and that proves itself to be essentially true in practice. With careful technique, you can get anywhere from 4-6 stops of improvement compared to the standard “1 / focal length” handheld rule.

Here’s an example taken handheld at 1 second, 70mm, with the original Nikon Z7:

And here is a 100% crop of the above image:

Not bad! It goes to show that you don’t need VR built into the lens in order for it to work well handheld. However, it does diminish the Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S’s utility on cameras that don’t have vibration reduction, such as the Nikon Z30, Z50, and Zfc series.

Here are a few more handheld examples at various shutter speeds and focal lengths. All of these images are sharp at the pixel level:

This is quite an impressive performance. The images in this section range from two to six stops of image stabilization performance compared to the standard “1/focal length” rule.

Bokeh

Normally, a midrange f/4 zoom isn’t ideal if you want blown-out backgrounds with beautiful bokeh. You will want to be at 70mm and f/4, and ideally focused fairly close, in order to have a strong out-of-focus background anyway. When you meet those conditions, is the Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S up to the task? Let’s ask Chester:

Chester says yes.

And here are a couple more sample photos if you are not convinced:

Bokeh is in the eye of the beholder, but I like how the images above look.

Also, the Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S has almost nonexistent levels of longitudinal chromatic aberration (color fringing in out-of-focus regions). This can be a major problem in some lenses, harming the quality of bokeh and making defocused lights look strange. Not an issue here!

Focus Breathing

Nikon’s promotional material made an effort to point out that this 24-70mm lens has very minimal focus breathing – change in focal length when focusing. This is not particularly relevant to photographers, except in extreme cases (like the early Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR for F-mount, which had excessive focus breathing). However, for videographers, it can be a significant problem. The reality lives up to Nikon’s claim, though; this lens has only a very small amount of focus breathing, enough to be irrelevant for most users.

Flare and Sunstars

For landscape photography, one of the most important overlooked factors in lens performance is flare. In backlit situations, some lenses have excessive internal reflections that appear in the photo as ugly blobs. Other lenses will drastically lose contrast in what is known as “veiling flare.” The Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S has some of the lowest flaring I have seen in a zoom lens, even when the sun is directly in the frame. I have only been able to get flare in a few isolated real-world cases, and even then it was not objectionable.

Because of the 24-70mm’s 7-blade aperture, you will end up with 14-point starbursts/sunstars in your photos. The starburst overall is quite well-defined with this lens, although individual blades of the sun are wider than on most other Nikon lenses. This leads to a rather unique look to starburst effects:

This is a bit of a love-it-or-hate-it look. Personally, I think it’s pretty cool, but when I first posted this image, some of our readers disagreed. It’s all a matter of taste. I leave you to make up your own opinion.

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”: