Our Recommendation
Two things are true simultaneously about the Nikon Z 58mm f/0.95 Noct: It is perhaps the best full-frame lens available today from an optical standpoint. And, you should not get it.
I get the appeal. Nothing else on the market is like this lens, and possibly, nothing ever will be. If you decide that its unique qualities are worth the tradeoffs – extreme price, high weight, and manual focus design – then you might fall in love with this lens. But it’s also so impractical and out of reach for most people that it isn’t something I’d recommend to very many photographers.
My question at the start of this review was whether the Nikon Z 58mm f/0.95 Noct is just a statement piece or a viable professional optic – and at the end of the review, my answer leans strongly in the direction of statement piece.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s an incredible lens, and the lab test results are something special. But in practice, the ultra-shallow depth of field at f/0.95 makes it tricky to achieve this optical excellence in practice. For most photographers, Nikon’s 50mm f/1.2 S or 85mm f/1.2 S will tend to result in sharper photos than the Noct, regardless of its advantages in a lab.
Pros:
- Record-breaking sharpness from corner to corner, and strong even wide open
- Excellent distortion, vignetting, and chromatic aberration performance
- Beautiful, smooth bokeh; can turn almost any background creamy at f/0.95
- Excellent build quality with tight tolerances and an all-metal design
- Advanced weather sealing that should survive anything other than a dunking
- Dedicated controls including a function button and EL display
- Large, smooth focus ring with a huge focus throw and clear distance markings
- Comes with its own briefcase for transport
Cons:
- Very expensive at $8000
- Large and very heavy at 2000 grams (4.4 pounds)
- Manual focus only – and takes a lot of practice to focus perfectly at f/0.95
- External focusing design
I think the Noct could make some sense for videographers and portrait photographers with an unlimited budget (recall the burst mode trick to get sharp photos even with manual focus). But even if you think your photography would benefit from the Noct, Nikon has other lenses that I would consider first.
My verdict? It’s mostly a statement piece and not a lens that I’d recommend to 99% of photographers. Although… if nothing else, it makes an impressive statement. The Nikon Z 58mm f/0.95 Noct has the best optics of any lens that I’ve ever tested, and Nikon did succeed at their goal to set a new ceiling with this lens. It simply took a lot of sacrifices to get there – manual focus, substantial weight, and high price most of all.
Conclusion
The Nikon Z 58mm f/0.95 Noct is available for $8000 through our affiliates, though it is not always in stock. When it’s backordered, I find that it typically takes 2-3 months for a copy of the Noct to appear back in stock and ship:
- Nikon Z 58mm f/0.95 Noct at B&H – Check Current Price and Availability
- At Adorama
- At Amazon
- Used: Check prices on KEH
Thank you for buying your equipment through the links above, whether it’s this lens or anything else! When you do, Photography Life gets a small percentage of the sale without costing you anything extra. It goes a long way to help us test more equipment, especially with such an expensive lens as this one.
Note that for the star rating below, I removed our usual category of “Value” from the score. Frankly, I don’t think that the Value category applies to a lens of this nature – extremely specialized and unique, but unreasonable for most photographers at $8000. Plus, more importantly, the “Photography Life Overall Rating” is an automatic average of all the sub-categories. My assessment of this lens’s value would be 1 or 2 stars for most photographers, but including that in the average would make the Noct look like one of Nikon’s weaker lenses, which is far from true. While I still think that most photographers would be better off with a different Nikon lens, I have removed the Value category to paint a clearer picture for our Overall Rating.
The next page of this review has reader comments on the final page. Use the Table of Contents below the star rating to jump to the section you want.
Nikon Z 58mm f/0.95 Noct
- Build Quality and Handling
- Size and Weight
- Sharpness Performance
- Other Image Quality
Photography Life Overall Rating
Table of Contents