Initial Nikon Zf Impressions

As happens much too often, a bright and shiny new camera has been delivered to my home address.  With this, my conversion to the Nikon Z mirrorless setup is complete (from a Fujifilm X setup).  This was somewhat unplanned, but happened very quickly.  I blame my new found love of shooting my Leica M10 and wanting a ‘regular’ camera to use those lovely little primes on without a crop factor.  That and the autofocus improvements the Zf would bring over Fuji’s current state.

With me shooting more sports and a new gymnastics season starting up for my daughter, The new exspeed 7 processor and AF enhancements for the Zf that came packaged in a retro body were too much for me to look away from.  In the end, I saw the camera come in stock at an online store and pulled the trigger.  It was delivered a few days and so far, I’m impressed.  All images below are with the Nikon Zf and either the Tamron 35-150mm f/2-2.8 or various M mount rangefinder lenses.

In the few short days I’ve had, I’ve gone on hikes, did some family stuff and been to a few events.  In every situation, it has performed great.  The camera feels very responsive and I’m never waiting on it.  The controls are pretty much exactly what I was hoping for, minus one annoyance with the ISO dial, which I’ll explain later.  The Zf feels great in the hand, even without the additional SmallRig grip, which is still on backorder.  The autofocus feels like a huge step forward over my old Fuji X-T5.  Not so much in terms of speed, although it is noticeably faster, but more so in the accuracy.  The X-T5 had an issue of the camera confirming good focus with a green box and then once the picture was taken, it was off either by a small amount or just completely no where the mark.  AF tracking on moving subjects was also a constant fight and the camera had to be setup for each situation.  So far, the Zf has been spot on without any real pushing from me.  I’m in either in large area AF with subject detection on or 3d Tracking and that has been amazing.

The built in image stabilization works great.  For a lot of these landscape shots, i was shooting between 1/8 and 1/4 second shutter speed to keep the ISO down and around f/8.  No problems at all.  While I was originally concerned about having both dials for shutter speed and ISO and the standard PASM switch, I’m finding it to be rather intuitive and useful.  I can set up my shutter speed dial for a slow speed landscape shot, but still be quick on sending it back to ‘P’ mode in case I’m hiking and something pops up quick.

I have only 2 real complaints so far.  The first is I’m noticing that when I’m shooting in full manual mode with an M mount lens, the viewfinder will show an image that is 1/2 to a full stop darker than what comes out when I actually take the picture.  I’ve been going through the menu settings to try and see what is going on, but nothing is popping up.  It’s only when shooting slower speeds it seems (lower than 1/30) and I think only when using adapted lenses.  Not a big deal, but slightly annoying.

Worse is how Nikon implemented the Auto-ISO and ISO dial controls.  What I was hoping for was to be able to set the camera to have Auto-ISO be the ‘C’ option on the ISO dial.  So if the dial is changed to anything but ‘C’, then the value on the ISO dial is used.  This however does not work.  When the camera is in ‘C’ mode, Auto-ISO can be enabled/disabled, but if you have Auto-ISO enabled and move the ISO dial to a number, then that number now becomes the LOWEST ISO value set and the ISO can rise to what you have programmed as the maximum.  I’m scratching my head to think of a time when I want to set a minimum ISO speed to use, but have it automatically rise to a higher value if needed.  In my mind, it would make much more sense to at least have the dial be the MAXIMUM ISO to use.  I’ve seen many other reports that people are annoyed by this too.  Hopefully, the firmware can be updated for this.

Even with the few faults, I’m loving the Zf.  I can use my M mount lenses without crop, the new autofocus is lightning quick and accurate and the camera looks and feels really good.  Image quality wise, I’d say it’s a step above my old X-T5 and I’m finding that processing files is a bit easier too.  For now, I’ve paired the Zf with a Tamron 35-150mm f/2-2.8 zoom.  More on that lens later, but I’m very impressed so far and it should be an awesome all-in-one solution for portraits, event, wedding and closer sports such as gymnastics in a super fast capable lens.

The switch from Fuji is now complete.  I’m a bit sad to leave that system behind, but I’m very much looking forward to learning this new camera and seeing what I can do with it.