I rushed to buy Nikon Zf as soon as it was made available. Here are my thoughts so far.
In general, the Zf is an inviting camera. It feels nice to hold and easy to carry around. It’s discrete and instantly familiar to those it was made for. It gives you this “at long last” feeling right out of the box. However, I’m not trying to sell the Zf to anyone, so I’ll dispense with the pleasantries and just stick to my observations.
The super-duper AF
Nice to have but who is going to use it? No “decent” AF lenses for the Zf.
Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of well performing AF lenses for the Nikon Z mount. However, they all look so ugly on the Zf. They look nice on those other “modern looking” Z cameras. But mounted on a Zf body, they all look so “out of place”.
What about the “retro looking” Nikkor Z 40mm f/2 SE and Nikkor Z 28mm f/2.8 SE? Well, those lenses perform well and look decent from afar, and cool to the untrained eye. However, someone that buys a Zf will look at these lenses from up close and will certainly have a trained eye. These lenses, though decent in performance, are just a placebo for the Zf shooter. I would not buy them.
So, although the Zf has these high-end AF capabilities, we won’t be able to enjoy them unless we are willing to ignore the camera looks. But, then again, the Zf is all about the look and feel. You cannot ignore that if you buy one.
Manual focus
So, if AF is out of the question, what about manual focusing? Luckily, focus peaking helps a lot. I have reprogramed the video-record button to zoom-in to 100% which also helps a lot in acquiring critical focus. I wish that the viewfinder would zoom-out automatically when touching the shutter-release though.
I could not try focus trapping because my Minolta lenses force the camera to MF. I hope that modern Z-mount MF lenses (like those Voigtlander primes I am about to go after), will allow you to set the camera to AF and use focus trapping. Not an absolute “must” but would be nice to have as an option.
The flippy screen
This was not necessary, but it is a welcome feature. Personally, the only use I have for the flippy screen is to turn it around and totally hide it whenever I feel like it. I was hoping that the fully articulating screen would allow for some discrete shots from the heap. However, the way it articulates is not very convenient. Your left hand is always on the way regardless of how you hold the camera. So, you can try to use it if you absolutely must, but you won’t enjoy it.
No grip, no problem
The grip is fine. I wouldn’t mind if it had no grip at all. If you feel the need for a grip, then this camera is not for you.
The Zf is made for those who want to shoot the way people shot in the ’70s and ’80s. Do you think that the combat photographers who carried the Nikon’s and Canon’s of the day in Vietnam ever wished they had a grip? These cameras are meant to be held by the lens. When shooting, the camera always rests on your left hand which supports the lens and controls focus, zoom and aperture. Your right hand does not hold the camera. It is only used to correct for tilt and gently release the shutter. There is no need for a grip. The presence of a grip would defeat the purpose of this camera. Just get over it.
The dials
There is a lot of talk and whining about so called “retro” cameras and their retro style dials. Now, it is understandable that these things look and feel weird to younger generations. That’s ok.
But think about it like this. Back in the analog days, we did not have screens and menus. If you wanted to switch anything you had to do it mechanically. So, the top dials of those cameras were their “screen”. You looked at them and you knew your camera’s settings. You fiddled with them and changed the settings to suit your varying needs.
When we were able to add screens to the back of the camera, we started moving these settings to the menus. It seemed like a good thing to try. Like an innovation. Why spend money on fiddly hardware when you can just add a menu item? Most cameras were made for everyday people anyway. Most people did not care about shutter speeds and f-stops. They wanted their camera to look fancy of course, with a big grip and nice curves and everything, but apart from that the main feature was the “Auto” mode.
Innovating on the shutter speed selection and aperture control dials would not be such a big problem had we not gotten carried away so much. I only used a couple of Nikons and a couple of Fujis in my time so I can’t have an opinion about every camera brand out there. But hélas with those menus! Let’s keep the essential things simple, tactile, intuitive, obvious, standard!
Is going back to the ideas of film cameras the way to solve this problem? Maybe not. But it feels good to some of us! And it’s for those of us that the Zf is made for. For everyone else there are all sorts of cameras waiting to be grabbed by their nice fat grips and shot with one hand while walking the dog or holding hands with the other and looking at the flippy screen with both eyes open. Not everyone needs this freedom when taking pictures.
Compared to the Df
The Nikon Df is more solid. More like a tank. I still have my D700 which was built like a tank. I am sure you can verify this anywhere you look for D700 reviews. When I got the Df, it felt just as solid and well-built as the D700.
That’s not the case with the Zf though. The buttons on the back side of the camera are not as well-made and well-behaved as the ones on the Df and D700. They are flimsy and too “eager” to get pressed the moment your finger goes near them. They do not click and so they can’t filter unintentional touches. The same goes for the shutter release button. Too eager to trigger. I guess with time I will get used to them and my handling will improve.
The multi-selector also feels toyish compared to the ones on the Df and the D700.
How many EUR would Nikon have to add to the price of the camera if they added a bit of quality to the buttons? Isn’t this camera supposed to be all about the feel? Those well-made tactile dials at the top of the camera make the back feel even more flimsy.
Better ISO control
The ISO dial is better on the Zf as it rotates freely, unlike the one on the Df for which you had to dedicate your thumb to keep it unlocked while changing ISO.
The Df has a nice feature that allows you to control the maximum ISO setting through the ISO dial while in ISO-Auto mode. I was happy to see the Zf retains this feature. It’s a bit of a hidden gem as you need to read the manual to figure out that you can do this and how to set it up. But it’s a good thing.
Better exposure control
The exposure compensation dial is also properly made on the Zf. The one on the Df was locking in every position and was impractical to use. You had to let go of the lens and use your left hand with three fingers. You even had to take your eye off the viewfinder and look at the setting. On the Zf you can just flick it with your right-hand thumb, and you can feel it passing through zero.
The exposure mode dial (M, A, S, P) has been replaced with a mode selector (M, A, S, P, Auto) which is easier to use than in the Df.
No “easy shutter-speed shift”
The Nikon Df had an option called “easy shutter-speed shift”, which allowed you to use the main command dial to shift (by +/- 2/3EV in increments of 1/3 EV) the shutter speed selected with the shutter-speed dial. That was quite a nice feature of the Df but for some strange reason the Zf does not have it.
The idea was that you enter a scene, and you say to yourself “I am going to be shooting my next photos at around 1/500”. You dialled 1/500 in the shutter-speed dial and off you went. Moments later while looking through the viewfinder you decided that you wanted to shift your shutter speed by just a tiny bit for a particular shot. You could do that without having to remove your hand from the release button (or your eye from the viewfinder) by using your thumb which is already resting on top of the main command dial. That was quite handy.
I wish Nikon will bing it to the Zf with a future firmware update.
Release mode no more
In the Df you had a “mechanical” switch to select the release mode (single frame, continuous etc.). Not on the Zf. You now need to go through the shortcut menus for that. That’s ok. The same “mechanical” switch is now used to switch between video, colour photo or monochrome photo modes. It’s a handy thing to have regardless of whether you shoot mostly colour or mostly B&W.
Low light performance
The Nikon Zf vastly outperforms both the D700 and Df in low light conditions although both those cameras were thought of as “seeing in the dark” back in their day. I rarely pushed the Df above 3200 ISO. I can get just as clean images at 12800 ISO with the Zf.
Ok, I know, we are in 2023. You are right.
Other differences
The awkward sub-command dial in the front of the Df was replaced with a “proper” sub-command dial. More discrete, more standard, more functional, and not unnecessarily fancy.
All the buttons moved to the right and are now accessible with your thumb. That’s good. But what’s was the problem with the focus-selector lock? Why did it have to go? What about the metering selector? Both had to go? What if Nikon didn’t just copy that back of the Zfc but instead designed a better back for the Zf? Anyway, not a big deal.
I wouldn’t mind a second function button in the front of the camera. The Df had two.
I liked the battery door lock of the Df better but that is not important.
Does it serve its purpose?
This camera attempts to carry forward, (bring back to the future), some of the legacy of film photography and to fuse the analog with the digital photography experience. Hence the “f” in its name.
Film photography was a different kind of art. When shooting film, you would think very differently about what you can do with your camera and how you would go about doing it.
When I switched from film to digital in 2005, I did not appreciate how much I was giving up. The only thing that DSLRs had to offer back then was instant access to the photo right after releasing the shutter. And that was enough to take the world by storm. I tried to embrace digital. Everything was moving that way. But so much of what photography used to be, was inevitably left behind.
Now the question is: can a camera that looks and feels like the cameras we used to shoot film with, bring back all the things that were overrun by the digital wave?
A sensor will never be like film even if modern sensors and modern lenses have better resolution and produce sharper, more life-like images. With film you know that a bunch of photons that were in the scene, hit your subject and then your film. And there were a bunch of silver grains on that film that got hit and burned by those same photons. And you made sure to protect those grains of silver from light, for days, so no other photons got to them except the ones that reflected directly from your subject. Then you took those same silver grains and dipped them into a bunch of fluids, timing your every move in the dark, to make sure those burns stay fixed on the film forever. Then, every time you shone a light through that film you could project those same burns onto a silver coated piece of paper and burn your original image on it. Then you would hang it on a wall and people had to take a trip and stand in front of your wall to look at your image.
In digital, as soon as those initial photons hit your sensor, they become data. Nothing is altered permanently. An impression is only recorded as data. A digital picture is a log file. There is no image. There is just information telling you how each pixel on a grid was affected by those initial photons. To the best of the ability of your camera. Then by reading this data, a machine can construct an image which you look at as if it ever existed. It didn’t. It’s just an illusion. The product of a bunch of instructions given to a screen or a printer nozzle.
So, the difference between film and digital is not in the resolution or the quality of rendering and reproduction. The difference is in the fact that you know that for every film photo that you see, no matter where and when you look at it, there exists a singular artifact somewhere in the world, which was there on the scene when the picture was taken, and which was altered and shaped forever by that very scene through the grace of the photographer, and it will remain forever singular and unique no matter how many copies of it you try to make: the negative. That’s what gets you when you look at picture taken with a film camera. It’s subconscious but it’s real.
So, there is no digital camera that can do that. Nor will there ever be one, unless we find a way to shoot film but still retain all the digital goodies, that we invented in the meantime.
What I wish
What I would like to see one day is modern film cameras. But before we embark on such long journeys, what I would like to see next is a Nikon Zfm (with a monochrome sensor). I don’t care if it can do video. I’d rather it didn’t. Also make the articulating screen flip vertically (instead of horizontally), so that you can shoot it like a Rolleiflex (from above) or in a crowd (from below) or flip and hide the screen when you want to get rid of it. May these wishes come true before I save enough to buy a monochrome Leica M.
In the meantime
Forget the wishes. Heck, I just got this camera! Body only though. So here is the plan for equipping it with lenses.
My Nikkor F-mount lenses are gone. So are my Nikon Df and D700. As much as I would like to keep them around, I need to offset the cost of switching to Z-mount. So, DSLR days are over for me. Adapting the F-mount lenses to the Zf is out of the question. The FTZ and FTZ ii adapters look ugly and so do the (otherwise beautiful) F lenses mounted on the Zf. No way.
That leaves me with my Minolta XG2 and only two vintage lenses. An MD Rokkor 50mm f/1.7 and an MD 70–210mm f/4. These lenses perform quite well on film. I did not really test them yet with the Zf but they seem to produce quite decent results. I got a cheap URTH adapter to see how they work with the Zf. So far so good. I wish I could find a sexier adapter, but the only SR (MD/MC) adapter that looks good to me, costs 145 EUR + import and shipping from Japan, so I am sleeping on it for the moment.
The next step is to buy the Z-mount Voigtlander 40mm f/1.2 Nokton. I wish I could afford the 50mm F/1 Nokton, but it’s way too expensive for my budget. I expect the Nokton 40mm to be a good lens for most situations, giving creamy bokeh wide-open while been sharp enough for the Zf sensor if stopped-down a bit.
After that, when I feel the time has come (and have saved the money), I am thinking of adapting the M-mount Zeiss 25mm f/2.8 Biogon T*. The 25mm focal length (like the more common 24mm) is great for travel, walking-around and landscape photography.
That’s about it. That should be enough. I dropped the idea of AF lenses. If I ever really feel the need for AF, I may go for the Nikkor 24–120mm f/4 S. For the moment, no AF on the Zf!
