Nikon Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 Review

 

 

The superzoom, the one lens that you never have to take off your camera. I never looked at these lenses for work as they are slow and tend to give average image results, so I always ignored them when looking at a new lens. But when I went away on holiday, I started dreading taking my heavy f/2.8 lens with me. They are too big and heavy to travel with comfortably all day, so I moved to Fujifilm camera systems for my travel and off-work photography needs. However, I never liked the color results I got with the Fuji cameras after the Fujifilm XT1, so I switched back to my Nikon DF and bought the Nikkor 24-120mm lens and used that as my main walk-around camera for a while, and I loved it. The Nikon 24-120mm f/4 lens was not a great lens, but for taking snapshots to post on social media and share with friends, it was perfect. It didn’t have the long reach that I wanted, so I ended up adding the Nikkor 70-300mm lens to my bag. Those two lenses served me well outside of work, and I used the Nikon DF religiously until the camera broke on me in January as the Coronavirus outbreak started, so I needed to buy a new camera.

I wasn’t, and I am still not, convinced that mirrorless cameras are good for my line of work, but the Nikon Z6 seems interesting to me. When I looked at the lens lineup, the Nikon Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 was supposed to be released on the 30th of April, and all the previews of the lens seemed to show that it looked like a great lens. So I ordered the Nikon Z6 and pre-ordered the new Nikon Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 VR, not thinking that the Coronavirus would become so big and delay everything for so long.

 

 

The Nikon Z6 arrived the day after I ordered it, and I used my F lens on it with the FTZ adapter while patiently waiting for the Nikon Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 VR to be released. I enjoyed the new Nikon Z6 camera, but changing lenses on a mirrorless camera is a pain, as the sensor continuously needs to be cleaned. Dust is a huge pain with mirrorless cameras, which was also a problem with the Fujifilm cameras. Cleaning a sensor is manageable, but it’s not something you want to do while shooting outside and cloning out dust spots is a hassle. So, I was anxiously waiting for the new lens.

Unfortunately, the coronavirus spread much worse than I had anticipated, causing all my work in China to be canceled for the year, and the lens release was delayed with no new date issued. I had a ton of free time to kill in China as I couldn’t leave the city I lived in, so I went out shooting almost every day. However, the F lens was a pain, and I grew tired of waiting, so I ordered the Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 S lens to tide me over until the new lens was released. The new Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 lens turned out to be really good, so I had high hopes for the superzoom Nikon Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 lens. I waited for what seemed like years, but the new lens finally arrived on June 20.

 

 

So as I write this review, I have been shooting with this lens for nearly 7 months now, which is the minimum time I am comfortable using a piece of equipment before giving my opinion on it. There is nothing worse than someone using a lens for a week and then giving a detailed review on something that they have hardly used. Most lens reviews seem to be like this lately. No one really uses their equipment before giving their opinions. I have shot nearly 1,500 photos with the lens now, so I am ready to share my thoughts about it.

 

 

 

Now, I will start off by saying that I was skeptical about all the hype around the new Z mount lenses for Nikon. I was perfectly happy with the results that I was getting from my F mount lenses. I have never had a single publisher or client come back to me and say that they wished my shots were sharper. Pixel peeping is the sole domain of the amateur photographer who wishes to defend his purchase. I almost never zoom into 100% on any photo that I am shooting unless I am doing some careful editing. But like most of us, I do tend to pixel peep when I buy new gear, and I have done that with each new Z lens that I have bought and compared it to my F mount lenses. The hype is very true. The new Z mount lenses are indeed much sharper than the older F mount lenses, but I still don’t believe that any client or publisher will ever notice the difference, to be perfectly honest with you. It might sound like I am slightly disappointed with my purchases, but I am not. I am just being perfectly honest with you. But let’s look at the new Nikon Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 lens.

 

 

 

The Nikon Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 lens is not the top-of-the-line S lens and is supposed to be constructed to a lower standard than the S line, but it still feels like very good quality to me. The lens is mostly constructed out of plastic, but most lenses are constructed out of plastic these days, including the new S lens lineup from Nikon for the Z system. At least the lens mount is still made out of metal. The lens weighs around 565g and is fairly hefty for a mirrorless lens, but so far, all the mirrorless lenses from Nikon have been a little hefty and much larger than the lenses for the smaller APS-C cameras in the Fujifilm XT lineup. Despite being a fairly hefty lens in size, it more than makes up for this with really good build quality and outstanding performance. So far, this has been true for all the Nikon Z lenses that I have used.

 

 

 

 

One of the first things that I needed to get used to when using a super-zoomed lens like this is that the lens extends an awful lot when zooming in. Compared to some of the more pro-like f/2.8 zooms, seeing the lens barrel extend like this can be a little disconcerting, especially when it comes to shooting in wet or dusty environments. I do most of my pro shooting in concert/festival music pits, and they can be very dusty or wet at times. This lens is not advertised for use by pros in that environment, so I can’t hold this against it. I bought this lens to use when I am not at work. In the few months that I have owned this lens, I have to say that I haven’t found any dust specs inside the lens, so the construction in this regard seems to be good. I will probably have to come back to this review in a year or two and update this section, as dust specs take time to build up in a lens. The more you use a lens, the faster they build up. With 2020 being the terrible year of COVID-19, I haven’t been doing as much shooting as I normally do.

 

 

Another potential downside of this lens is that it is not weather-sealed. I would have liked a little bit of weather sealing on a lens that is my everyday carry. The weather in my base city in China can be quite unpredictable, so having a nice weather-sealed gasket on the mount would have made me feel slightly more confident to use the lens in the rain. However, so far it has held up rather well in wet conditions. After COVID first broke out in China, lots of cities got flooded by heavy rains, so I went out to shoot some of it and had no problems with the lens in the rain. The zooming in and out never sucked up any water into the lens barrel, and the lens mount was always dry when I was changing the lens outside. Although this lens is not weather-sealed, I think it can handle a bit of moisture very easily. So far, all the new Z mount lenses seem to be constructed to a high degree of weather resistance in my testing.

 

 

As with all the lenses in the Z lineup, the front element is rather large at 67mm but not as large as the old Nikon G 24-120mm f/4 lens. I was surprised to see that the filter sizes of the different Z lenses were all different. Nikon is usually good at keeping the same filter size on their lenses if possible, so you don’t have to buy multiple filters. All my old Nikon AIS prime lenses have the same filter size of 52mm, and I would have loved Nikon to continue this tradition. But as big as the front element is, the rear glass elements on all Nikon Z mount lenses are truly massive. Compared to the old Nikon F mounts, these rear lens elements are huge. They do worry me when it comes to scratching, and I tend to handle the Z lenses a little more gingerly than my normal F mount Nikon lenses. Maybe it is the price of the Z lenses that makes me worry, but those big rear elements do seem like a prime location for lens damage to occur. Unlike the front lens elements that are usually protected by a lens filter these days, the rear elements are completely bare.

 

 

 

One of my pet peeves with the new Nikon Z lens is the lack of an aperture ring on the lens. This trend started way back with the Nikon G-series of lenses and has continued with the new Z mount lenses. Having an aperture ring is really useful and provides tactile feedback when shooting. You can simply glance at your camera quickly and have a rough indication of the aperture or even have a rough idea before you mount the lens on your camera. Now, if you just shoot landscapes and time is on your side, this is no problem. But if you shoot in a high-stress environment like a music pit, you only have three songs to work with, so you have to be able to tell what your settings are very quickly. I don’t have time to look at menus on my camera, thus I have tended to shoot with the older D series of lenses at work when possible.

I was hoping that Nikon would change this with the new system, but no such luck. Fujifilm has had aperture rings on most of their lenses, and it was one of the reasons I wanted to move over to the Fujifilm system. But as much as I enjoyed using their cameras in my personal life, at work it was not up to the task of focusing in extremely poor lighting conditions, and the high ISO simply could not compete with the Nikon cameras. So, the Nikon Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 lens does not have an aperture ring, but since this is not a work lens for me, it gets a pass on this. It would have made the lens better for me to use, but I guess that having an aperture ring on a variable zoom lens could have confused some newer shooters when they zoom in with the lens and the aperture changes.

 

 

The actual mechanism of zooming the lens in and out feels really nice. There is just the right amount of resistance when zooming in, but this may change as the lens gets some use. I hope it stays around this level. Right now, the resistance is enough to allow you to zoom in and out precisely without affecting your composition. The lens has a lock to prevent zoom creep while walking around, but I never use the lock as there is enough resistance to prevent the zoom from extending right now. Again, age could slowly reduce the current level of resistance on the barrel of the lens, but after the lens gets some wear and tear on it, this might change. Right now, lens creep is not something that I am worried about, but if it does become an issue in the future, there is a lens lock switch that I could use.

 

 

The lens comes with a small manual focus ring, but this ring is tiny. Unfortunately, for those who enjoy focusing manually, the focus system used by this lens is “focus by wire,” which basically sucks. You could try to pull focus with the lens while shooting video, but I would rather use a manual lens than try to do it with the “focus by wire” system they have here. On the positive side for video shooters, there is very little to no focus breathing with the lens. When it comes to photography, I really don’t care about focus breathing, but it is much more important for video shooters.

 

Trying to handhold the lens at 200mm and manually take the focus out and then back again is not easy. But what the little video clip above can demonstrate is the quality of the stabilization in the Nikon Z6 body. I would never have been able to get anything that stable while handholding and focusing with a DSLR Nikon.

 

As far as photography goes, the lens focuses extremely well. Even when shooting in low light, the lens focuses accurately and quickly. Even the eye-detect system on the camera works well, as long as the person’s face is large enough in the frame. So, when you are shooting at 24mm, if the person is very small in the frame, the camera will detect their head, but it will only switch to their eyes if the person is much larger in the frame. I would say that the focus was largely accurate when I tried it, but I still prefer to select my own focus points. I seldom use the eye-detect autofocus system as I rarely shoot portraits, but it seems to work with this lens. To be honest, this is not a portrait lens. I tried out the eye-detect autofocus at a live show that I was working, and the results were surprisingly good.

If I had to compare the eye-detect focusing of this lens to the Nikon Z 50mm f/1.8 lens, I would say that the keeper rate is about the same on both lenses. So, I would guess that the quality of the eye-detect focusing is more influenced by the camera and the algorithms than the actual lens. When shooting in a normal everyday environment, the lens is fantastic at focusing, and I have never lost a shot because of the focusing. It focuses way faster than the old Nikon G 24-120mm f/4 lens and is much more accurate. The focus on the Nikon Z 24-200mm lens is precise, there is no hunting for focus, and it generally gives you confidence when shooting. As far as focusing goes, this lens is great. I haven’t tested the more pro-level Z f/2.8 lenses, but this non-S line lens focuses better than any Nikon F lenses that I have ever used. I simply can’t fault the focusing of this lens, which is a surprise to me. I always had issues with the Nikon 24-120mm f/4 lens focusing. I thought the Nikon 24-120mm f/4 was a bit of a dog when it came to focusing at the long end, so I am very happy with the Nikon Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 performance regarding the autofocusing.

 

 

The image quality is probably the best part of this lens. The lens is superb when it comes to the images it produces. They are sharp when shooting the lens wide-open, with a good amount of detail, providing those nice colors that Nikon is famous for. At the wide end (24mm), the lens provides good sharpness throughout the image. The corners are sharp even with the lens wide open, although they do sharpen up a tiny amount by stopping the lens down, but this is really hard to tell. You have to do some serious pixel peeping to even see this in action. A normal person looking at your image will never be able to tell if you shot the image wide open or stopped down a little. Even a trained pro would have to spend some serious time in front of the computer to try and find a tiny amount of difference in sharpness. If you take a quick glance at any image, you will not find any difference.

 

 

The Nikon Z 24-200mm lens maintains its sharpness and contrast throughout its zoom range. This really made me happy, as most superzooms fall apart at the long end of the zoom range, but the Nikon Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 maintained its sharpness. Even switching the camera over to DX mode, which is basically just cropping into the image, the shots still come out nice and sharp. No matter if you are shooting wide or long, the image quality is great when it comes to sharpness, contrast, and colors. This is perfect for an everyday lens. Just pick up your camera and go shoot. No need to worry about switching lenses or even deciding which lens to take with you.

 

 

As with all superzoom lenses, there are weaknesses that can’t be avoided. There is no such thing as the perfect superzoom lens at a budget price (well, this lens is not exactly budget-priced, but it is one of the cheaper Z lenses from Nikon) and with a low enough weight that would make you want to carry it around on your camera all day. There is a reason why I never use my 70-200mm lens as my everyday carry-around lens. The thing is too big and heavy. Nothing screams “new guy with a camera” more than seeing a tourist walking around with a 70-200mm strapped around his neck. So, this lens is much smaller than a big zoom lens and much lighter, but that does introduce some issues with the lens performance. This lens can and will flare if you are shooting into bright light. It is not terrible, but it will be there.

 

 

But a mirrorless camera makes it much easier to see the flaring happening with the EVF, so you can adjust your shot before taking it. I did see a lot of flaring happening at work with this lens, and I had to adjust my angle of shooting to reduce or eliminate the flaring from the shot. I don’t always hate flaring, though; it can be useful at times, but that all comes down to your shooting style.

 

 

The second thing to be aware of is that there is a tiny bit of chromatic aberration when shooting high-contrast scenes, but it is very hard to find. I searched through many of my shots, but I could not find any real examples of it. Compared to all my other Nikon Z lenses, it is there, but you will have to shoot this lens in the perfect high-contrast scene for the ugly purple flaring to appear. Overall, I would say that chromatic aberrations are very well controlled in a lens of this type and price. I am sure that the Nikon Z “S lineup” of 2.8 pro lenses would probably handle chromatic aberrations in a much better way, but they would be more expensive and weigh a lot more. I don’t want a huge, heavy carry-around lens, so I can accept the trade-off.

 

 

The lens can vignette slightly, but once again, it is hard to find. One reason it is hard to find small issues in a lens is that the camera body applies in-body corrections to the RAW files, which is fine by me, to be honest. Fujifilm does this with all the X series lenses as well. This does save me some time when editing. If you hunt for some images with vignetting, you will be able to find some, but once again, it would be very similar to the chromatic aberrations, which are extremely hard to find and not something that you should worry about.

 

 

When looking at this lens with regards to bokeh, well, this is not the kind of lens that you are going to use to blow the background away. The lens only has 7 aperture blades, and it is a slow lens, so you will generally have too much depth of field to get much background blur, and most bokeh balls will not be nice and round. The minimum focus distance with the lens at 24mm is 0.5 meters, which means that you can’t get too close to your subject with such a wide-angle, resulting in a much larger depth of field than you would expect. On the long end, you could get some bokeh as long as the background is far away from the subject, but this is not exactly the kind of lens you buy to shoot portraits.

 

 

If we compare the bokeh to a few other lenses, you will immediately see the difference in bokeh and the shallow depth of field that a lens with a larger aperture can generate.

 

 

 

Comparing the three shots at 50mm, you will clearly see that the Nikon Z 24-200mm has too much depth of field to generate enough shallow depth of field to blur the background away. The Nikon Z 50mm f/1.8 and the Nikon F 50mm f/1.2 do a much better job of melting the background away. The biggest surprise to me was how much warmer the new Nikon Z lenses were. I actually think that the Nikon Z 50mm f/1.8 did a great job at blurring out the background, especially when compared to the Nikon F 50mm f/1.2.

 

 

 

It is only at 200mm that the Nikon Z 24-200mm lens can generate enough blurring to be used as a portrait lens. Looking at the bokeh, it is not great though. If I had to compare it to the Pentax 67 105mm f/2.4 lens (a very unfair comparison, I know), the quality is completely different. I would never use the Nikon Z 24-200mm lens as a portrait lens unless it was the only lens I had on me at the time, and even then, I would want to shoot it at 200mm. This is simply not the type of lens that you buy expecting great bokeh.

 

 

So, what about the in-body stabilization of the lens for shooting with slow shutter speeds? Well, I would generally say that a lens should have very little to do with in-body stabilization, but I do notice that I can get sharper images with slower shutter speeds using the Nikon Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 than with any lens on the FTZ adapter. So, there is something to be said about shooting with native glass on the Nikon Z camera bodies.

 

 

So, who is this lens for? Well, that is hard to say. I ordered this lens for the Nikon Z6 so I could use the Nikon Z6 as my everyday carry. I bought the Nikon Z6 to replace my Nikon DF and the Nikon 24-120mm lens that I carried around every day, so the lens played a big factor in why I ordered the Nikon Z6. I would say that this lens is a great everyday carry lens. It is wide enough at 24mm to be used by most people, and the zoom to 200mm gives enough flexibility so that this one lens can replace almost all lenses that you would carry with you as a tourist or even a street shooter. If you are looking for a single lens that can deliver great picture quality, then this is a great lens to buy. If you are a festival or live event shooter, then I would think very hard before buying this lens. It is a great lens, but it is extremely slow. If you do any kind of lowlight work, then this is not the lens for you.

 

 

The lens is slow, so it’s not ideal for shooting at night, but the image stabilization from the Nikon Z6 is really good, and you can generally shoot at slow shutter speeds with little problem.

 

 

In conclusion, the Nikon Z 24-200mm lens is a good all-round travel lens. I would actually say that it is the perfect travel lens. If you don’t want to change your lenses a lot, then this is the lens for you. My Nikon Z lens collection is complete with just two other lenses included with this lens (the Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 lens and the Nikon Z 50mm f/1.8 lens). The Nikon Z 24-200mm is a great lens, in my opinion, but it is an expensive lens. All the Nikon Z lenses are expensive, but as the old adage goes, “You get what you pay for.”

 

Shaun.