Approaching the Scene 121: Nikon's New 14-24 2.8 S Lens & Z6ii

today exciting stuff for the nikon shooters my initial impressions of the 14 to 24 2.8 s as well as the z62 well hey everybody it's hudson welcome to this week's approaching the scene i have a ton of exciting stuff to cover you know if this wasn't an exciting enough week this past week on friday i got the 14-24 and on monday i got the z62 so i haven't had a whole lot of time with the z62 but i did get to play with the 14 to 24 on my z7 a lot over the weekend and i did some comparison work you know detailed aperture sharpness test using rykan's focal software pitting it against my original 14 to 24 f-mount lens the new 14 to 30 f4s mirrorless lens and the 20mm 1.8 s mirrorless lens we'll talk about those results i'll show you some real world tests with the 14 to 24 the 14 to 30 and the new 14 to 24 s and i'll show you why you'd have to pry this out of my hands to get it away from me i absolutely love it i don't know that everybody needs this lens but i do desire and need this lens um saying that comes from someone who's a long time affectionate of the old 14 to 24 and i think this one just sort of kicks it off the map for me as much as i love it and i'll talk about why and then we'll talk briefly about sort of my introductory ideas about the z62 some things i love about it some things i wish had changed about it and you know i'll do much more detailed analysis of both of these over the weeks to come thanks so much to everyone who's been liking sharing subscribing to this channel there's always a subscribe button down in the bottom right if you want to jump to a specific place within this video you know there's a there you scroll along the bottom of the time bar and you'll see that it's chaptered out so you can see right where you want to go to watch or re-watch a specific section of the video also in the video's description if you click the title or show more depending on your platform you'll see there's a linked table of contents with time codes to every section of the video and product links to buy any of the stuff that i'm talking about which if you use those links thanks so much in advance that really helps out i've also got a video that i reference about the z62 and that link is in that video description as well okay so what do i love so much about this new 14 to 24 well one thing is it's versatile it's small it's light especially compared to the old 14 to 24. it handles beautifully it's really ergonomically well designed and made it's sharp edge to edge its color rendition's beautiful it creates stunning images it's razor sharp at wide open clear across the frame you know it's emblematic of a lot of what nikon is doing with the new z system and that wider flange and the shorter flange distance that wider mount shorter flange distance that they've got with this new mount it really shows in the optical performance of this lens i am a long time aficionado of the 14 to 24 2.8 i've been using this lens over a decade i've made some of my favorite images from africa and indian ocean to the desert southwest in patagonia to mountaintops in alaska i've carried this lens with me and created stills and panoramas that are some of my absolute favorites of all time but you have to remember this lens was designed in the days when the highest megapixel nikon dslr was 12 megapixels and now my z7 is 46 megapixels i'm sure that there'll be a camera next year that's 64 megapixels and it's time to increase its optical performance to to keep up with that kind of resolution requirement um so and you'll see what i'm talking about when we go through image quality testing and aperture tests with this lens so this lens is smaller and lighter when you look at weights let me give you the weight specs this lens is 23.6 ounces the 14 to 24 with the ftz adapter on it is 41.3 ounces that's a that's a huge difference you take the ftc adapter off for a dslr it's still 36.5 ounces this this weighs significantly less it's significantly smaller if you look at the size of the two relative to each other fits in your bag nicely the 14 to 30 the smaller f4 lens for the z system is less than 20 ounces it's 19.5 ounces this thing is tiny and light and i'll show you why i think it's enough lens for a lot of you out there actually it's been funny in testing this lens i realize why i haven't been missing this lens shooting with this one this one is ridiculously sharp as well it just doesn't let as much light in doesn't have quite as beautiful as image quality but it's razor razor sharp and an amazingly effective lens this one i can't wait to go out and test with stars and i'll let you know what the results are i have a feeling it may compete with this 20 millimeter 1.8 that i just love for night sky work and with the ability to go to 14 millimeters that's 30 percent wider so it'll be really exciting to test that out all right what else about this lens let's talk about some of the quirks and cool things about it first thing cool things really really nicely built from an ergonomics perspective the focus ring feels great the zoom ring feels great it's just nicely balanced in the hand really solid build quality it has that third ring that nikon's been putting on its holy trinity 2.8 lenses so that you can program that to do exposure compensation or aperture changing or whatever you want i tend to like exposure compensation you just have to be careful that you set it back to zero it has this cool digital readout that is you change i it lets you do several different things i like to see the focus distance in a readout with a depth of field scale that changes across that that uh that distance readout as you as you increase aperture or focus further out you'll see the depth of field growing and you can use it to calculate hyperfocal distance i need to test it in the field this is the lens that i think that that distance scale and hyperfocal scale could be so fantastic for i'm going to test it and let you know how it works when i'm actually out with a tripod and have some time in good weather to really test it and see if it nails hyperfocal distance like i hope there's also a programmable function button i usually program that to activate a tracking box in auto area autofocus mode so that if i'm if i'm letting the camera make decisions about what to focus on based on what's happening in the frame i can override it by activating a tracking box and putting it over my subject and then deactivate that tracking box with just a press of a button on the lens barrel that's usually my choice for a single function button on the lens barrel so um quirky things about it a couple more cool things it has two different lens hoods that come with it one is just a nice kind of normal sized lens hood might reduce flare although i'll show you this lens is incredible shooting into backlight and throws a relatively nice sun star while it's at it but it's tough to get ghosting and flare with this lens even if you try but this can help reduce it it's a nice sort of normal size like your other wide angle lenses in your bag might have and then it comes with this monstrous hood that screws on here and enables you to use round 112 millimeter filters so let's say you want to do uh some neutral density and slow your scene down well you can put a 112 millimeter neutral density screw-on filter on this it's a huge expensive piece of glass but it's nice that nikon included this the old 14 to 24 people used to get these elaborate contraptions built around it to light seal it with flat glass filters out in front of it this nice nikon thought to add that and it has a huge lens cap that goes on that that 112 millimeter filter hood that comes all in the box with the camera along with a nice kind of soft cloth carrying bag um it also has a proprietary lens cap the the front of the lens has this kind of sculpted shape to it and so does the lens cap and you have to line that sculpted shape up you have to get it lined up you actually have to kind of look down and make sure that those little scallops are aligned with the front of the lens in order to put it on there and that means you can't just grab a generic you know 72 or 77 or 82 millimeter cap and drop it back on here if you lose this lenses cap so the first thing i did when i realized that getting it out of the box was jumped on b h's website and ordered a backup it's back order but in a couple of weeks i should get a backup cap just to have in my bag in case i were to lose this in the field you don't want to put this back in your bag without a cap on it the glass is pretty close to the front and it's an expensive piece of glass so i'd highly recommend anybody buying it get a spare cap i'll put a link to that in with the product links in the video's description um for anybody you know i i i have so long been a fan of this big huge honking lens but it's been surprising to me how happy i've been leaving it at home and taking this 14 to 30 millimeter lens out with me and i've had a question from a number of people asking me you know i have the 14 to 30 am i gonna need the 14 to 24 and the answer is no you don't the the 14 to 30 is a fabulous lens and when you're out just shooting landscape in normal light conditions you don't necessarily need f 2.8 you know it's when you're doing night sky work ultra low light work that's when that 2.8 comes in handy if you want to shoot in a low lit event situation handheld without boosting your highest iso to the moon that extra stop of light is gonna help you uh the this lens has a little bit of a special look to the images that it renders it has beautiful out-of-focus details if you get up close and open it wide up there's things you can do with it that you can't do with the 14-30 but if you're looking for an ultra-wide landscape lens that's going to render sharp details corner to corner and give you really high image quality this lens will do that and let me jump in let me take a look at some images and i'll show you what i'm talking about and then we'll come back and i'll talk a little i'll wrap up and talk about the z62 all right so friday night i get this lens i pull it out of the box i take a picture of my little girl pepper and i start doing some testing and i want to test it against the other lenses that i know and love my ultra wide so you know i'm going to color code these so you can know just what i'm looking at any of the red color coded images like these those are the new s 24 to or 12 to 24 2.8 the yellow coated images are from the old 24 12 to 24 2.8 f-mount on the ftc adapter all these are shot with the nikon z7 no adjustments whatsoever lens corrections turned off and no automatic profiling no no chromatic aberration correction just straight out of the camera i don't want to even touch any of these you're going to see the noise you're going to see the grunge no edits whatsoever and then the the the blue images are with my 14 to 30 f4 mirrorless lens so the the ultra lightweight smaller f4 14 to 30 for the nikon mirrorless all right so red is the new lens yellow is the old lens and blue is the new f4 lens alright so first shot jumping in to see my little girl pepper i just kind of came into the house i'm like i got my new lens and i laid down on the carpet in the kitchen at 14 millimeters f 2.8 use that eye detect uh you know it's it and just was like wow i like the way the out of focus details are rendering i like the way the highlights are not creating ghosts in the scene even though i'm shooting up straight into bright led lights um i'm excited about this lens so i dashed back to the studio started testing it uh i put it just zoomed up at the ceiling at wide open f 2.8 14 millimeters kind of lit the ceiling with some led studio lights uh and and i shot it both at f 8 and f 2.8 so you know have a look here here's the here's the 2.8 image these are the new lens images these red ones you can see the vignetting by me just flipping back and forth there's some vignetting at 28. f8 that cleans up obviously it's not massive but you know there's vignetting any ultra wide lens wide open you're going to have a bit of vignetting this is definitely correctable in post let's have a look you know center sharpness nice and sharp let's have a look at the edge wow really really good for wide open like astoundingly good for wide open let's compare the old 14 to 24 and if you look it's also got that vignetting maybe even more vignetting let's have a look center sharpness nice and sharp out on the edge oh it's definitely falling off as i said you know this is really made for the days with 12 megapixel center sensors and the the center sharpness has always been phenomenal on the old 14 to 24 but the edge particularly when you do milky way work with it you take a look at the stars at the edges you're like oh wow wide open this this has a lot of sharpness fall off at the edges and then to just kind of throw a little wrench in the works let's look at that 14 to 30 f4 lens you know here it is it has some vignetting any ultra wide lens wide open a bit of vignetting that's just to be expected often turning on the automatic profiling in lightroom or your editing suite of choice will take care of that automatically a little pull the vignetting slider will take care of it but jumping in here wow just razor razor sharp um this lens is really sharp at f4 you know it it has a little fall off and sharpness at the edges how is that corrected if we stop down to f8 it's not completely corrected i'd still say it's not quite as sharp as the the new 2.8 s lenses wide open but you know it's still plenty except when you get a little ways away from the corner and it's it's nice and sharp this is a really high performing lens and i love that little 14 to 30 you know i've taken it out and shot a lot of scenes with it and been really really impressed with what a good job it's done and i haven't missed carrying that big heavy lug of a 14 to 24 around so we had some some time out in the beautiful fall colors here in portland and i took my family out to hoyt arboretum both on a rainy evening and a sunny day and i did some more kind of back to back lens testing here so here is the the the new 14 to 24 in a scene wide open uh 20 you know at 2.8 and i focused uh manually in on some of these leaves at the edge of the trail so we can get a view of like how good oops sorry about that don't click there um how good you know obviously it's blown blurred in the background but i wanted to focus on close details in the path and see how sharp it really renders serious detail out in nature and the answer is it's pretty crazy that is ridiculously ridiculously sharp doing the same thing on the ftz adapter with my 14 to 24 f-mount lens the yellow image here i'm going to click it and you can see focusing on the same thing its edge sharpness is as abysmal looking in comparison as it was on the ceiling in my studio and you know as you get into the scene it's nice and sharp in the middle and what i was focusing on the path but it just loses sharpness at the edges and then the 14 to 30 millimeters you know if we if we bring that lens up it's it's sharp in the center you can see i was focusing in here but as it gets to the edges it does break down a bit too nothing's quite as sharp as this new 14 to 24 to 8 it really is special in its ability to render sharp details throughout the entire frame you know stopping down to to f 2.8 or i mean to f8 with all three lenses you take a look at details like up in this tree so i'm trying to get pretty much everything in the scene in focus at f8 here and you can take a look at the details in this tree all three images taken about the same so here's the new 14 to 24 2.8 s here's the old let's zoom out and zoom back in here let me go back and forth for you again here's the old uh then brand new 14 to 24 2.8 s here's the old 14 to 24 f mount just not as sharp in the edges you know it gets worse as you get closer to the edge how about the the 30 the 14 to 30 30. sharper than the 14 to 24 f mount but not as sharp as that new s lens it's just really really good with these kinds of fine details sort of shocking at 46 megapixels all right so you know that that led me to kind of wonder about testing center sharpness if you look at center sharpness on these three lenses um you'll notice this is the the 14 to 24 s lens let's zoom back out 14 to 24 s let's have a look at the old 14 to 24. it's not as sharp in the center but it's not bad take a look at the 14 to 30 that's pretty darn sharp in the center it gives the 14 to 24 s a run for its money so the 14 to 30 versus the 14 to 24 s this is the new s lens the red image the blue image with that smaller lighter 30 by the center of the frames razor razor sharp all right so that made me wonder i set up my my rykan focal software and put all the lenses at 14 millimeters and did an aperture sharpness profile you set up rykan's focal software and it'll not only do uh fine-tune your auto focus automatically by letting your computer take control of your camera and fire a bunch of test shots and tell you what to enter for for auto focus calibration but it also will do an aperture sharpness profile if you buy the pro version of the software and so i plugged in the brand new lens the 14 to 24 s you can see up here which lens we're looking at at 14 millimeters and let the software measure its sharpness and you can see running along 2300 quality of focus is the z-axis so the vertical axis is how sharp is the image 2300 is a measure of sharpness the horizontal axis the x-axis is what aperture it's testing it at from wide open at f 2.8 all the way stopped down at f 22. you can see it doesn't drop below 2000 until it gets way out to f14 and that wide open clear into f4 is the sharpest apertures of the lens if we go and take a look by comparison same chart with the old version of the 14 to 24 for f-mount just you can compare i think that the proof is just in having a look at that chart um a lot of that charts below 2000 um and none of it really keeps up it just is a new level of performance but if you take a look at the 14 to 30 the little lightweight 14 to 30 uh that we were that we've been talking about it it isn't as good it never quite measures up as high a marks as the 14 to 24 s the new 2.8 lens but it certainly isn't too bad it's not too shabby and it sadly is better by quite a bit than the original 14 to 24. so kind of proves out what i've been observing just using these lenses out in the field i got curious um you know one thing i love to do lately is shoot stars and milky ways with my 20 millimeter prime my 1.8 uh prime lens for the nikon z cameras the 21.8 s so i as long as i had the things set up i shot the 21.8 s and it doesn't quite measure up to the 14 to 24 2.8 but it's pretty insanely sharp too you can see it stays above 2200 until you get out to f7 it's it's in some ways you know that is pretty impressive it's nearly on par and then it holds up at this extreme end of its range better for sharpness it never drops below 2000 really in any significant way maybe a tiny bit all the way out at f16 so some really great test results uh from the 20 millimeter 1.8 the 14 to 30 and then exemplary amazing kind of mime bending from the the new 14 to 24 s as expected so let me just show you some other shots i captured with the the 14 to 24 s you know here's here's one at really high iso f11 but i just wanted to get everything in the scene relatively sharp as this person was walking through the path and the hoyt arboretum and was kind of looking at how out of focus details you know are rendered in really really intense backlight and i just don't see much chromatic aberration or color fringing this was the first shot i did like that took this shot of my wife using the eye detect autofocus wide open at f 2.8 you know with this eye targeted and you know despite there being a little bit of noise which i could get rid of in post again these are straight out of the camera not a slider pulled or an auto setting turn on you can just see that it renders beautiful out of focus details this one of the kids taken at f 2.8 eye detect on my little girl pepper you can just see that you know it's incredibly sharp and the detailed portions are just detailed throughout where they're the same distance as pepper's eye and no chromatic aberration or color fringing i can't wait to test this with stars at night and city scenes here's just you know in a friend's yard uh saw the sun peeking through their japanese maple and stopped down to f22 to shoot a sunstar through it middle you know midday harsh high contrast scene and yet no ghosting no flare it was it's almost it's difficult to make this lens ghost and flare you have to try and i love having that wide you know aperture this is f 3.5 and the ability to focus in really close and use that eye detect and just blur the background stacy and then zooming in on my little boy pike in this climbing tree he's like dad when are you gonna quit playing around with the camera and climb the tree with me so you know the the life of the family of a photographer and i did a little bit more backlight testing as the sun got low you know here we are close to wide open at 3.5 almost no ghosting or flare poking that sunstar through the tree and a really quite a nice star still details in this is at the arboretum so there's little tags on the trees let's let the full resolution image load in here um let's take in a second i thought i have one-to-one previews loaded on all of these but apparently i only did the examples but look at how sharp the details in the sign are behind the start of 3.5 i mean that's that's pretty pretty sharp and amazing just crazy good in backlight um and then the kind of last shot that i took with it at the evening before we headed back home from the arboretum trails was just this sunstar through the trees and you know stopped all the way down to f22 it doesn't throw a bad sun star and it's certainly nice and clean so this is just handheld of the 13th of a second so you get a lot of motion blur in the people walking through there but really really impressive results from the first few days with this lenses and with this lens and as i said you you'd have to pry it away from me all right so you get that impression that i i i love this 14 to 24 28 s i will not be getting rid of it by any stretch of the imagination i also am really enamored with the 70 to 200 2.8 s i don't have the 24 to 70 and i don't feel like i need it i love the 2470 f4 it's razer razor sharp it's a fantastic size and weight and balance for a kind of everyday knock around shooting lens for me and i have no need to feel to upgrade that to the 2.8 version plus i have the 50mm 1.8 that i'm filming this with right now uh and i feel like a lot of the time all i'll carry is the the 14 to 24 28 s the 70 to 200 to 8 and the 50 in between and just move my feet to get different compositions or use panoramic technique i'm kind of on the fence about the 21.8 since i'm not running a nikon museum and i need to probably get rid of some stuff this one is amazing in night sky work and i'll have to to test the 14 to 24 s and night skies before i decide to ditch the 20 but i will be getting rid of the old 14 to 24 f-mount lens and the 14 to 30. i just don't see myself using them with this new lens in my arsenal i'm enamored with it now that doesn't mean to say everyone needs it if you're not into night sky work if you don't want blur backgrounds with a wide angle if you don't work a lot handheld in low light conditions if the absolute edge corners of your 14 millimeter compositions don't need to be as razor sharp as humanly possible and you're not printing big prints then the 14 to 30 is a really really good little lens it's sharp it's amazing it weighs very very little it's less than 20 ounces and gives you higher performance than this great fabled 14 to 24 2.8 of the f-mount era all right so let's talk about the z62 for a second i have barely had a chance to play around with this camera i haven't even gotten all my settings dialed in on it but i'll give you a few little kind of of of pros and cons things that i love about it things that i wish they hadn't done or had done that they haven't it's much much faster handling it has these dual processors instead of one fast processor inside it has two and that lets it do much faster autofocus calculations i'm finding it does eye detect and face detect much much more quickly it has improved face detect and eye detect modes and an expanded group of those you can focus on what part of the image you want it to do face detect with with wide area autofocus with eye detector face detect for humans and animals which is pretty cool it's got a much bigger buffer and a faster frame rate so it's 14 frames per second with this huge buffer and with the cfx compact flash express card it's you know if i if i it just goes on and on and on i found a hundred and it was 109 frames before it even slowed down and then it was still pretty fast um you can do power you can power the camera via usbc i tested it you do have to have a battery in it so for some people that are doing astro work you might worry about whether the overcharging the battery might make it warm or not i don't i don't know i haven't tested that in cold conditions or out doing astro work i will say it powers off the usbc you get a little indicator uh that next to the battery that it's charging and the camera will run at the same time so that's that's wickedly cool you can take a power brick out with you and run all night um it definitely has improved autofocus i haven't had a chance yet to take it out and do things like birds and flight or my kids moving at high speed on bicycles or chasing each other the weather's just not been quite right since i've had it it's been raining but i will get out and do that as soon as possible and report back that's my biggest question is how much better is the autofocus i want to mount my 500 pf on this on the ftc adapter and go out and shoot some birds in flight and see what i think the compact flash express support they already had that on the z6 and z7 but i think it's a faster writing system i think it's designed around compact flash express instead of updating xqd to compact flash express and i'm kind of loving the fast compact flash express cards particularly when i pull it out plug it into the computer and it's transferring via usb 3.2 at 1.6 gigabytes per second it's pretty impressive it has a second sd slot i know a lot of you care about that i could care less about that i'm so so uh i have a lot of faith in xqd and compact flash express b that is a bomb proof card i can't imagine having problems with it but i know a lot of people really want that second slot i could see it being useful you know the fastest you can get an sd even a compact flash express sd is what 300 megabytes per second it's a fraction of the speed that you get with compact flash express but it's fast enough to write 4k video so maybe get a big card to put your 4k video on if you're a hybrid shooter and keep your stills on the cf express and put your video on the sd card you'll probably want to get coffee while you're transferring your video files into your computer that way though as opposed to just watching the lines whip across with the compact flash express um it's got let's see a couple other things i want to talk about for video shooters it's got the ability to shoot pro res raw 12-bit pro res raw video out via hdmi straight from the factory you don't have to send it in for modification like you would a z62 or z7 2. um i think that's oh you know one thing that's really really cool that i love there's a feature in the menu where you can enable longer shutter speeds than 30 seconds and it goes all the way up to 15 minutes you can set it to do a 15 minute exposure without using an external trigger or an app which is really really cool and that's super super handy what am i not so particularly happy about well the biggest thing is it still doesn't give me the ability to zoom in and check focus at apertures smaller than f 5.6 in stills mode this is a thing i've talked a lot about i've got a video on it linked you know please fix this nikon i'm putting that in the video description if you want to know more about it you know you can work around it it certainly doesn't make it unusable but it would be nice if they fixed that it's not a limitation in its video mode only at stills mode i can only assume they did this to protect autofocus capability and so it'd be nice if they'd let us turn it off when we're manually focusing doing still lifes or macro or a finely tuned landscape image on the tripod and there's no internal 10-bit n-log recording for video shooters which it seems like it should be easy for them to do given the speed with which this thing processes data and writes to its card so things i still need to test i i need to test uh the pro res raw output to my age to my um to my atomos ninja 5 recorder and see how great the dynamic range is in video i'd like to test its audio preamps and see if they're improved from the original nikon z6 which had a pretty bad hiss and it's audio preamp i do a lot to get around that in the recordings that i do for you folks uh and i need to test it's it's action capabilities with birds in flight and some fast moving action to truly get the full take on it so i've got some night shooting to do and some action shooting to do before i give complete and detailed reports but the bottom line is i'm completely in love with the 14 to 24 2.8 s and the z6 is a very worthy update there are some really cool added features and benefits i actually had a chat with people at nikon about the the depth of field preview issue and they they were going to send my concerns to engineering and i'm hoping that i hear back positively from that so check out my depth of field preview uh video and there's a link in there to to make your own voice heard okay so thanks for bearing with me this was a long one lots to cover exciting stuff sorry for anyone who's not a nikon affectionator if you made it through to this point you must be a subscriber and i appreciate it i think for those of you who may have been sitting on the fence uh with your with your dslrs waiting to see how good the z62 and z72 are they're significantly faster handling the autofocus seems to be significantly improved to me but i can't wait to go test it out i was pretty impressed just tracking my kids around the darkened house with eye detect and face detect but i do want to try birds and flight and some other things before i fully report back on that all right everybody thanks so much for bearing with me i hope everybody's out there being creative staying safe this is a pretty weird time we're all living through so just find creative ways to stay happy and stay safe and we'll see you next week

Channel: Hudson Henry Photography

Views: 25,419

Keywords: Nikon, Z7, mirrorless, lesson, education, training, how to, gear, photography class, digital photography, depth of field, f5.6, aperture, live view, Approaching The Scene, Hudson Henry, z6, z6ii, 14-24, 2.8, lens, ultra wide, sharpness, comparison, F mount, z mount, 20mm, 1.8, 14-30, F4, Reikan, FoCal, Hoyt Aboretum, Compact Flash Express, CF Express, SD, autofocus, eye detect

Id: vTKMA86fylg

Length: 34min 12sec (2052 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020