NikonNIKKOR Z 14-30mm f/4 S | Premium constant aperture wide-angle zoom lens for Z series mirrorless cameras | Nikon USA Model

If you understand what this lens is, this is a fantastic piece of glass in your bag. If you are going Z system and you need a feather light and ultra small landscape lens with excellent IQ, this is a must have. Ordered this from Amazon.com as the vendor on January 12th and received the legit US version with 1+4 warranty card.I compared this directly to my F mount 20mm f1.8G, which is itself considered to be Nikons best ultra wide prime lens. I love that lens. Super sharp, minimal distortion, brilliant colors, and great contrast. The 14-30 f4 is virtually identical to the 20mm f1.8G at 20mm f4. Side by side, super pixel peeping, you cannot tell these two apart in terms of sharpness, contrast, colors, and so forth. The only difference is that the 20mm f1.8G has color fringing at f4 (and lower), while the 14-30 f4 never shows color fringing at any focal or aperture setting. I did not expect the 14-30 f4 to perform this well. Amazing!The small size and light weight are exactly what I want in dedicated ultra wide to wide zoom landscape lens. I never bought any of the previous generations f4's and f2.8's for that reason. Too big, too heavy, too cumbersome. I cannot take these on a hike with me. Weather sealing? Good luck with that. Edge to edge sharpness? Good luck with that.Obviously, the 14-30 is an f4 and not an f2.8 or f1.8 or smaller prime. 10 years ago, that mattered. You were lucky to get decent low light performance at 1600 ISO without a crazy amount of grain. With the Z6, thats a problem of the past. And since nobody cares about the Bokeh in the 14-30mm focal range, thats also not a thing. The use case where not being able to go lower than f4 is less desirable is with astro. But, things, of course, are never what they seem. I cannot shoot my 20mm f1.8G at f1.8 for astro. Way too much coma. I have to stop down to f2.8 to get acceptable results, but really the coma does not go away until f4. The 14-30 f4 matches that performance at f4. So, in reality, there is no speed advantage for astro with the 20mm f1.8G, for example, if you want quality results. There are astro-friendly primes that can shoot faster with no coma, but they tend to suck at everything else. Comparing the 14-30 f4 to other AF multi-use lenses, the 14-30 f4 actually fairs pretty well in astro.There are two potential negatives with this lens, and one may not affect you. One is sample variation. There have been reports that sample variation may be high with this lens. Decentering, etc. My suggestion, is get out the test target and snap away. You should be able to determine if you got a bad copy there. Otherwise, get out there and shoot a ton with it while you can still return it. Second, the "baked in" corrections. For some, this is a real problem and you cannot do anything about it. The theory being that with "baked in" corrections the IQ suffers unrecoverable loss of detail, contrast, and so forth. I cannot perceive that in my images. Again, I compared this to what many consider to be a god-like prime and easily Nikons best ultra wide prime at the moment (which does not have "baked in" corrections). You cannot perceive the pixel stretching, blah, blah, blah. The images are identical (other than the 20mm f1.8 at f4 still showing color fringing). Believe what you want. I have done my tests and I have drawn my conclusions on actual results. The "baked in" corrections cause no ill effect that is perceivable even with the most extra pixel peeping.For video shooters, this lens is usable throughout its range just fine. However, I prefer 20-30mm because the distortion is less, and I am too lazy to correct distortion in Davinci Resolve. 14-16mm, especially, is distorted in the corners. Resolve can totally straighten this lens out, so if you are willing to put in the time the results can be worth it. AF is silent, comparable to the 35mm Z and 50mm Z. You will not get the transmittance and IQ of a cinema lens. If you need that, this lens will not work for you. However, I would not rate the transmittance and IQ as poor. Its what you would expect from an ultra wide to wide zoom f4 lens.I was not going to buy this lens. I really wasnt. It took me a good, long while to realize what this was. I decided to give it a shot being fully ready to return it. I am so glad I took that chance. This lens is amazing. Tiny, light, screw filters, prime lens edge to edge sharpness, beautiful colors, awesome contrast, minimal distortion. Rather good weather sealing to boot. Is the cost high? At full price of $1300, not really. This lens is covering 4 primes (14, 20, 24, 28), which would cost you about $3850 combined for the best F mount versions. And it is matching or exceeding the IQ of each of those primes. Reviews on YT are showing it beating all the F-mount ultra wide to wide zooms, pro or otherwise. At $1300, this is a great value. On sale, no brainer.

I'll start by saying that I wasn't planning to like this lens. My main gripe when this lens was announced was that it wasn't an 11-24mm or a 12-24mm. While I would like Nikon to eventually release a wider lens, I've come around to the belief that they found a great balance in this lens.The lens weighs next to nothing and doesn't take up much space in the bag thanks to its compact design that gets even smaller when you set the zoom to its storage mode (basically retracts the lens completely). Despite this, the actual build feels pretty solid and I can attest that the weathersealing is excellent. The main thing that really makes this lens stand out is the ability to take standard 82mm circular filters. As of this writing, this is the only ultra-wide zoom on the market that boasts both 14mm on the wide end and the ability to use standard circular filters. Tally up these things and it's probably the most practical ultra-wide angle zoom on the market.All of this would mean little without performance and we come to a bit of a mixed bag here. In terms of sharpness, the 14-30mm f/4 S seems to be sharper across the frame at all apertures than the 14-24mm f/2.8G and it makes the 16-35mm f/4G look like a complete joke. The coatings do an excellent job at retaining contrast and mitigating flare. The color rendition is very accurate (images accompanying this review are uploaded with no color correction using the Camera Neutral profile). I haven't found any notable chromatic aberration to speak of either. That brings us to vignette and distortion.You know that saying that "You can't have your cake and eat it, too."? With every lens, there's going to be some sort of trade-off. Generally speaking, high quality, well-corrected optics will result in the trade-off of a large and heavy lens. While this lens is razor sharp and excels in many optical aspects, the compact design of the lens meets its trade-off in the form of significant optical distortion and vignetting. People who use Lightroom probably won't even notice this because Nikon has worked with Adobe to automatically apply a software correction to the RAW file upon import to fix the distortion and vignette (I'd guess that it's about 2 stops at its most extreme on the wide end), but you'll definitely notice both if you're using any other RAW conversion software. So we have a bit of a controversy here. If the distortion and vignette is corrected automatically upon import in the software so you wouldn't even notice it, does it matter?In my opinion, yes, it does. The reason is because any corrections that you're doing in software rather than optically is going to require interpolation of the data on your sensor and it will inevitably lead to SOME loss of quality. The same can be argued about the vignette where locally fixing it leads to less dynamic range able to be captured in those portions of the image. If you have a Z7 like I have, then the loss of quality is likely not noticeable for most purposes, but it's there and it needs to be acknowledged. Having said this, one can argue whether optical distortion or even a strong vignette are necessarily bad things. I know it sounds pretty stupid to say, but unless you're using this lens to shoot architecture, real estate (like I do), or other subjects with really straight lines, you're not really likely to notice even moderate levels of distortion or vignette as real world scenes are complex enough to mask those types of flaws. If you ARE shooting straight lines, then you're either going to have to live with software correction or look elsewhere. For me, the size, weight, and 82mm filter thread still make this lens much more desirable than a larger, better corrected lens. Admittedly, I cheat the system here by having a sensor with far more megapixels than I'm likely to ever actually need.So why am I giving this lens 5 stars despite these flaws? There's a physical reality that you have to deal with for every lens. Because of this, I believe in judging a lens based on what it's intended to be and what the value of the overall package is. In this case, we have a lens that's extremely sharp, has excellent resistance to flare and CA, possesses great color rendition, is light weight, is compact, and can take standard circular filters while reaching 14mm on the wide end. This is an extremely high quality, 5-star package that's unprecedented in its combination of features. Yes there are flaws, but the only way to realistically solve those flaws would be to make the lens bigger, heavier, and likely remove the ability to take those circular filters. In my opinion, that's the realm of Nikon's upcoming 14-24mm f/2.8 S lens, not this one. This is going to be a choice between functionality (this lens) vs. unparalleled optical quality (a much bigger and heavier lens). I can definitely say that Nikon is making the decision a very interesting one by releasing such a good 14-30mm f/4.

Wonderful lens! Sharp from edge to edge and a great holiday price!

This lens is a great wide angle zoom for my Z 7ii. My biggest question before purchase was regarding vignetting. I have two polarizing filters. My B+W slim circular polarizer works great. I just need watch out for polarizing effect on extra wide shots; sky can get dark on one side and light on the other. My other B+W E TOP-POL linear polarizer works great but since it is much thicker, it vignettes below around 20mm. The quality of the lens is fantastic, it is very light weight, extremely sharp, the price I paid was fair, and the delivery was on-time. I highly recommend this lens and seller.