Review: Nikon Zf

The Nikon Zf is Nikon’s latest full-frame Z-series camera, though you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a film camera. The design is borrowed from Nikons of yore, but with a decidedly modern 24 megapixel sensor. In many ways, the Zf is the best of both worlds: a high-quality digital sensor married to a dial- and button-heavy case.

The result is a camera that’s a ton of fun to shoot with. I never had to go hunting around in menus, and using it was nearly as simple as using my vintage Nikon FE2. It doesn’t have the speed you’d want for wildlife or sports, but for everything else, this camera is hard to beat.

I’ve seen quite a few people compare the Zf design to the 1970s FM2, but I don’t think you need to go back that far. The Nikon Df has similar lines, as does the Zfc, which is the APS-C little brother to this new Zf.

Whichever old Nikon you think it looks like, it’s decidedly larger and heavier. As you can see in the picture above, next to my film FE2 (which is very similar to the FM2), it’s about 20 percent larger and weighs almost 6 ounces more.

Much of the Zf’s weight is a good thing. This thing is incredibly solid. The body is all-metal and totally weather-sealed. The two large dials are both made of brass and turning them feels just like turning the dials on an old film camera. The Zf is the best constructed digital camera body I’ve ever tested. It’s a tank, in a good way.

The cost of great construction comes in the weight—22.29 ounces without a lens, and 40 ounces with the included Nikkor 24-70 f/4 lens. That’s not outrageous, but it sometimes feels that way because there’s almost no grip. The little lip provided reminds me of my old Nikon F3, which was also awkward to hold after a while. This isn’t a huge deal. There are plenty of third-party grips you can add.

Other than the weight, the handling of the Zf is excellent. The dials are easy to turn and allow you to set shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation, shooting mode, metering mode, and shutter speed without even lifting the camera to your eye. Note that shutter speed is displayed on a screen. With most lenses, it will be changed via a dial since quite a few Z lenses lack aperture rings.

One thing I didn’t like is the lack of joystick on the back. There’s a D-pad to control things like the focus point, but a joystick is just faster and smoother to operate. On the plus side, another aspect that reminded me of a film camera is the big bright viewfinder. Like Nikon viewfinders on the F-series, this 3.68M dot OLED viewfinder is a pleasure to use.

My caveat here is that nearly everything I liked about the Zf is because it reminds me of my old Nikons. As someone who learned photography on 1980s Nikon film cameras, this is very much a 1980s Nikon film camera, at least on the outside.

On the inside, the Zf has a very nice 24-MP CMOS sensor, which appears to be very similar to the sensor in the Nikon Z6 II. That’s a few years old at this point, but it’s still very capable. The sensor is paired with a new processor (the Expeed 7 processor), which gives the Zf some tricks other Nikons lack.

The best of these is the autofocus system. The Expeed 7 processor brings subject recognition in the 3D tracking (which is borrowed from the very high-end Z9), and it is amazingly accurate. I didn’t shoot any sporting events, nor do I have a wildlife lens, but it had no issues tracking my kids running around. That’s not to say it didn’t miss focus at times, but it did so far less than most cameras I’ve tested.

Speaking of speed, the Zf can shoot at up to 11 frames per second when going for RAW images and up to 15 fps in JPEG mode. The Zf also offers a JPEG-only shooting mode that uses video to capture 30-fps images similar to what you’ll find in the Z9. The 11-fps is going to be fine for 96 percent of people, but probably not wildlife, sports, and some other edge cases.

One very nice feature in the Zf is a black and white mode. There are two things that make this better than the black and white mode in most cameras. First, you can activate it with a switch under the right side dial—no hunting around in menus. You just flip the switch and flip it back when you’re done. This enabled me to use black and white mode as a quick way to view a scene without color, which I find helps with composition. Sometimes elements seem fine at first glance and don't appear distracting until later, when you view the scene in black and white. This is the thing I liked most about the Nikon Zf.

The black and white images themselves are also better than most. You don’t get Fujifilm-level image customization, but there are a few options. You can shoot in three modes, plain monochrome, “flat mono,” and “deep tone mono.” There isn’t a huge difference between these three, and there’s no way to customize the profiles the way you can in a Fujifilm camera, but it’s a start. I’d like to see Nikon expand on this feature in future cameras.

While I did not expect it given the obvious nods to Nikon’s film past, the Zf is a surprisingly capable video camera. It shoots up to 4K/60 using an APS-C size crop of the sensor. If you want to use the whole sensor, you can get 4K/30. That’s not going to wow video professionals, but again, it’s good enough for most photographers who just want the possibility of shooting some 4K footage.

Overall, I loved shooting with the Zf and were I in the market for a new camera, this is the camera I would buy. That said, there are few things about the Zf I truly dislike. The first is the card slots. There are two of them. One is a standard SD card slot supporting UHS II cards. The second is a microSD card slot that supports only UHS I. The slow speeds I could live with, but it’s so difficult to get the microSD card in and out that I ended up just leaving it in and treating it as an emergency overflow. There should have been two matched full-size SD card slots.

The other thing I thoroughly dislike is that it doesn’t ship with a battery charger. A $2,000 camera shouldn’t require you to buy a separate battery charger (for $80 retail, no less). You can charge via the USB-C port. Battery life is so good that a single charge will last about 350 shots, more if you turn on energy saving mode (I got 407), but serious photographers are always going to want a separate charger and at least a second battery.

As noted above, the Zf wouldn’t be my top pick for sports or wildlife. That’s in part because of the autofocus and shooting speed, but also because the 24-MP sensor, while sharp and capable of delivering those characteristic Nikon colors, is probably not what wildlife and sports pros are after. The Z7 and especially the Z9, with their much higher megapixel sensors and faster autofocus, are the cameras you want for those use cases.

Nikon did not have one to send me, but I think the ideal lens for this camera is probably the new Nikkor Z 40mm f/2 Special Edition ($310). This may be personal prejudice, but something about this camera cries out for a short, fixed-length lens—a fast 50, or in this case 40. It’s going to balance well with the camera and make a good reportage and street photography setup, both of which feel like ideal use cases for the Zf.