This is the fifth in a series of posts on the Nikon Z50. You should be able to find all the posts about that camera in the Category List on the right sidebar, below the Articles widget. There’s a drop-down menu there that you can use to get to all the posts in this series; just look for “Z50”.
Yesterday I compared the Nikon 16-50 mm f/3.5-6.3 lens on a Z50 to the Nikon 24-70mm f/4 Z-mount lens on the same camera at 24 and 50 mm focal lengths, and found that the ceap kit zoom acquitted itself quite well, not lagging much behind its much larger and more expensive full frame stablemate. Today I’ll compare the 16-50 at 16 mm with the Nikon 14-30mm f/4 Z mount lens. This lens is not quite the spectacular performer than the 24-70/4 is, but it is certainly respectable.
The scene:
The images were exposed at f/4 and 1/13 second at ISO 100. I used spot AF-S, made three pictures at each setting, and picked the best one for this post.
I developed the images in Lightroom with the following settings:
- Adobe Color Profile
- Sharpening amount 20, radius 1, detail 0 (this is much less sharpening than Lr’s default)
- White balance to the gray background of the Siemens Star
Let’s look at some tight center crops of the star, at about 400% magnification:
The 14-30 is more contrasty, but the cheap zoom is no slouch.
In the corner:
There’s more light falloff with the 16-50. It’s not as sharp. But it’s still doing really well for a lens of its size and price.
By the way, it’s pretty obvious from these images that the Z50 has no anti-aliasing filter. I think that was a mistake on Nikon’s part.
How much of FX coverage does the 16-50 have?