Image Quality
One would expect a $3,250 prime lens to have the goods optically, and I’m glad to say, the Z 400mm f/4.5 VR S certainly does. As you’ll see, the lens is simply a gem in the optical department – even more making that light weight something to marvel at.
Sharpness
The 400mm f/4.5 VR S is a lens that provides excellent sharpness across the frame straight from its widest aperture. Wide open, the lens shows slightly less performance at the edge of the frame than in the center, but it’s still sharp to the edges. Stopping down a little gains almost nothing in the central part of the image frame while bringing the edges up to very near the center. There’s really not much more to discuss here – it’s brilliant. Click here for a 100% crop of the image below, taken wide open at f/4.5:
With the 1.4x Teleconverter mounted, sharpness remains very good across the frame at 560mm f/6.3, with very minor improvement stopped down a touch. I have no qualms whatsoever about using this lens with a 1.4x TC. testing the lens with the 1.4x vs cropping the bare lens does show a noticeable detail advantage with the teleconverter. This is often not the case, so it’s really nice to see that benefit here. With the 2x teleconverter, image sharpness is still pretty good, and definitely usable, but I found that there was no real additional detail resolved by using the 2x TC when compared to a cropped shot with the 1.4x converter attached. So if you want to extend reach with this lens, I can easily recommend picking up the 1.4x TC, but I wouldn’t bother with the 2x.
Bokeh
Being a reasonably fast telephoto, depth of field can be very shallow when shooting the 400mm f/4.5S, especially for closer subjects. As such, most of your images outside of landscape use will have some sort of subject separation and foreground and background blur. The 400mm f/4.5 VR S puts in a good performance here, with smooth backgrounds and no obvious structure to specular highlights. It falls short of the creamiest lenses I’ve used, however, as there can be a bit more contrast to the backgrounds than on some other lenses. Still, it’s a very nice performance here. Luckily, neither of the teleconverters appear to have any obvious affect on the quality of the bokeh.
Contrast, Color and Chromatic Aberration
Like you would expect from a high-end modern lens, the 400mm f/4.5S shows good strong contrast at all apertures. Likewise, color is rich and vibrant, without any obvious color casts. Overall, there’s essentially nothing to complain about here.
The lens shows negligible lateral chromatic aberration and also controls longitudinal chromatic aberration extremely well. There foreground and background color fringes are essentially absent, even when shooting high contrast targets, and as such, it’s a near apochromatic performance in this department. Very impressive.
Distortion, Flare and Vignetting
The Nikkor Z 400mm f/4.5 VR S has shown a fairly remarkable performance thus far, and the good news continues with discussion of distortion. The lens displays a small amount of pincushion distortion that isn’t particularly field relevant unless you are shooting architecture that has a pure grid-like nature. Even then, it’s difficult to see unless you toggle the lens profile on and off. Overall, a very nice performance here.
The lens shows moderate vignetting at f/4.5 that eases by f/6.3 and is essentially gone at f/8. I like a small amount of vignetting in my images (and often add a bit more in post to highlight a subject), so no issues whatsoever here.
Finally we reach the one optical characteristic where the lens falls a bit short, and that’s flare control. When shooting into the sun, the lens loses a fair bit of contrast and can display rather large and obvious multicolored ghosts. Considering how good many of the Nikkor Z lenses are at flare control, this was a bit of a surprise, but I also found it not to really matter much in the real world. The included hood shades the front element very well, and due to the narrow angle of view, it is a rare thing to shoot with the sun in frame. In fact, in the over 2,500 images I took with the lens over a 7 month period, the only shots I took into the sun were those I took specifically to test flare performance, as seen below. Using the 1.4x TC magnifies the flare and introduces a couple more ghosts as well.
Overall, the Nikon 400mm f/4.5 VR S is a gem of an optic. It’s very sharp straight from f/4.5, has outstanding color and contrast, very good bokeh, low distortion, and almost no chromatic aberration. The only weak point optically is worse than average performance against bright light.
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