I noted in last year’s review of the Nikkor Z 50mm F1.4 that Nikon’s marketing strategy at the typical prime focal lengths (35mm, 50mm, and 85mm) is a bit unconventional. In the past the usual strategy was entry level (F1.8), mid-tier (F1.4), and premium (F1.2) options. But Nikon actually released F1.8 lenses at these focal lengths first, but rather than the typical entry level “plastic fantastics” they actually created more premium mid-tier options included in their premium S-line lineup. They then followed those up with F1.2 options (large, expensive, and excellent), and only then created F1.4 options. The F1.4 lenses are actually the least expensive options, and, ironically, tend to be about the same size as the F1.8 S lenses. But thanks to a newfound connection at Nikon Canada (thanks, Chris!), I’ve got an opportunity to work through some of the catalog lenses in Z mount. I’ve been very interested in seeing how the F1.8 S lenses compare to the newer F1.4 lenses, so I’m starting that journey by reviewing the Nikkor Z 50mm F1.8 S, and I’ll follow that up with a review and article directly comparing it to the 50mm F1.4. Sound interesting? Find out my thoughts by watching the video review or by reading on in the text review.

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Thanks to Nikon Canada for sending me a review copy of this lens. As always, this is a completely independent review.  All opinions and conclusions are my own.  *The tests and most of the photos that I share as a part of my review cycle have been done with the 45MP Nikon Z8, which I reviewed here. You can visit the product page for the Nikkor Z 50mm F1.8 S here.

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I actually really liked the Nikkor Z 50mm F1.4 and ended up purchasing one myself from Camera Canada. I’ll be using my own copy of that lens for some of the comparisons in these reviews. What’s interesting is just how similar in size these two lenses are. The F1.8 lens is about 2.5mm shorter and weighs 7g less, but let’s just say that it wouldn’t be difficult to confuse the two lenses.

The 50mm F1.8 S has been a great seller for Nikon, and that’s in part because this approach allowed photographers to have an S-Line lens that they could afford…and that wouldn’t mind carrying. The 50mm F1.8 S weighs 416g; the premium F1.2 S weighs a whopping 1090g! Many “ordinary” photographers aren’t interested in paying for or carrying around a lens like the F1.2 S, so that has made the F1.8 S lens the sweet spot for many buyers. I’m curious how the F1.4 lens released in 2024 has impacted sales of the F1.8 S. Has Nikon done a good enough job of marketing the S-Line advantages to the casual buyer, or will they see the F1.4 aperture and lower price of the newer lens and pull that level instead?

This is not a new lens. It was one of the first released by Nikon when Z mount launched in late 2018, so is it sill holding up to scrutiny over six years later?

Nikkor 50mm F1.8 S Build and Handling

Though this is the smallest of the three traditional 50mm options available from Nikon on Z-mount (excluding a macro option), it isn’t actually small…particularly for an F1.8 lens. Nikon’s Z-mount is the largest diameter of the three major full frame players at 55mm, with Canon’s RF mount right behind at 54mm, but Sony’s E-mount is a much smaller 46.1mm. There are definite advantages for Nikon with their larger mount diameter, but the downside is that lenses tend to be a little bigger because the diameter of the lens even at the mount starts a bit larger. Sony has proven to be the most efficient of the three in creating smaller, more compact premium lenses, but that is aided by having that smaller diameter to start with. The 50mm F1.8 S is 76mm (2.99″) x 86.5 mm (3.41″) in length.

It weighs in at a moderate 415g or 14.64oz. The outer barrel is made of a robust polycarbonate material with some metal components, including the mount. There is a weather sealing gasket at the mount along with internal seals throughout the lens.

I count either 6 or 7 seal points overall in this diagram. Nikon’s language around the weather sealing is a little more confident for the S-Line lens than it was for the Z 50mm F1.4. They say, “Extensively sealed against dust and moisture, especially around all moving parts of the barrel.” (Emphasis mine). On paper the 50mm F1.4 and the 50mm F1.8 S have similar weather sealing, but Nikon seems to be indicating that the sealing is more robust in the S-line lens. As with the 50mm F1.4, however, the gasket is pretty thin at the lens mount.

The feature set of the 50mm F1.8 S is fairly brief. There is an AF | MF switch along with the S-Line badging near the lens mount (*my Nikon Professional Services loaner has stickers all over the place, so these won’t be the prettiest product shots I’ve ever produced!)

There is just a single ring on the lens barrel. This is an area of differentiation from the newer 50mm F1.4, as that lens has two rings. It has a dedicated manual focus ring along with Nikon’s customizable control ring that can be assigned to adjust aperture, exposure compensation, or ISO. In this case, however, the single ring is the customizable control ring, meaning that manual focus is the default function but is also just one of the potential uses for the ring.

This leaves me with a bit of quandary, as I do like having an aperture ring, but I also really like Nikon’s full time manual override and do find it often necessary when autofocus doesn’t want to grab a close object. The shot below found autofocus stuck on the background and I had to use manual override to pull focus to the right zone where autofocus can take over. I would give the win to the newer F1.4 lens for having a separate control ring, as I decided that I would just have to skip the manual aperture control in order to retain manual focus override.

The feel of the ring is fairly good, with good damping and precision. I like Nikon’s options for controlling the behavior of the manual focus ring, allowing you to choose a linear response and your desired focus throw distance.

The aperture iris is made up of nine rounded blades, allowing for a circular aperture shape when the lens is stopped down.

As you stop the aperture down, the overall shape is “roundish” but you can slightly see the shape of the aperture blades (F1.8, F2.8, and F4 shown below).

The front filter size is a relatively uncommon 62mm, though Nikon is making it more common by equipping the 50mm F1.4 along with both the 35mm F1.8 and F1.4 options with a 62mm filter thread. The 85mm F1.8 S moves up to a 67mm filter size.

There is a fairly deep lens hood included. There are ribs inside and a ridged grip section to make it easier to mount/unmount the lens. My loaner copy didn’t include the hood, though I found that the one on my 50mm F1.4 looked very similar to the one shown in the photos and mounted fine.

The 50mm F1.8 S lags behind the F1.4 lenses a bit in minimum focus distance. It can only focus as closely as 40cm while the 50mm F1.4 can focus down to 37.19cm. This means the maximum magnification is reduced from 0.17x (on the F1.4 lens) to 0.15x here. That’s about average for a 50mm lens, and the 50mm F1.2 S shares that specification. Here’s what MFD looks like:

While the F1.4 does have a higher degree of magnification, it produces a much poorer end result, with less contrast and a plane of focus that isn’t particularly flat. The 50mm F1.8 S does a much better job.

I’m not sure that you’d be able to tell that the 50mm F1.8 S is the premium lens when just visually comparing the 50mm F1.8 and 50mm F1.4 lenses. It adds the AF | MF switch but loses the separate control ring, and while there are a few more metal bits on the S Line lens (it does have slightly better build), the build materials don’t feel radically different. Add in that both lenses are roughly the same size and weight, and you end up needing to use other criteria to differentiate the two lenses in your buying decision. The current price of the 50mm F1.8 S is about $630, while the 50mm F1.4 will cost about $500. You’ll have to decide if the S-Line approach is worth more to you than the newer, brighter lens.

Autofocus for Stills

Like the 50mm F1.4, the 50mm F1.8 S utilizes a stepping focus motor (STM) that is, for the most part, surprisingly fast. Focus changes happen very quickly whether indoors or outdoors, and most of the time you won’t think about autofocus at all because the job just gets done quickly and efficiently. I was able to track action sequences with good accuracy on a squash court shooting at F1.8 (despite shooting through glass). I shot bursts at 20FPS on my Z8 and got nearly perfectly focused long bursts.

I had very good results when shooting “people pictures”, with beautiful focus on the eyes.

My one complaint with walkaround focus is a fairly typical one with lenses on my Z8; 3D Focus (my typical focus mode) doesn’t love picking up close objects when the background is fairly complex…even if I put the default box/point right on the out of focus contrast edge of the subject. This is something that Sony and Canon seem to do a bit better with. What helps, however, is that Nikon’s full time manual override works in all modes…including AF-C, so it is easy to pull focus back where I want it and then let the AF do its thing.

There is a faint “schnick” sound if you put your ear right next to the lens barrel, but if I held the camera at chest level and racked focus here and there, I couldn’t hear anything. Focus speed in my formal tests was not instant but was nice and fast racking back and forth.

I’ve got no concerns for autofocus for stills.

Video Autofocus

Though some training with my new Nikon insider I’ve learned that tweaking the focus settings in G6 and G7 of my Z8’s menu will affect the speed and sensitivity of focus with on screen subjects but not the touch to focus process that I use for my video focus pulls. This helps explain the variance I’ve sometimes seen between this test and my “hand test” detailed below.

My first test was video focus pulls, and I saw quick and reasonably confident pulls from one subject to another in my standard test. I didn’t see any visible steps from the STM motor. What I did see was a bit of micropulsing where it felt like focus had perhaps slightly overshot the target and pulsed back. You will see a periodic quick rack in the wrong direction, which is another thing that I’ve seen in all of my Nikon tests thus far. That means that this is more of a camera/focus system issue than a lens specific issue.

Focus breathing felt fairly well controlled, but Nikon does have a focus breathing compensation setting that does help with that.

My “hand test” where I alternately block the camera’s view of my face with my hand and then remove it has improved through tweaking the settings I’ve mentioned before. I will now keep these new settings as the standard settings so that I have a baseline for all future Nikon reviews. I’ve found that I needed to nearly maximize speed and sensitivity settings to get the kind of result I was looking for, but I was pleased with the result I got in my test here.

I had very good results when walking towards the camera, with consistent tracking of my face, and when I ducked out of frame and then back in, the lens was relatively quick in picking me back up.

I’ve shot a number of short clips with the 50mm F1.8 S and had solid, reliable focus results.

All told there is a lot to like here in the autofocus performance. I never get too excited when I see “STM” under the focus motor description, but this is a solid implementation of STM.

Image Quality Breakdown

The Nikkor Z 50mm F1.8S is an FX (full frame lens), though it can also be used on DX cameras where it will give a full frame equivalent of 75mm due to the 1.5x crop factor on DX. This is a more complex optical design than the F1.4 lens, with 12 elements in 9 groups, including one aspherical element. This is clearly not the same optical design as their older DSLR era AF-S 50mm F1.4, which had 8 elements in 7 groups. The MTF chart shows a very even performance across the frame with only a slight drop in the extreme corners.

The difference in the design philosophy for the two lenses can be easily seen if we compare the MTF charts. I like to line up MTF charts and put a line through the 80% threshold. Anything above that at 30lp/mm will look extremely sharp.

You can see that the S-Line lens has a lot of its performance either above or just slightly below that threshold, while the 50mm F1.4 lens is considerably softer. If pure sharpness is your priority, the S-Line lens definitely wins on paper.

Out in the real world, I found a very, very different philosophy between the design of these two lenses. The newer 50mm F1.4 follows more of a classic design philosophy. It’s less corrected, lower contrast, but I continue to think it has a nice rendering. The S Line lens has much higher contrast and is a much sharper at similar apertures. Take a look at my classic lock that I use as a subject for many of my reviews.

That’s a radically different result. Here’s a look at result from the 50mm F1.8 S.

That’s an intense amount of contrast and detail, and that, to me, really defines the character of this lens.

You’ll also see it in the approach to correcting LoCA (longitudinal chromatic aberrations), which show up as fringing before or after the plane of focus. The 50mm F1.4 shows not only the fringing but also the loss of contrast that comes as a byproduct.

You can see how well corrected the S Line lens is by comparison. So, as expected, when we go to the test charts we won’t really see any fringing.

Lateral chromatic aberrations near the edge of the frame are essentially non-existent, so that won’t be a problem.

Sometimes highly corrected lenses like this will suffer in terms of their bokeh and overall rendering, so we’ll revisit that in a while to see if there are negative consequences that come from the corrections.

If we move on to vignette and distortion we find a tiny amount of barrel distortion which required just a +2 to correct for. It is both minimal and linear, so it corrects fine but would also be fine uncorrected in almost every application.

Vignette is another story. I had to add a +71 to correct for the vignette. That’s not as bad as the 50mm F1.4, but it isn’t great! The correction profile is able to make a clean correction of the vignette, though I will note any lens with high levels of vignette will result in some less clean corners when shooting at higher ISO values.

We’ll move on to inspecting our test chart.  This test has been done on a 45MP Nikon Z8 sensor.  I use a high end tripod and two second camera delay to ensure vibration doesn’t affect images.  Here’s a look at the test chart that we will examine at high magnification:

If we take a look at crops (at roughly 200%) at F1.8 from the center, mid-frame, and lower right corner, we see a very strong center and mid-frame (contrast is a standout), with a bit of fade very close to the edge of the frame.

What stood out to me above all was the really impressive contrast. It also has an Apochromatic look. I often shoot on this fallen jack pine because the lichen covered cones really challenge a lens’ ability to produce good contrast. Often you’ll see fringing and blooming on the textures because of high contrast transitions along with the complication of subject matter with a lot of depth. The 50mm F1.8 S kills it on this shot, with amazing microcontrast, no fringing, and extremely crisp delineation of details even at a pixel level.

If we zoom in to the pixel level, we see that the subject looks nice and crisp.

This gives you a lot of versatility to challenge challenging, high contrast scenes and trust that you are still going to get images that hold up under careful examination.

Let me give you an excellent case in point. I took this shot of a new emerging buds on a tree with intense evening backlighting. This is a scene loaded with potential image destroying elements. Intense backlight brings the risk of flare or ghosting, bright light coming through fine, filament like subjects gives the perfect recipe for fringing and a loss of contrast. The image looks fine when viewed globally…

…but it looks great when viewed at high percentage levels, as you basically need to view it at 100% to appreciate just how well the S Line lens is handling the very difficult subject in the narrow depth of field.

If you’re a fan of monochrome images with intense contrast, that’s very easy to achieve here.

Surprisingly, a mild stopdown to F2 creates a noticeable improvement to contrast.

Whereas I classified the sharpness at wide apertures “enough” in my review of the 50mm F1.4 Z, I would call the sharpness of the 50mm F1.8 S intensely good.

Stopping down further can essentially be reserved for two scenarios: 1) to increase depth of field or 2) to achieve maximal corner sharpness. It’s at F4 where corner sharpness becomes impressively good.

High contrast lenses like this are really fantastic for landscape images because they produce really inky black levels and well saturated colors. Here’s a case in point.

That image just wouldn’t look as good from a less corrected lens. There are just certain situations where a only a high contrast lens produces the kinds of images you want.

Expect the typical diffraction pattern on high resolution cameras where the image is a little softer by F11 and softer still at the minimum aperture of F16, though frankly I’ve seen much worse when it comes to diffraction.

Sharpness and contrast are nothing short of fantastic on the Nikkor Z 50mm F1.8 S – even six years after release!

I noted in my review of the Z 50mm F1.4 that one tradeoff for some uncorrected fringing can be a softer background. Often lenses with a little less contrast and a little more fringing are able to produce softer, more pleasing backgrounds. We’ve determined that the S Line lens is certainly more corrected…so does that come at the cost of softly blurred backgrounds and pleasing bokeh?

First we’ll look at specular highlights (bokeh balls).

We see an immediate advantage for the F1.4 lens – a lens with a larger maximum aperture is always going to produce larger, softer specular highlights than a lens with a smaller aperture because those specular highlights will be more out of focus. This is a byproduct of the shallower depth of field.

Lets zoom in a bit and take a closer look:

There’s some give and take here. The 50mm F1.8 S loses points for not only having smaller bokeh balls but also having more busyness inside them. There’s also an inner line or membrane that is lacking on the 50mm F1.4 Z. But the cheaper lens also has fairly pronounced fringing on the specular highlights that the better corrected 50mm F1.8 S doesn’t have. The winner is going to the lens whose flaws you find less objectionable.

What’s interesting (and that many photographers don’t know) is that the larger aperture lens will maintain some advantage even when the two lenses are stopped down to equal settings. If I stop the F1.4 lens down to F1.8, it still has larger specular highlights.

In this case, however, that advantage fades by about F2, where the two lenses equal out.

How about the rendering without specular highlights? That’s just one aspect of bokeh. We’ll start with a scene that I know will render well (a lot of depth, not too many hard edges, etc…)

The results are somewhat surprising. Yes, where there are specular highlights, they are larger and softer on the F1.4 lens (at F1.4), but frankly I don’t see a lot of difference overall in the two images.

What’s more, while we all know by this point that the microcontrast on the F1.8 S is far and away better at a pixel level, when viewing at this global level the F1.4 lens doesn’t look like it has lower contrast levels.

In another unexpected twist, I found that when I stopped the F1.4 lens down to F1.8, that I actually felt like the F1.8 S did a better job of managing the defocused areas nearer the edge of the frame. The F1.4 lens looks a little jittery.

That was unexpected.

In this second series I chose a more complex background with a lot of hard edges and a less preferential ratio of distance to the subject and then to the background.

This was another example that gave both an expected and unexpected result. On a global level the lower contrast of the F1.4 lens actually works here, making the background appear a little less dominant in the shot. When I zoom into the defocused area in most of the frame, the two lenses are very similar. But it was on the edge that I found the S Line advantage once again.

It reminds me of the design philosophy around the Nikkor Z 135mm F1.8 S Plena (my review here); a point of emphasis for Nikon’s engineers was to really work on the outer portion of the image. They took advantage of the bigger mount (and building a bigger lens) to allow them to have more consistent shading and performance in the corners. The 50mm F1.8 S doesn’t go quite to that limit (it also costs a third as much), but its clear that Nikon’s engineers did work along the edges of the frame to improve the rendering.

My chief concerns going into this review was that 1) the S Line lens wouldn’t have held up well being older, and thus wouldn’t look extra sharp compared to the newer F1.4 lens and 2) the rendering wouldn’t be as nice as an F1.4 lens. Neither of those things proved to be true. I think the rendering from the F1.8 S is just as nice as the newer lens.

There are going to be times that an F1.8 lens won’t look as defocused as what I would like, but in many situations the bokeh is just generally very nice.

Flare resistance was generally pretty good, though I could pick up a little flashing if the sun or light source was right out of frame (it’s a little easier to demonstrate in video).

Ordinary flare resistance was pretty good, however, with minimal amounts of ghosting blobs or loss of contrast.

Color more impressed. This lens is better than I expected, particularly considering how long its been around. I was impressed with the images I was able to produce with the lens. It feels like an easy lens to reach for those family moments you want to capture, for walking around when you feel like shooting 50mm, and for portrait work in this range.

You can check out more photos by visiting the image gallery here.

Conclusion

I still can’t say that Nikon’s overall marketing strategy with their primes at key focal lengths makes sense, at least in a conventional way, but I can at least understand why they did the original S Line F1.8 primes. F1.8 is not a typical maximum aperture for any premium lens save perhaps an ultra wide angle or a longer telephoto like a 135mm, but Nikon chose to make some lenses that could be both premium in performance and reasonable in price. If they’d made F1.4 lenses, they almost certainly would have priced more like Canon or Sony’s F1.4 primes. This way a lot of people could afford a higher end lens, even if the maximum aperture wasn’t particularly sexy.

And, at least as far as the Nikkor Z 50mm F1.8 S goes, the performance is pretty sexy. It is incredibly sharp and contrasty and retains a very nice rendering even if the depth of field isn’t as shallow as a faster lens. If you want to go crazy, there’s the Nikkor Z 50mm F1.2 S…but you’ll be spending a whopping $2100 to get it and have to tote around a nearly 1100g 50mm lens.

The 50mm F1.4 Z is actually less of a threat than I expected it to be. Nikon did a good job of leaving a lot of daylight between the two lenses in terms of performance, so I think the three main advantages of the 50mm F1.4 Z are the lower price, brighter maximum aperture, and having a separate control ring. But the 50mm F1.8 S does win basically every other metric. It’s much sharper and better corrected, has slightly better autofocus, and manages to even render slightly better. It’s probably the best 50mm F1.8 lens that I’ve ever tested. I suspect the main challenge will come from a company like Viltrox, who will have a 50mm F2 from their AIR series, a 50mm F1.4 from their PRO series, and a 50mm F1.2 from their LAB series on Z mount probably by this time next year, and surely one of those lenses will be fairly competitive. I’ve wondered at times why people seem to love this lens so much, as on paper it isn’t particularly impressive. But now that I’ve used it, I get it. This is a great lens, and still well worth considering in 2025 (particularly when it goes on sale!)

Pros:

• Great price to performance ratio
• Has a nice build
• Weather sealed
• Autofocus is fast enough to keep up with action
• Video AF works pretty well
• Good up close performance
• Excellent wide open sharpness
• Truly amazing contrast
• Bokeh is nice
• Flare resistance is solid
• Low distortion

Cons:

• Having just one ring seems limiting
• Marketing confusion

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