I noted in my recent review of the Nikkor Z 50mm F1.8 S 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 have started to create 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. The most recent of those is the Nikkor Z 35mm F1.8 S, which was originally released in late September 2018. Does it hold up as well as the 50mm F1.8 S? 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 35mm F1.8 S here.

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Nikkor 35mm Comparisons

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AI SUMMARY: The Nikon Nikkor Z 35mm F1.8 S lens is a durable, compact, and reliable option that offers strong optical performance, especially in sharpness and contrast. It features weather sealing and excellent close-focus capabilities, making it versatile for various shooting situations. However, its higher price point and limited feature set for a premium lens might pose drawbacks, particularly given the competition from newer or more affordable alternatives. Overall, it remains a very capable lens that suits many shooters, but it doesn’t fully stand out in its price range.

Strengths:

• Robust, weather-sealed build
• Reliable autofocus and close-focus distance
• Excellent sharpness and contrast across the frame
• Compact, lightweight, and versatile design

Weaknesses:

• Higher price relative to performance
• Limited features compared to other premium lenses
• Noticeable vignetting and some chromatic aberration
• Less exceptional rendering than the 50mm F1.8 S

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As with the 50mm focal lengths, the Nikkor 35mm options have a clear separation between the F1.8 S and the F1.2 S…but then the waters get murkier between the F1.8 S and the newer F1.4 lens. The latter two lenses are within a few milimeters of each other in their dimensions, and the weight difference is only 45g (the F1.4 version is slightly heavier). The F1.2 S, on the other hand, is massively larger, some 64mm longer and weighing nearly 700g more! Camera Decision does a great job of presenting the difference in scale:

That’s a BIG difference!

The thought behind the F1.8 S-Line lenses was to produce high quality optics at an affordable price, and while that makes these lenses somewhat unconventional, they do make a lot of sense once you start to use them.

I always enjoy a 35mm lens. It’s a excellent general purpose focal length, and this lens provides a lot of solid attributes – reasonably compact, very good image quality, and consistently good autofocus.

Like the 50mm F1.8 S, the 35mm F1.8 S 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 35mm F1.8 S Build and Handling

The 35mm F1.8 S is slightly smaller and lighter than the 50mm F1.8 S. It measures 73mm (2.87″) in diameter and 86mm (3.39″) in length. The 50mm F1.8 S is 76mm (2.99″) x 86.5 mm (3.41″) in length. It’s reasonably compact and easy to bring along.

It weighs in at 370g (13.05oz), which is 45g lighter than the 50mm. I consider any lens under 400g to be lightweight. 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 8 seal points overall in this diagram. Nikon’s language around the weather sealing is fairly confident. They say, “Extensively sealed against dust and moisture, especially around all moving parts of the barrel.” (Emphasis mine).

The feature set of the 35mm F1.8 S is fairly brief. There is an AF | MF switch along with the S-Line badging near the lens mount…and that’s it.

There is just a single ring on the lens barrel. This is an area of differentiation from the newer 35mm 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.

If I set the control ring to power aperture, I was able to do a smooth aperture rack without visible steps. They’ve done a good job with with. I like the aperture control better for that (in video) than in stills.

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 62mm, which is shared with the 50mm F1.8 S, 50mm F1.4, and 35mm F1.4. 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, so here’s a picture of the lens hood from Nikon’s website.

The 35mm F1.8 S lags can focus as closely as 25cm, which bests the 35mm F1.4 (27cm) or 35mm F1.2 S (30cm). That gives us a 0.19x magnification, which is very useful. It’s interesting to note that the 35mm F1.2 S gives the highest magnification of the trio (0.20x) despite having the longest minimum focus distance, which tells me that there must be some focus breathing at work here.

The up close performance is good, though the plane of focus that isn’t entirely flat. That’s less of an issue in the real world, however, and I got nice up close results.

The 35mm F1.8 S has held up fine in terms of build quality and the execution of what is there, though most premium lenses now feature a separate aperture/control ring and a custom button. The current price of the 35mm F1.8 S sits at right under $850 USD (2025 has been a volatile year for prices), leaving a $250 gap between it and the cheaper F1.4 version. That may be enough to shift more buyers in the direction of the F1.4 lens. If you’re on a tighter budget and are flexible about focal length, I do feel like the 50mm F1.8 S provides a stronger value (it’s MSRP sits more than $200 cheaper for some reason).

Autofocus for Stills

Like the 50mm F1.8 S, 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 moderate action without difficulty on either my Z8 or the Z5II that I was testing at the time.

Eye AF was nice and “sticky”, grabbing the correct subject and locking focus accurately.

The previous image was on the Z8, but I saw similarly good focus on the Z5II.

It’s spring, so I did a lot of shots isolating spring blossom and new growth, and got well focused results throughout.

Here’s another example:

I could hear a light “schnick” sound as focus went back and forth during my focus speed test. I don’t recall hearing something similar during my test of the 50mm F1.8 S, so the focus motor may be a bit louder in this application.

Still, focus accuracy was good throughout my tests and I never lacked speed to do what I wanted, so I’m happy with AF here. I often associate STM focus motors with lower to mid-tier lenses on other brands, but Nikon’s STM motors have all seemed to function pretty well.

Video Autofocus

I’ve learned that I need to be a little more proactive within Nikon’s menu options to get the Video AF results that I want, as I can’t rely as much on the default settings as I might on Sony or Canon cameras.

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. This behavior was basically identical to what I saw from the 50mm F1.8 S.

Focus breathing isn’t as well controlled as what I saw from the 50mm F1.8 S. It’s a bit more obvious.

My “hand test” where I alternately block the camera’s view of my face with my hand and then remove it went well, exhibiting more confidence and no pulsing relative to what I saw in just the autofocus pull test.

I also found that the lens was nicely stable for doing on screen presentations. It stayed locked on my eye as I spoke without any unnecessary focus changes or pulses.

Where the focus motor shines best is when making transitions in the real world world. It is able to pull off nicely damped focus changes that seem fairly cinematic to my eye.

Image Quality Breakdown

The Nikkor Z 35mm 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 52.5mm due to the 1.5x crop factor on DX. This almost certainly has produced some crossover appeal for this lens, as both focal lengths are very popular. The optical design here is 11 elements in 9 groups, including 2 ED (extra low dispersion) elements and 3 aspherical lenses. The MTF chart shows a very even performance across the frame with only a slight drop in the extreme corners.

The 35mm F1.8 S isn’t quite as impressive as the 50mm F1.8 S either on paper or in practice. I found the 50mm F1.8 S results to be almost apochromatic in appearance, but I would consider the 35mm F1.8 S very good but not great.

That being said, it does show a clear advantage over the newer 35mm F1.4 in terms of pure sharpness. 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.

Unliked the 50mm F1.8 S, none of the performance here lies above that threshold, but it also has a roughly ten point advantage relative to the F1.4 lens all across the frame. It definitely is capable of delivering crisp real world images, however.

The 50mm F1.8 S has an optical performance that is defined to me above all by its intense levels of contrast. The 35mm F1.8 S doesn’t quite match that, in part part because it does struggle with a bit longitudinal style chromatic aberrations. Not that they are bad (at all), but it doesn’t have quite that same degree of perfect correction. You’ll see some on my test chart after the plane of focus:

You’ll also see it on shiny surfaces like the outlines of the metal frame of my vintage Pentax.

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

This latter is important on wider angle lenses like this because lateral CA can have a negative impact on landscape style images. I didn’t notice any issues with lateral fringing in landscape style images (particularly those with bare branches near the edge of the frame).

If we move on to vignette and distortion we find a small amount of barrel distortion which required just a +5 to correct for. It is very linear and corrects easily enough.

Vignette is another story. I had to add a +100 (maximum) to correct for the vignette. This is the great challenge of the Nikon Z mount generally; its large diameter does make illuminating the edges of the sensor more difficult.

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, a bit of a dip to a still strong midframe (this being probably the weakest area relative to the 50mm F1.8 S), and corners that I think still mostly look good other than being dark even after the correction profile is added.

I personally compose a lot of images in the rule of thirds mid-frame zone, so that different in mid-frame contrast is where I most see the difference relative to the 50mm F1.8 S. I find that midframe contrast levels at F1.8 are good but not exceptionally good like the 50mm.

Stopping down a bit will increase that contrast level, though, and this image, for example, shows that gorgeous deep contrast levels in the color gradations that I associate with the 50mm F1.8 S.

There is slightly more contrast at F2, but a more significant advantage comes in the center at F2.8, which is now exceptional. I can noticeable improvements in the mid-frame and corners, but I wouldn’t call the midframe exceptional until F4:

and the corners until F5.6.

By F5.6 you can have sharp, deeply contrast images across the frame.

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.

So, my conclusion is that sharpness and contrast are good, but not as exceptional as what I saw on the 50mm F1.8 S.

But how about the overall rendering from the lens? Does it have that “special sauce” that makes images look exceptional?

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

There’s a very fine amount of green fringing around the edges of specular highlights, but nothing worth mentioning. Like the F1.8 S, however, the insides of those specular highlights are fairly busy. Not onion rings, but what looks like a microscope slide with bacteria on it. I found the bokeh balls on the 50mm F1.4 to be much smoother than those of the F1.8 S, and I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar is true of the 35mm F1.4, too.

General bokeh is fairly good, though. There’s perhaps a bit more hard edges than what I would like, but the overall look is fairly good.

What it is not is exceptionally soft and creamy. I’ve reviewed a number of the 35mm lenses on other platforms in the past year, and I’ve definitely seen softer, creamier backgrounds than this.

If I mount the Sony 35mm F1.4 GM and shoot at F1.8, the Sony definitely delivers softer looking backgrounds (less edges, more uniform).

I found that the Viltrox 35mm F1.2 LAB was even better…and that’s a lens that inevitably will be coming to Z mount and will probably cost no more than $200 more than the F1.8 S. Obviously it will be a much bigger, heavier lens, but if you’re looking for image quality, that will unquestionably be an attractive alternative.

This image I think looks fairly good, but all of the specular highlights definitely look defined.

My early morning grass shot that I like to capture during the more pleasant months looks good but exceptional.

What I did like, however, was a shot like this:

I feel like there is good 3D pop on the subject, and while the background isn’t strongly blurred out, it fades away in an unobjectionable way. That is in part because the transition zone is handled pretty well. It does become nervous or jittery.

Colors are nice and crisp. This shot of a camera looks very nice and clean.

This blue hour shot has very deep color saturation, but not in an unnatural way.

Here’s another where the image just looks very pure.

Flare resistance seems like a strength to me. Nikon’s coatings are doing a good job of thwarting ugly flare artifacts, which is true at large apertures…

…and at smaller apertures like F11.

What’s more, that sunstar looks fairly nice.

This is a solid lens optically. It has good sharpness, good rendering, but it doesn’t feel as exceptional to me as the 50mm F1.8 S. There’s no one area where it particularly stands out, and that fact that it retails at a higher price point is a somewhat counterintuitive relative to performance. I’m intrigued to test the less expensive 35mm F1.4, as while I know that lens will be a bit softer in terms of sharpness and contrast, it could potentially deliver nicer rendering. At the same time, however, I could also see some of the DNA that I loved from the 50mm F1.8 S in certain images. You can check out more photos by visiting the image gallery here.

Conclusion

As you’ve probably picked up, I’m a little less wowed by the Nikkor Z 35mm F1.8 S-Line than I was with the 50mm F1.8 S. That lens was much better in reality than it was on paper, and while the 35mm F1.8 S is definitely probably the nicest 35mm F1.8 lens optically that I’ve tested, the problem is that it is priced to compete with a number of 35mm F1.4 lenses. I suspect what some of those lenses start to arrive (like the scheduled Viltrox Pro 35mm F1.4), Nikon might want to consider discounting the price of a 7-8 year old lens.

In the meantime, however, once you’ve paid the price you’ll end up with an extremely competent lens. It’s got a sturdy (if simple) build, good autofocus, and a fairly strong optical performance. What’s more is that it is fairly compact and lightweight, making it an easy lens to bring along and one you can match with either FX or DX bodies.

The F1.8 S-Line lenses made little sense to be as an outside observer before I added Nikon to my review kit. They seemed like overpriced lenses due to the maximum aperture of F1.8, but the reality of the lenses in this series makes much more sense. They bring a premium performance at a mid-tier price, as similar lenses with F1.4 aperture would be almost certainly be priced well over $1000 (as equivalents from Canon and Sony are priced). So while F1.8 lenses may not be the sexiest options out there, these F1.8 S-Line lenses are pretty special for their ability to give more Nikon shooters a chance to shoot with better glass. That I can applaud.

Pros:

• Has a nice build
• Weather sealed
• Fairly lightweight for a premium lens
• Autofocus is fast enough to keep up with action
• Video AF works pretty well
• Good up close performance
• Very good wide open sharpness
• Bokeh is nice
• Flare resistance is very good
• Low distortion

Cons:

• Not many features for a premium lens
• Marketing confusion
• Heavy vignette
• More expensive than it should be

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GEAR USED:

Purchase the Nikkor Z 35mm F1.8 S @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

Purchase the Nikkor Z 50mm F1.8 S @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | The Camera Store | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

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Purchase the Nikon Z8 @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

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