MF lens options with Nikon Zf

[Jürgen Pfeiffer]

I recently read an article by Batian K. on philipreeve.net in which he described the Nikon Zf as the best full-frame camera for MF lenses. In it he mentioned the use of an ETZ adapter which sounded very promising.
I switched all my Nikon AIS MF lenses to non-cpu adapters because the lenses are equipped with Dandelion chips and the IBIS of the camera does not work with them.
I have now created a small table of different MF options with the Zf. Maybe this can be helpful for someone. If someone can add further options or configurations such as Zeiss ZF2 lenses to the table, I would really appreciate it.

[Birna Rørslett]

There are even more options and settings.

The manual Voigtländer lenses for 'F' mount with built-in CPU band attached to FTZ/FTZ.2 behave like the native Z-mount Voigts. This also applies to the few manual-focus Nikkors with F-mount and factory CPU, such as 45mm f/2.8, 500mm f/4P, and the PC/PC-E Nikkors. Since there is only basic electronic feedback, and no camera-controlled aperture stop-down lever, for the F lens on the FTZ adapters, we lack the opportunity to dial in the lens aperture from the camera side. Definitively not a deal-breaker as that layout should have been abandoned by -Nikon long ago for such lenses. Rotate the aperture ring and all is well.

Some years ago we had third-party bespoke CPUs for lenses with F-mount, and these were emulating a factory CPU for a manual Nikkor. Lenses with these CPUs work just like the Voigtländer optics listed in your table. There is green dot focus confirmation, full transfer of EXIF data(a zoom lens has a CPU setting corresponding to the mid of its zoom range, which worked very well on the Nikkor zooms with aperture variation +- 1/3 EV). I sold many hundreds of these CPUs with mounting kit, and 'Dr.Lens' Erik modified many lenses for me or other users. I think there still are about 200 such items left in my cup boards.

[paul hofseth]

As a firm neoluddist I use the focus enlargement, like to set the aperture myself and never cared for Exifdata. However, the useful stabilization needs to be set.

I do not worry about the out of focus shapes and ideally everyhing in a picture should be pin sharp with high contrast. Colours are determined more by pixelfilters & demosaic-algorithms than lenses -provided that they do not have grave construction errors.

Hence, the only points I can add to the call for Zeiss info to the table above, is that my old Contax glass does not have any focus confirmation, exif data delivery and only manual aperture setting. But  I find the Zeiss 60mm makroplanar S quite good even if its conjugate optimum  is designed for flat field  A-4 originals while it does focus to 1:1.  Out of lazyness I do most often use Birnas 24-70mm made for the Z, otherwise my Leitz lens library also gets some use. In general, any high quality optic will perfom its best on the recent Nikons (provided that one keeps a stict watch on the unruly arbitrary focuspoint and spot metering  mover and the wobbly exposure adjustment which should have had a disable option )

p.