A few weeks ago, I received Nikon’s new Nikkor Z 17–28mm F2.8 lens to capture some sample photos. While I was willing and able to do so, mother nature had other plans, giving me dreary day after dreary day for two weeks.
Thankfully, my brother had a wedding coming up, so I held off until this past weekend to throw the lens on a Nikon Z7 II (also provided by Nikon for testing with this lens) and snapped some shots throughout the event. The above gallery showcases an array of lighting scenarios at various apertures and focal lengths.
Overall, my experience with the lens was a pleasant one. This is my first time shooting with a full-frame Nikon camera (DSLR or mirrorless) and the lens seemed to be a solid wide-angle pairing with the Z7 II. Autofocus was incredibly fast from what I could tell and I don’t ever remember hearing the AF motors at work.
I’m not a fan of Nikon omitting a physical AF/MF switch, as I’ve become accustomed to on nearly every other lens I’ve shot with, but Nikon’s customizable ‘i’ menu did make it fairly straightforward to switch between autofocus and manual focus. And while the control ring does double as a manual focus ring, it was incredibly narrow and didn’t feel great to use.
That said, this lens is designed to be mainly used with autofocus and to that end, it excels. It’s also incredibly light for the fast F2.8 maximum aperture is offers. So much so that when held alongside Nikon’s Nikkor Z 24–70mm F4 S lens, this one almost felt hollow inside.
Feel free to peruse the above gallery and leave comments on the individual images. No processing was done on any of the JPEGs aside from standard sharpening and image corrections per Capture One’s profile for this lens. There are also Raw images you can download and look at as you see fit.
