Intro

In the past few years I switched camera systems a lot, I tried a few brands, always different models. Nikon Z6, Z50, Sony A7R II, A7C, A7IV, Lumix S5 II. But in between these mostly FF models I always went back to the one brand that started it all for me. Fujifilm.

My first camera was the Fujifilm X-T30, which was an amazing little camera. Just perfect for beginners. Then after trying out the Nikons, I got my first X-T3, which I bought 3 times in total, in between trying out the Sony A7R II and A7C. Then I tried out the Lumix S5 II after which I got the first X-T5, which I also bought 3 times until this point. The current one being the third. Got the A7 IV this spring for the Japan trip, and we arrive to August 2025, and this blog’s subject, the Nikon Zf.

Now you might be thinking, that’s a lot of switching and a lot of money wasted because of switching, and you would be right. This was not a cheap process, but I tried reducing the cost by getting my gear on the used market as much as possible, and also open box with nice discounts, while also making use of 1 and 2 months return policy periods in some cases (there were 1 camera and 2 lenses I think I was able to return within that window).

This journey led me to Nikon Zf, and this my friend, might just be the perfect camera for me. Let me explain!

Design & Build Quality

I want to start with this because it’s a great introduction to the camera, while it explains one of the main reasons why I think it’s the perfect camera for me.

First and foremost, this camera is quite large, but not too big. It’s quite heavy, but not end of the world. I wont specify the dimensions, because you can look them up, and they won’t tell you much anyway. You should try to find it in a store and hold it in your hand to feel it. The closest you can do online is to use camerasize.com to compare it to other cameras you might now the size of. But the weight is important to know, and that’s 710g with battery and SD card. Which is not heavy but only because the grip is not good. But let’s leave that topic for later.

Now, it has this size and weight thanks to the excellent materials and build of the camera. The magnesium alloy top plate, and structure, brass dials, metal details and such, makes this camera feel amazing compared to any other camera I had before. The Sonys the Nikons the Lumix I had before, all of them are really well built, but this Zf feels just that bit better. The only part that brakes this all-around excellence is the bottom plate and the battery door, which feel plasticky and cheaper. Not bad, but not the same as the rest of the camera.

Now all of that I just said is objectively true. The camera feels good because it is built well with good materials. You can not argue that. What you can argue with though, is the design which is very subjective.

I think it’s beautiful. Even more so than the Fujifilm X-T5, or the X-E5. I think the Zf is the best looking digital camera of the mirrorless era. But that’s just me, you might not like it as much.

Handling

And to not be so positive about it, let’s talk about handling.

This is one of the most important thing about a camera because if you don’t resonate with the piece of gear you are trying to use, then it can have all the best tech and features, you will not want to use it. But if you like how it looks, and how it handles and how it feels in the hand, you might overlook some of its quirks or faults.

The Nikon Zf feels amazing in the hand if you look at the quality of it, but it falls a bit short when you look at it from the ergonomics perspective. If you use the camera with 2 hands all the time, then you might not have any issues with it, because you can reach and use every button without any issue or any strain building up in your fingers/hand. But if you like using your cameras with one hand, and it’s an important factor for you to be able to access the most important features with only one hand, then this camera by default is not the best.

Let’s start with the fact, that it has a small grip that’s basically unusable. It does not have a thumb rest type of formation on the back side. The AE-L/AF-L button is positioned to far to the left, so your thumb does not fall on it naturally. The front button is decently positioned, but when holding the camera only with one hand, you try to balance it between your fingers, so you don’t really have a “spare finger” to press that button with. However, while holding the camera in hone hand you can quite easily use the shutter button (thank god :D) and rotate the front dial. But that’s it.

For me personally, this means that for the first time in a long time, I went back to using the shutter button as the focus button as well as the release button. Which feels a bit weird, and removes some of the advantages of using back button focus… But I think, I can solve this issue by getting a grip extension accessory, and potentially a thumb rest thingy that I can stick to the back of the camera. We will see how this will affect the usability.

The lens is mounted the other way around compared to any other cameras I know. The button to release the lens is also on the other side. And this is weird at first, but you can get used to it.

The other thing that is related to handling, although maybe more related to usability I guess, is the fact that this camera does not have Banks, or Custom User Settings. Which means you can not quickly switch between predefined modes that you set up like for example:

Low Light mode - with Max ISO 25600 / min shutter speed 1/50th second / single point AF / single shot drive mode
Normal Scenario mode - Max ISO 12800 / min shutter 1/250th second / continuous AF / Continuous Low drive mode
High action mode - Max ISO 25600 / min shutter 1/1000th second / continuous AF / Continuous High drive mode

It wouldn’t be the end of the world if there would be a way to quickly switch the minimum shutter speed for Auto ISO at least. By using a button shortcut to the setting, or some sort of Custom profiles. Or having 3 Auto ISO / Min Shutter speed slots, that you can switch between with a dial like how you can on Fujifilm cameras.

Fujifilm despite not having the PASM dial (which on most cameras there are custom slots too) has both 7 Custom settings that you can switch by pressing a button and rotating the dial. And it also has the 3 Auto ISO slots with min shutter speed, that you can change between with one of the command dials when you set the ISO dial to C (command dial option).

So I beg you Nikon, even if you won’t implement any custom profiles, or Auto ISO slots, that you then at least give us the possibility to access the Minimum Shutter Speed setting via a shortcut button, so that we could quickly change it on the fly.

Performance

The performance of the camera is an important factor when you consider buying one. But depending on you and your needs, you might not need the best in the class. Now for me, I want good image quality, but I don’t need 50 Mp. It would be nice to have somewhere between 30-40 but 24.5 is good enough. Even more so when you consider what a great low light beast this camera is and how nice the high ISO noise is. It’s not that film grain style noise like how the Fuji X-Trans sensors produce, but it’s still nice and also it has a lot less noise compared to Fuji’s APS-C sensors because it’s FF.

The high speed continuous shooting mode in lossless compressed mode is around 7-8 fps, which for me is more than enough. Doing High + basically disables AF (not really, but really…) so I can’t consider that as a usable feature. Why would you want to shoot 14 fps on a still subject? I mean maybe capturing a flying humming-bird that stays in one place? But then it moves a bit and it’s gone out of focus…

The autofocus performance is also really good. I think the A7 IV was a tad bit better, but not by much. I never had a Sony with AI focus, so I can’t comment on that, but considering the A7IV was a bit better, then I assume anything with AI from Sony must be even better. Low light focusing is also amazing, I did not had a situation when the camera couldn’t focus, at least not yet.

The only point I want to make here, is that even though the camera is fast, and works excellent in finding the eyes, faces, whatever subject it is using the Auto Subject detection, I find it front focuses quite a lot. I always have usable images from a burst, but I also always have front focused images, where the camera focused on the eyelash, nose, fur and not the iris itself.

The menu performance is also quick and smooth. The main screen is bright and sharp enough, the viewfinder is beautiful. I never had a camera with over 3.69M dots, so I don’t know how much better those look, but what I know is that the Nikon Zf’s viewfinder is the best from all the cameras I had until now even though most of them have the same 3.69M dot resolution.

And last but not least video. I will not comment on this part, because this is one thing I actually not care at all regarding this camera. I don’t want to shoot video with it at all, and so I did not take any with it, thus I can’t comment on it. Please feel free to look at other reviews where they talk about the video specs and performance because I’m most likely to omit that part of the camera even going in to the future.

Comparing this to the X-T5, the Nikon Zf is better in most ways. The image quality is better, even with the 40Mpx, the Fuji feels soft no matter what I do with it. Lightroom handles the Fuji files not the best… SOOC Jpegs are nice, but still don’t have that crispiness that the Nikon has. Autofocus, don’t even talk about it… Fuji is good in general, but I’d rather have Nikon’s front focusing, then the unreliability of the Fuji AF. You can get by with Fuji, don’t get me wrong, but why should I when I have something that’s better?

Screens are good, but Nikon’s are better. Menus and features are let’s say on par. Nikon has some customisability that Fuji doesn’t and Fuji has some that Nikon doesn’t. So it’s a wash. Just like the battery life, which is good for around 500 shots in my experience for both cameras (with a normal use, and not shooting high speed all the time - that can result in thousands of photos before the battery dies, but it will die in a few hours. Compared to my usage, which is photo walks around cities and such, in which case in can go all day, and I can take around 500 shots).

The only thing that Fuji wins, is basically burst speed, because it can shoot 15 fps with autofocus. But I don’t care about it, I never used 15 fps anyway.

Lenses

They say that a camera is as good as the lenses that are available for it. And while Nikon has a lot of good glass, the lack of an extensive third party library of lenses might be a dealbreaker for some. Compared to Sony, and in 2025, to Fujifilm too, Nikon only has a few Tamron and Viltrox lenses for FF. They are good, and I’m glad they exist, but I’m sure a lot of people would like to have some more cheaper options from the likes of Sigma and Samyang/Rokinon, and also more from Tamron. But Nikon does not allow anybody to create lenses that compete with their own… Because they know that Tamron and Sigma are capable of making better glass for less money.

But, that being said, depending on what lenses you want, you might just find your place in the Z mount family. In my case, it means I bought the 24-200mm for general purpose travel lens. This is the do it all, be prepared for everything lens. Then I bought the 28m f2.8, which is their best option for a small inconspicuous street lens. And I already ordered the 50mm f1.4, which in my opinion is kind of an underrated gem.

It has a beautiful rendering of the background. It’s strikes a perfect balance between the perfect 50mm f1.8 S lens, and vintage glass. While keeping a really good sharpness in the middle at 1.4, or having almost perfect sharpness stopped down. I haven’t seen many people talk about it, and those who talk about it, say it’s good but… There is always a but. Now, I don’t know you, but I think this lens fits the Zf perfectly, considering that the Zf is a retro style camera, so the vintage character of the images suits it well, but it’s also a modern really capable digital camera, so the lens being sharp and fast focusing also sits perfectly with my expectations.

And last but not least I keep the 180-600mm in my wishlist, for those travel occasions when a Safari trip or an Iceland trip might come up. It’s not an urgent buy, so I won’t talk about it yet. The time for that lens will come eventually.

Comparing this to Fujifilm, where I had all of these at some point:

XF 23mm f2
XC 35mm f2
XF 35mm f2
XF 50mm f2
XC 15-45mm
XF 23mm f1.4 WR (new one)
XF 55-200mm
XF 16-50mm f2.8-4.8 WR
XF 18-55mm f2.8-4
XF 16-80mm f4
Viltrox 23mm f1.4
Viltrox 27mm f1.2
Viltrox 56mm f1.7 Air
Viltrox 25mm f1.7 Air
Samyang 12mm f2 AF

You can see that I had a lot more lenses from third party, which are all good, and for the price of one expensive Fuji lens you can buy 2-3 third party lenses instead. Which for a beginner is a lot more tempting then getting the best in terms of quality…

Colours & Editing

From my extensive experience with Fujifilm, and why I always went back to this brand over and over again, boils down to 2 things really. The shooting experience that the handling and design causes is one of them, and the other is the colour rendering.

I’m not really an artistic and creative person by default. I like doing photography as a creative exercise so that I help develop this part of me. Although, I’m not able to identify and explain what is it that I like in how Fujifilm renders colours, tonal contrast, highlights and shadows, but I know that there is some sort of magic involved in it, because not other camera brand comes close to it in my honest opinion.

BUT, and this is a big one, I always wanted to have all the traits i just mentioned, but also have the crispiness and sharp look of the other cameras. This crispiness I believe comes from the fact that all the other cameras use Bayer sensors, and Fuji has this softer feel because of the X-Trans pixel arrangement.

And here comes the best part I found with the Nikon Zf. Have you heard of Cobalt Image picture profiles? I heard of them before, but I did not want to pay 100 bucks for getting a base profile for one specific camera and then the Fuji Profiles on top of it. Until now that is! And I’m really satisfied with the results I can get out of the Nikon files.

It really allows me to get the colours of Fujifilm, also softening the transitions between highlights, mid tones, and shadows (this needs a bit of a tone curve adjustments too but it really looks nice). While keeping the crispiness of the Bayer FF sensor. In my opinion it’s almost perfect. I’m sure it can be even better than this somehow with a GFX camera for example but let’s be real… that’s a bit out of budget for most of the people out there…

An extra help for getting the softer tonal transitions is to use the Active-D Lighting setting in the camera. This is basically similar to what the Dynamic Range setting does on Fujifilm. It underexposes the image with a certain amount to protect the highlights, then brings it back in post and also applies a bit of highlight reduction and shadow increase.

Active-D Lighting Normal is like DR200% for Fuji, and it’s probably the perfectly balanced setting.

For those who don’t know, this setting affects RAW files too, because basically what this does is actually underexposing the image by 1/3rd of a stop, and then bringing it back and applying the highlights and shadows settings in Lightroom. And Lightroom does this AUTOMATICALLY when importing the images.

I already created 5 presets that I really like for different situations. And in the meantime I’m also trying to transform these presets into ones based on Adobe Color, so they would work with multiple camera brands for those who don’t want to spend the money for Cobalt Images profiles. Not sure how well I will be able to recreate the presets but I will try.

And as an extra info, I think Fujifilm Film Simulations and Recipes system is better then Nikon Recipes. And it’s because Fujifilm colors and the default settings that you can change, really give you a JPEG output that is just simply beautiful. While Nikon Recipes are a lot more difficult to create, and even though there are more settings to change and play with then Fujifilm Recipes allow, the sliders still don’t affect the images how I would like. The effect of each slider is very different compared to Lightroom, and I can’t get a similar result to what I would be able to get from Lightroom. And the best way to see this is, when you make a change in NX Studio to a raw image, after which you import that image to lLightroom, most of the settings carry over and get applied automatically in Lightroom too. But the edited image you see in Lightroom is horrendous… So, no.. I decided that I use the Standard Picture Control in camera to have a decent look on the screen, and edit everything with the new approach in Lightroom. Luckily as I said, I was able to create some really nice presets with Cobalt Image profiles as the base, so I can quickly do the editing.

LEFT SIDE Nikon ——— RIGHT SIDE Fuji

Conclusions

So during this 2 week period, I was able to find my next long term camera and for the first time I don’t feel bad for selling and returning my Fujifilm gear.

So from now on, you will see the Nikon Zf on this channel, and so if you are interested in my journey in becoming a Full Time travelling photographer and Youtuber, please consider subscribing. You can also find more images of mine on instagram where I just decided that I will shift gears, and not only slowing down but also changing the strategy. You can find all the details about this in one of my latest posts on @wfs_wanderframe.

But before I go I wanted to mention a few extra details about the cameras:

The Nikon Zf has a micro SD card slot instead of a full size SD card like the X-T5. If you are not a professional photographer doing client work, where a real duplicate of the raw files is crucial, I don’t think this is an issue. I actually think, this approach is really good from Nikon, because I can put a microSD card in the camera, where I save the JPEGS only, and I can forget about it like it’s internal storage.
I like the X-T5 3 way tilting screen better, and I wish the Nikon Zf would have the same type of screen. But I can live with the fully articulating one too. At least I can take selfies if I want :)
The buttons while really good quality, they feel just a tad mushier than the ones on the X-T5. Also there are more buttons on the X-T5 and the X-T5 has pushable front and back command dials.
The quick access to the B&W mode on the switch is awesome. I started shooting in B&W, with a B&W mindset instead of just converting images in Lightroom.
I like the top dial lock mechanism of the Zf more than the X-T5 click toggle lock. It makes working with the dials a lot quicker and safer

And that’s it for today, I hope you liked the video and that you found some good info about the Nikon Zf. Maybe you now understand this camera a bit more and can make a better decision on weather to buy it or not.

You can find the written version of this review on my blog if you want to check it out, but there are other posts in my blog that might interest you. I will also post some reviews of items that are not making into a video, so please consider subscribing to my newsletter if you want to get a weekly update on what happened on my blog and also on my youtube channel. I promise you that I will not spam your inbox 😁

Thanks for watching, you know the jazz, subscribe comment like, and see you in the next one!

Nikon Zf Review - VS Fuji X-T5 | Which will I keep?