A Technical Review of the Nikon 58mm f/.95 Noct

This is an outstanding lens. I’ve worked with f/0.95 lenses before, and they’ve all been severely optically compromised. You can’t say that about the Nikon 58mm f/.95 Noct. It’s sharp across the frame wide open, and amazingly so stopped down to f/1.4. It has few aberrations by any standard, and amazingly few for such a fast lens.  It focuses down to half a meter. The bokeh is close to perfect.

What’s not to like?

The price, for starters. At eight thousand bucks, it’s out of the impulse buy territory and into the don’t-tell-your-spouse-how-much-the-darned-thing-cost region.

Then there’s the size and weight. It tips the scale at an even two kilograms, or 4.4 pounds. It’s four inches in diameter and six inches long. It takes an 82mm filter. When you’re handholding it, it feels like a fast medium telephoto, but optically it’s not much longer than a normal 50mm full-frame lens. It has a hefty tripod collar, and you’re going to need it.

For some people, the capper will be that there’s no autofocus. It’s got a focusing ring with almost a 360-degree throw, which is nice, but the depth of field (DOF) at f/0.95 is so shallow that the ring feels twitchy sometimes.

It’s a statement lens. It shows what Nikon can do when they put their minds to it, and it shows what the Z mount can allow lens designers to do. Like the recently teased 1000+ horsepower Corvette ZR-1, it is intended by its manufacturer to make people feel good when they buy lesser products. That doesn’t make it useless in and of itself, but the space inside the optimal usage envelope is cramped. You can kill flies with a 9-pound sledge, and you can take family snaps with the Noct, but who would want to do that?

Sharpness

Here’s a 250%-magnification crop of an on-axis Siemens star 25 feet away with the lens wide open on a Nikon Z7 body, developed in Lightroom with sharpening set to zero:

The lens is laying down fairly high contrast detail at frequencies well above those that the sensor can properly resolve.

Stopping down to f/1.4 makes things even crisper:

It looks to me like this lens could do fine on a 200+ megapixel sensor!

The lens retains about this level of sharpness until f/5.6, where diffraction cuts into its ability to render detail. The lens is still very sharp at f/5.6, though.

In the corner, wide open:

There’s quite a bit of illumination falloff, but once more, the corners are unbelievably sharp. Note from the above that radial and tangential sharpness appear to be about the same. This is a striking accomplishment on a lens this fast.

At f/1.4 in the corner:

Even better, and less illumination falloff.

Corner sharpness improves slowly as the lens is stopped down further, reaching its greatest sharpness at f/4 or f/5.6.

Illumination Falloff

Since illumination falloff has come up, I’ll report on it next. Here’s what it looks like wide open as developed in Lightroom with default settings:

It gets better as you stop down:

I examined the raw files and found that the illumination falloff from center to corner at f/0.95 is one stop. For f/1.4, it’s 0.78 stops. For f/2, the falloff is 0.44 stops. When the illumination is corrected for exposure, on axis at f/0.95 the illumination is a third of a stop less than you’d expect it to be from looking at the f/2 image.

Focus Curvature

Focus curvature is excellent, as shown in this wide-open shot using Roger Cicala’s quick focus curvature test:

The green behind the main plane of focus and magenta in front of it indicates a bit of longitudinal chromatic aberration (LoCA), but it’s not bad at all.

Bokeh

If you’re using a lens like this anywhere near wide open, the bokeh is going to be important to you most of the time, because probably much of the image is going to be out of focus. One way to get a good handle on the far out-of-focus bokeh is to image a defocused point source at various places in the frame.

Here is a set of three images composited with the lens wide open using the mechanical shutter.

And here are six more composited images wide open:

You can see that there is some mechanical vignetting at the edges and corners, but remarkably little vignetting for such a fast lens.

If we stop down to f/1.4, the mechanical vignetting virtually disappears:

There is no onion ring bokeh. The flatness of the illumination within the circles of confusion is almost ideal.

Not surprisingly, images made wide open look very good:

It’s been a privilege to be able to work with such a capable optic. However, I’m not lining up to purchase one for my own use. I might rent one if I had a project that needed its unique capabilities. If I were into wide-field astrophotography, I’d definitely be interested in owning one.

Author: Jim Kasson

I’ve been a photographer since high school, and an electrical engineer all of my professional life. The two things came together for a while. From 1989 until the middle of 1995, I worked as an IBM Fellow at the Almaden Research laboratory south of San Jose, CA. For those six years, my principal area of research was color management, color processing for digital photography, and color transformations such as gamut mapping. At other times in my career, I researched speech recognition and speech bandwidth compression and developed data acquisition and process control computer systems, telephone switching systems, and data communication systems. I retired in 2000, and for the last 22 years when I’m not serving on NFP boards unrelated to photography, I’ve been spending most of my free time making photographs.