Earlier this year, Nikon introduced a new version of one of its professional workhorse lenses: the Nikkor Z 70-200 F2.8 VR S II. We’ve now had the chance to spend some time with it, shooting portraits, firefighting aircraft and more. You can jump straight to the gallery to see the results for yourself, or read on to see what we thought about how it feels to use and the images it produces.

In Use

Three of the Z 70-200mm F2.8 VR S II’s states. Left: its smallest and lightest configuration (998g / 35oz). Middle: the lens with the cosmetic bayonet cover (1028g / 36.3oz). Right: the lens with its foot and hood (1248g / 44oz).

The big (or rather, not so big) selling point of this lens is its size and weight. Without the tripod foot and cosmetic sleeve installed, it’s only 998g (35.2oz); the lightest full-frame 70-200mm F2.8 for a mirrorless system. With that said, I typically preferred to use it with the tripod foot; it’s Arca-Swiss compatible, making it very easy to mount to a tripod, and the lens isn’t quite light enough that I feel terribly comfortable toting it around without a solid handle to remind me that I’m carrying a camera attached to a lens, not the other way around.

Even with the foot, the lens’s weight is competitive with that of its lightest competitors, and is a substantial improvement over the original. The lens’s center of gravity is also remarkably consistent as you move through its zoom range, so you don’t have to shift your grip as you change focal lengths.

The tripod foot and decorative bayonet collar are toollessly removable using a button and a bit of a tug.

In terms of features and controls, this lens has most everything you could want, with the exception of the top-display from the previous generation that some – though not I – may miss. And as someone who has long disliked clickless control rings, it’s good to see Nikon providing the option to click or declick the one on this lens, even if I’d still personally prefer a dedicated aperture ring.

I also appreciate the ample number of function buttons, which are available no matter what orientation you’re holding the lens in. The manual focus and zoom rings are also satisfying to turn, and the latter is a relatively short throw, letting you move through the range quickly if need be. While the pattern on them provides plenty of grip, I do wish they were just a bit softer, but not enough that I’d be willing to accept any trade-off in durability.

The tripod collar can be freely rotated, making it easy to switch from portrait to landscape, even when mounted on a tripod. I do wish it had detents or clicks at 90° intervals, though, as those make it easier to tell when you’re perfectly aligned.

Nikon says the lens has an upgraded autofocus system, and I found it always kept up with the camera, snapping into focus very quickly. It never felt like the lens’s autofocusing motors were bottlenecking the body, or like I would have gotten a shot if only it had moved a bit faster.

When working in concert with a stabilized sensor, this lens’s optical stabilization is among the most impressive that I’ve used in a full-frame zoom. It’s so effective, in fact, that it can occasionally be a bit difficult to precisely recompose your image with it on, though I only really noticed that in a few situations.

Optics

With the lens wide open at F2.8, there’s noticeable vignetting at the corners throughout its focal range (though it’s most noticeable at the long end). It mostly clears up by F4, though you’ll see further improvements going to F5.6. While this can easily be corrected using the lens’s profile, this will come at the cost of having fractionally more noise visible in the corners of the image.

You can gain a small sharpness advantage in the corners by stopping down, too, but in our experience, this lens is very sharp corner-to-corner no matter what focal length or aperture you’re shooting at.

70mm	F2.8	F4	F5.6	F8.0
200mm	F2.8	F4	F5.6	F8.0

I find the lens’s bokeh to be very pleasing, rendering even busy backgrounds relatively smoothly. The specular highlights are also quite clean, without distracting aberrations, which is exactly what we’d want to see in a professional lens destined to shoot a lot of weddings with trendy lighting.

Nikon’s latest coatings are also quite impressive. There was one time when I was shooting pretty much directly into the afternoon sun, which produced a somewhat washed-out image, but things improved as soon as I was shooting even a little off-axis.

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The lens makes use of minor software corrections for geometric distortion – there’s a very mild amount of pincushion distortion at the long end and barrel distortion on the short end – but we wouldn’t consider using them mandatory. And, indeed, neither does Nikon; with the 70-200mm F2.8 VR S II attached, the camera allows you to turn off Auto Distortion Control, which isn’t the case with every Z mount lens, such as the Nikon 24-120 F4 S.

Sample Gallery

Please do not reproduce any of these images on a website or any newsletter/magazine without prior permission (see our copyright page). We make the originals available for private users to download to their own machines for personal examination or printing (in conjunction with this review); we do so in good faith, so please don’t abuse it.

Thank you to Nikon for the loan of a Nikon Z8 to capture this gallery. All images were processed using our standard lens workflow in Capture One, with the manufacturer’s distortion correction applied but no correction of vignetting.

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