I've long shied away from superzooms, largely because what they give you in one hand – in the convenience of not having to change lenses – they take away with the other, with their distinctly average image quality. Besides, the whole point of an interchangeable lens body, such as a DSLR or mirrorless camera, is the ability to change lenses to suit the situation that you're shooting, right?
Well, there's one superzoom that changed my mind: the Nikon Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 VR. It offers the convenience of a standard and a telephoto zoom in one, covering the focal range of both 24-70mm and 70-200mm lenses in one fell swoop, but with image quality that rivals separate optics.
How so? It's all thanks to the innovative Z-mount. When we first started testing Nikon's Z-mount lenses, we found the sharpness results were off the charts. Quite literally: our sharpness scale, measured in 'line widths per picture height', topped out at
2500. Back in the DSLR days, this gave us plenty of headroom, as it was rare for a lens to exceed a figure of 2000 or so, and anything above 1500 was considered exceptionally sharp. But the very first Z lens that came through our labs, the Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 S, smashed right through the 2500 ceiling, giving us cause to recalibrate the Y scale up to 3000.
Not long after, some Z primes exceeded even this figure, so we had to up the scale again, to 3500.
As you'll see in the center sharpness graph above, the Z 24-200mm superzoom exceeds the 'exceptionally sharp' 1500 figure right the way across the zoom range up to f/16. And that is not too far off the sharpness of the very sharpest pro-level 24-70mm f/2.8 and 70-200mm f/2.8 F-mount DSLR lenses.
Of course, the Z-mount equivalents to these pro lenses are even sharper still, but these are extreme levels that only our technical lab tests can differentiate between; to the naked eye, sharp is sharp.
The upshot is, the Nikon Z 24-200mm is the best superzoom in the history of superzooms, bar none, and is the top pick in our Nikon superzooms buying guide. And call me lazy, but at the end of the day, sometimes I really can't be bothered to change lenses unless I absolutely have to.
