The NIKKOR Z 24-105mm f/4-7.1 is Nikon’s latest attempt at the do-it-all full frame zoom that stays small, light, and relatively cheap. If a single lens lives on the camera most days, this one raises a very specific question: how much performance do you give up to get that kind of range in such a lightweight package?
Coming to you from Christopher Frost, this methodical video puts the NIKKOR Z 24-105mm f/4-7.1 through the kind of tests that actually reveal where a “cheap but convenient” zoom wins and where it quietly costs shots. Frost starts with the practical stuff that decides whether you’ll enjoy using it: mostly plastic construction, a plastic mount, no included hood, and no optical stabilization in the lens. You also get a control ring you can assign to exposure settings, and manual focus that works precisely but feels a bit slow through the focus motor. There’s also a video-friendly note that’s easy to miss when you’re shopping: focus breathing is kept to a modest level, so framing doesn’t lurch every time focus changes.
The image tests are where the lens starts sounding like two different products depending on what you mount it on. Frost tests on a Nikon Z8 and you can see the lens look impressively sharp in the center at the wide end, then slide toward “fine” as you zoom longer and the aperture narrows. At 24mm, the middle looks crisp even wide open, while the corners lag a bit and show visible color fringing. Around 50mm, the center stays very sharp, but the corners don’t really tighten up even when you stop down, which matters if you expect edge-to-edge detail in landscapes. At 105mm and f/7.1, the look shifts again: sharpness and contrast come across as average, and stopping down doesn’t magically rescue it.
Then Frost flips a switch that most reviews gloss over: turning off in-camera corrections to show what the optics are doing before the camera cleans them up. The wide end shows heavy distortion and strong darkening in the corners, the kind that can make an uncorrected raw file look broken at first glance. Zooming toward the middle reduces the distortion, while the long end brings pincushion distortion back along with noticeable vignetting. If the workflow depends on profiles and corrections anyway, that might not scare you, but it’s still useful to see how much the camera is being asked to fix.
The more interesting twist is close focus, because it’s the lens’ “wait, what?” feature. Frost finds the best close-up results around 50mm, where magnification gets genuinely fun and sharpness holds up even at the maximum aperture. Push to 105mm for close-ups and the quality drops hard, which is the opposite of what many people expect. He also checks how the lens handles bright lights and finds flaring more obvious than you’d want from an everyday travel zoom. There are smaller details worth catching in the video too, like when purple fringing shows up on bright points of light, when it fades, and what kind of sunstars you can realistically get as you stop down. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Frost.
