Nikon's Low-Light Trinity, Tested After Dark

Nikon now has three autofocus f/1.2 primes for its Z mount, a 35mm, a 50mm, and an 85mm, and each one weighs more than a kilogram. If you shoot for yourself instead of for clients, you have to decide whether any of them earns a place in a bag you actually carry every day.

The 35mm was the surprise. Jack Wang of Bokeh Therapy spent a final night on city streets with the Nikkor Z 35mm f/1.2 S, Nikkor Z 50mm f/1.2 S, and Nikkor Z 85mm f/1.2 S, weighing each against the slower glass he already owns. He has a day job and shoots almost entirely after dark. For him, f/1.2 means faster shutter speeds, lower ISO, and motion frozen under street lamps. Some separation at 35mm is easy, even at f/2, but a dreamy look usually requires moving in close, where wide angle distortion makes faces and shapes less flattering. At f/1.2, he could stand about 10 meters from an overhead street lamp and still watch the background fall away.

His close-up test puts the 35mm f/1.2 against the Nikkor Z 35mm f/1.8 S and the Nikkor Z 35mm f/1.4 at roughly 30 cm from a tiny toy camera, with crops at 400%. The depth of field at f/1.2 is so thin that details 2 to 3 mm apart land on opposite sides of sharp. The big lens is also sharper wide open than the f/1.8 S is at f/1.8. To catch up, the f/1.8 S has to stop down to f/2.8. All three are sharp enough that the gaps only show at heavy magnification. For Wang's own 35mm work, where the space matters more than any single face, corner detail and the way the lens draws light sources count for more. The ARNEO Coat diffuses street signs and lamps with a soft glow, without ghosting or a drop in contrast. Wang considers that look distinctive to Nikon right now.

Fast primes have spread across every mirrorless mount over the past several years. Canon put the Canon RF 50mm f/1.2L USM out early in the RF system. Sony followed with the Sony FE 50mm f/1.2 GM in 2021, and Nikon's 35mm arrived in 2025 to complete its set of three. Meanwhile, current sensors handle high ISO well enough that an extra stop of light rarely makes or breaks a night exposure the way it once did. That pushes the case for f/1.2 toward rendering: how a lens separates layers, how it draws a neon sign, how much background blur you can get from a comfortable distance. Depth of field depends on subject distance as much as on aperture. A faster lens lets you step back, keep perspective natural, and still melt the background. If most of your frames are taken from across the street, a wider aperture changes the picture far more than it does at arm's length, where even an f/1.8 lens blurs plenty. Balance changes with barrel shape and how the glass sits inside, so two lenses of similar weight can feel very different on your camera.

The 50mm is the oldest of the three and still carries the OLED info panel on the barrel. At night, Wang found it more distracting than helpful because it lit up when he didn't expect it. It edges out the Nikkor Z 50mm f/1.8 S for center sharpness. Its fall-off makes it easy to place blur both in front of and behind a subject, a simple way to layer a frame. The 85mm breaks the pattern. Nikon makes no 85mm f/1.4 for Z mount, and the Nikkor Z 85mm f/1.8 S is sharper wide open than the f/1.2. Some cat's eye bokeh appears toward the corners, which the Nikkor Z 135mm f/1.8 S Plena is designed to avoid. The 85mm is about 100 g heavier than the 35mm, yet its thicker barrel spreads the weight so evenly that it handled best of the three. Its compression also pulls foreground objects up against the subject, putting things side by side that you'd never notice together with your own eyes.

How Wang weighs that 85mm rendering against the size of all three lenses, and what he shot them on, is all in the video above.