Nikon Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR Review

Introduction

Ease of Use

Weighing in at 1955g (4lbs 5oz) excluding the tripod collar ring and measuring 31.5cm (12.5in.) in length, the Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR is a large and heavy lens, understandable given the large focal range of 180-600mm that’s on offer.

It feels well balanced when using it with a large sized camera body like the Z9 body that Nikon provided for us to test it with, as shown in the product photos.

The internal focusing lens design means that the lens does not extend at all when zoomed out from 180mm to 600mm.

Build quality is outstanding for what is after all a professional-level lens. With a mostly metal construction, the Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR feels very solid in your hand, and it commendably has a metal mount. Note that this lens also has a weather-resistant design to help protect it against dust and moisture.

There are two switches on the left hand side of the Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR lens. The top one is a switch for choosing between auto-focusing and manual focusing.

The bottom one is a focus range limiter switch with two settings, Full and Infinity-6m.

The built-in 5.5 stops of image stabilisation are important when hand-holding such a long lens, and the system thankfully works very well, ensuring that you can shoot at slower shutter speeds than 1/600th and still get sharp results (obviously depending on your technique).

Note that there is no external control on the lens for turning image stabilisation on or off.

Towards the end of the Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR lens, you’ll also find the customisable function button, labeled as “L-Fn”. In the main camera menu, you can choose from one of 21 different functions, including AF lock, metering, subject tracking, framing grid display and so on.

There are a further three unmarked buttons on the same ring which will duplicate whichever setting you assign to the L-Fn button, ensuring that you can always access one of the buttons no matter how you’re holding the lens.

Towards the lens mount end of the Nikon Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR lens, there’s the first (and smallest) of the lens’ three rings. This lens can be customised, too. By default it is set to control aperture, but you can also change it to adjust exposure compensation or ISO. Alternatively you can have it set to do nothing at all.

At the centre of the lens, you’ll find the focusing ring. It has no hard stops at either end of the focusing ring, so it’s harder to know you when you have reached infinity focusing. The ring has just enough resistance to make fine adjustments to manual focusing, without having too much give.

The final ring is the zoom ring, which has a short zoom throw rotation of just 70°. It has focal lengths marked at 180, 200, 300 400mm, 500mm and 600mm.

All three of the lens rings are ridged, helping you feel them by touch when shooting through the viewfinder. They also help to add to the high-quality and sturdy feel of the Nikon Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR lens.

This lens has been designed to be as quick and quiet as possible when autofocusing. That makes it ideally placed for both stills shooting and video.

Shooting with the lens proves it to have almost unerringly accurate and rapid autofocus in the majority of situations, with barely any hunting at all. It’s also impressively quiet, too.

An inbuilt tripod collar is included, towards the lens mount end of the lens. You can position it anywhere you like around the Nikon Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR S lens, allowing you to attach the camera to your tripod or monopod in whatever position you need it.

A removable foot is also included, which has two different tripod attachment threads (one at the front, one at the back). You can use the dots on the tripod collar to match up with the lines on the lens itself to perfectly align it, too.

Also included in the box is a large lens hood (HB-109), which fits onto the Nikon Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR’s 95mm filter thread. The hood locks into place and is reversible so you can reduce the size of the lens for transporting it and storing it at a smaller size.

Focal Range

The Nikon Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR’s focal range provides an angle of view of 13° 40′ at 180mm and 4° 10′ at 600mm.

180mm

600mm

Chromatic Aberrations

Chromatic aberrations, typically seen as blue or purple fringes along contrasty edges, were not especially apparent in our test shots, only appearing in very high contrast areas.

180mm

600mm

Vignetting

With the Nikon Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR lens set to its maximum aperture, there is some light fall-off in the corners, which you’ll need to correct in post-processing.

180mm

600mm

Distortion

There’s some mild pin-cushion distortion at either end of the focal range in both the JPEG and Raw files, but it’s not too pronounced.

180mm

600mm

Macro

The Nikon Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR offers a minimum focusing distance of 1.3m (4.27ft) at the 180mm focal length and 2.4m (7.88ft) at 600mm, with a maximum magnification of 0.25x. This enables you to capture some good macro shots particularly when shooting at the 600mm focal length.

Bokeh

Bokeh is a word used for the out-of-focus areas of a photograph, and is usually described in qualitative terms, such as smooth / creamy / harsh etc.

In the Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR lens, Nikon have employed an iris diaphragm with 9 rounded blades, which combined despite the rather slow maximum apertures results in fairly nice bokeh in our view, especially at the longer focal lengths.

We do realise, however, that bokeh evaluation is subjective, so we’ve included lots of examples below for your perusal.

Sharpness

In order to show you how sharp the Nikon Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR lens is, we are providing 100% crops on the following pages.