p.1 #1 · Failure to focus FTZII, Z9, 600 FL and 180-400TC
I shoot college baseball for the University of Miami. The season began last Friday. For the last several seasons I have used two Z9's with a Z8 as a backup. My main lens is the 180-400TC with some use of the 600FL, both f mount lenses with two FTZII adapters. Friday night, neither lens would autofocus, so I had to use my Z9 with my 180-600 6.3 at iso 12800, which worked very well. Saturday morning, I remounted the two lenses again on the FTZII adapters and tried all three of my Z bodies and there was no autofocus. Other Z lenses work fine on all three bodies. I used Sony gear for the next two games.
The only difference from previous baseball seasons is that the firmware on all three Z bodies had been brought up to date prior to Friday night. I had not used this exact combination of bodies and lenses since baseball season ended last year in May. I use Z bodies and lenses for football, and Sony gear for other sports.
p.1 #2 · Failure to focus FTZII, Z9, 600 FL and 180-400TC
That is weird that all three are behaving the same. I’m not aware if there is a setting that could cause AF to be disabled for FTZ mounted lenses that would not affect Z. I don’t have my Z8 in front of me to play with.
Do you save your camera settings to a card? Maybe you could do a full reset on one body and reload the settings and see if that clears something out. Maybe a setting is glitched from the update.
p.1 #6 · Failure to focus FTZII, Z9, 600 FL and 180-400TC
My 500mm F4 FL autofocus stop work about a month ago.. and never came back so I asked Nikon for repair and it will cost around 1000 to 2000 euros to repair… at this point I don’t know if it’s worth it repair.
Sometimes the autofocus would come back by moving the manual focus ring around but now it’s just gone.
Anyone have repair any FL lens and it’s still working today?
Feels like this older lens have some type of trouble on the Z9 body
p.1 #7 · Failure to focus FTZII, Z9, 600 FL and 180-400TC
I was visiting rclewis recently, and did some more testing of his gear. The AF not working is not an FTZ / Z series camera issue. His affected lenses don't AF on Nikon DSLR bodies either...at least not initially. After doing some googling, and finding this thread:
I tried manually focusing the 180-400 from end to end numerous times, after which AF began to work, but not with 100% reliability. Again, it doesn't matter if it's on a D5 or a Z9 with FTZII. Once the AF motor has been "unstuck", it will AF on either camera, at least sometimes. The 180-400 isn't his only impacted lens. This issue seems to affect all of Nikon's final generation of F-mount super-telephoto lenses (180-400, 500mm F4 FL ED VR, 600mm f/4E FL ED VR) and based on the number of them owned by different people having the same issue, I would say it's caused by either a design or materials defect.
I'm curious if anyone has sent lenses back to Nikon for repair with this issue, and how that went? i.e. Can they repair them? If so, at what cost? And does the repair hold up, or will you have the same issue if the lens sits unused again for "too long"?
p.1 #8 · Failure to focus FTZII, Z9, 600 FL and 180-400TC
Thanks for the follow up. It sounds like the same issues that have plagued many of the ultrasonic motors across all generations. Nikon will only replace motors as long as they have stock. I think the same issues can eventually return. It does seem that sitting has some influence. Seems like some oxidation of the plate stacks in the motors. Have seen some posts where techs have restored function by cleaning/polishing the motor plates. However taking these lenses apart is its own chore and they don’t take the motor apart when cleaning since there is some precision calibration of the assembly that we don’t have tools for.
