Re: Nikon Zf as a platform for adapted/native manual focus lenses
RomanMF wrote:
Yeah, towards the end of the night I turned off the AF and gave the MF with green box confirmation a shot. It worked pretty well. I did find the box would jump between yellow and green quite rapidly. It felt slightly more unstable than continuous AF, but when it was green, it was absolutely in focus.
I'm still looking for a digital solution to shoot my M lenses. I thought it would be the M EV1, but it was mostly a miss for me. The ZF is cool, but it's my partner's, and I just bought it for her as a gift 😅
I still totally think Leica should make one of these for the SL. It's got limitations, but so do their other accessories, lol. Charge a crazy markup for it and profit! They like money over there!
Mystik wrote: RomanMF wrote:
It performed a lot better than I thought it would. It's pretty fast, not native fast, but fast. This was also my first time using the Nikon ZF, so it's hard to know whether the AF performance is specific to the Nikon ZF or this adapter setup. I'm going to assume the adapter. I was shooting wide open, or close to it, for most of the event due to location lighting conditions. This was the first time I was using the Simera 28 on a digital body.
It would never fail to focus, at worst it would sometimes pick the "wrong," eye, or be on the bit of hair behind the eye and not the eye. This was rare and actually happened in great light the times it did. It was snappy and worked with continuous AF quite well. I'm sort of stunned that this exists tbh. If I was Leica, I'd totally make something like this for the SL line and charge people $1,000 for it, lol.
matoqui wrote: RomanMF wrote:
I'm going to attempt to shoot an event tonight with a Nikon ZF and a M-mount lens using the Techart TZM-02 adapter. Wish me luck!
Would you be so kind as to share your experience with us? Thanks!
Great set Roman! I've had similar succes with the Techart LMEA9 on my Sony a7cr, and have even used the adapter for some event and wedding work. It works surprisingly well so long as you are aware of that it is kind of slow and moving across long focal distances but is very reliable at making small adjustments. Apply a little rangefinder mentallity of pre-focusing to get the adapter in ballpark range before you to take the main shot. So long as you aren't shooting something moving rapidly across different focal ranges, it works great...including when I used it with the 75 Nokton.
I prefer the MF/RF process for the engaging shooting experience. That to me is the whole point of M lenses. This adapter feels like cheating hah but for use cases where you need to focus quickly with a high hit rate with M lenses, this is a nice option
I think if the M EV1 implemented focus confirmation like the ZF it would be perfect. I've not used the M EV1, but I do have a Visoflex 2 on the M11. The whole magnify to focus process is not great and this is why I migrated from Sony to Leica in the first place. ZF is cool but its kind of bulky. No goldilocks solution out there for sure hah
Aug 06, 2026 at 11:54 AM
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