Nikon Teases the Impending Arrival of Autofocus Z Cinema Lenses

Nikon has released a video teaser for what appear to be autofocus-equipped Z-cinema lenses. The company didn’t release much information beyond that, but the teaser follows a previous announcement made last year.

The only new information that can be gleaned from this announcement is that Nikon’s cinema lenses — which last year were announced to be a series of primes — will feature both autofocus and manual focus control.

“We cannot provide details yet but we are developing them in line with the needs of our target customers,” a Nikon representative tells PetaPixel.

Nikon has shown interest in making dedicated cinema lenses for the last couple of years.

“We have also begun considering Nikkor lenses for cinema. We are actively considering lens development that is in demand in the cinema market,” Keiji Oishi, from Nikon’s Imaging Business Unit and RED’s new CEO, told PetaPixel at the 2024 NAB show in Las Vegas. At the time, it had been less than a week since Nikon had officially acquired RED.

Since then, Nikon’s pace of engineering with RED has been lighting fast, despite the company’s insistence that customers should be patient as it would supposedly take some time to integrate the two brands. But over the last two years, Nikon brought its Z mount to RED cameras, launched a Z cinema lens, announced the ZR Z cinema camera, and released the more affordable V-Raptor XE.

Last September, Nikon announced that it would be taking its aforementioned “consideration” more seriously and would be developing dedicated cinema primes for Nikon Z mount. As mentioned the 28-135mm f/4 PZ, which is more of a hybrid lens than one made specifically with cinematic video capture in mind.

Back then, only showed darkened silhouettes of the lenses but a bit more is revealed today in the teaser above, including on-board controls and a closer look at the geared manual focus rings. Several frames show multiple lenses arranged in a ring, continuing to indicate Nikon intends to reveal these as a set.

Unfortunately, Nikon is not displaying these new cinema lenses in any way at the company’s booth at NAB. For now, the teaser above is the best look filmmakers are going to get.

Image credits: Nikon