I honestly admit that during the first round of testing in this category the Nikkor Z 135 mm f/1.8 S Plena played a joke on me. It's my standard procedure – I put the sun more or less in the middle of the distance between the centre and the corner of the frame in order to take photos of a series of reflections. Then I move them to the corner and then so far away outside the corner to make all visible artifacts and contrast loss disappear. A result of such a series of photos both at the maximum relative aperture and on more pronounced stopping down I present below.
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It's clear that the complex optical construction with as many as 14 groups of lenses and a huge front element made themselves felt. The performance is far from perfection but still the results you can describe as being on the borderline of medium and high.
At first glance it seems that moving the sun just several degrees outside the frame corners will make all problems disappear. The last photos of each of the series show images devoid of any artifacts and properly contrasted.
My mistake – I trusted that assumption and didn't continue moving the sun a bit more outside the frame. I did it later, by accident, during a session with a model en plein air. Photos against the light, with the sun situated really far away from the frame, made me catch a distinct colourful arc that was able to destroy many shots and one of them I present below. In such a situation you simply have to put the hood on unless you like such effects and you want to use them creatively. Of course it doesn't change the fact that such a slip-up shouldn't have happened in a lens of this class.
