Meike 85mm f1.4 AF Z Sample Images

These sample images are intended to go along with my detailed hands-on review.

But here’s the short version . . .

I’ve been shooting with the Meike 85mm f/1.4 AF Z, a full-frame autofocus lens for Nikon Z-mount (also available for Sony E-mount). At $470, this Chinese third-party lens is considerably more affordable than Nikon’s own offerings in this focal length.

The lens is optically very good. It’s sharp, even wide open at f/1.4. The bokeh falloff is smooth, and specular highlights are nice and round thanks to the 13 aperture blades. There’s some vignetting at larger apertures, but it’s subtle and smooth — something I actually quite like.

My biggest quibble is the autofocus performance. The AF speed is just OK — smooth and quiet, but a bit slow. More importantly, the focusing reliability has room for improvement. At closer distances (up to around 10 feet), it often takes a few tries to lock on. When focusing closer to infinity, I’ve found it occasionally front-focuses slightly. It’s most reliable at medium focus distances, which happens to be the sweet spot for portrait photography anyway.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed shooting with it. The optical quality is strong, and the price is attractive. But the autofocus performance gives me some hesitation for critical work like wedding or event photography. For portrait work at typical distances or general creative shooting, it should work well.

High-resolution sample images

Here’s the gear I used to shoot these photos.

I’ve been using the Nikon Z version on a Nikon Z8. These were all shot in RAW and lightly processed in Lightroom Classic.

I generally have not applied much in the way of optical corrections to these, and there’s no direct lens profile in Lightroom for it. If you want to use a lens profile (I haven’t here), I did find that the profile for the Samyang AF 85mm F1.4 RF gave good results (more on that here).

And you’ll notice that many of these are shot wide open or close to it. That’s deliberate. After all, a core feature of this lens is its large maximum aperture; if I’m not going to shoot at that much of the time, I may as well get a slower (and probably less expensive) lens.

You can click on each image for a full-size version for a closer look.

Price & availability

Check the current price and availability at:

• B&H Photo

You can also buy it directly from Meike, although I’m not the only one to be confused by what the import tariff implications and responsibilities are for products shipped directly from China these days.