The Problem With Using the Lens Control Ring for Exposure Compensation on Nikon Z Cameras

Every time I turned my Z8 on, my exposure was off by a stop. I thought I had “Auto Reset” enabled, but I missed one critical detail about how the lens control ring behaves. Here is the fix.

Screenshot of Nikon Z8 menu system for Lens Control Ring Exposure Compensation

Text & Photos By David Coleman

Last Revised & Updated: February 9, 2026

Filed Under: Lenses, Mirrorless Cameras

Topics: Nikon, Nikon Z8

I MAY get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

I’ll say upfront that I recognize this is an extremely narrow issue. It is something that maybe no one else will ever run into.

But on the off-chance that someone else does, I want to save you the frustration I had in troubleshooting it.

The symptom: Mysterious underexposure

The issue was that every time I turned the camera on, the Exposure Compensation was already set to -1 or -2 stops. I kept risking underexposed images right out of the gate.

Naturally, I checked my settings. I had “Easy Exposure Compensation” set to Auto Reset. Theoretically, this should have zeroed out my exposure settings every time the camera turned off or went into standby. But it wasn’t working.

The culprit, it turns out, was a conflict between the Lens Control Ring and the Auto Reset function.

I encountered this on the Z8, but this likely affects other Nikon Z cameras with similar firmware architectures.

Nikon NIKKOR Z 50mm f/1.2 S Lens. Photo by David Coleman " havecamerawilltravel.com — On this Nikon Z 50mm f/1.2 S lens, you can see the narrow control ring closest to the mount point. Photo by David Coleman / Have Camera Will Travel

The setup: Assigning the Lens Control Ring

I like using the rear dial for exposure compensation, but I thought it would be useful to also use the smooth, click-less lens control ring for quick adjustments in tricky lighting.

It’s easy to set up. You just go to:

Custom Settings Menu > f2 Custom controls (shooting)

Then scroll down to the lens control ring option and change that to Exposure Compensation.

But I’ve found there’s a catch, and it took me a while to figure out.

The conflict: Easy exposure compensation reset

I prefer my exposure settings to “clean the slate” automatically when the camera turns off. This ensures I don’t accidentally start a new shoot with settings from yesterday’s sunset.

There’s an option for that on the Z8:

Custom Settings Menu > b3 Easy exposure compensation > On (Auto reset)

Screenshot of Nikon Z8 menu system for easy exposure compensation settings

However, the camera makes a distinction between “Easy Exposure Compensation” (which uses the rear command dial) and assigning Exposure Compensation to a Control Ring.

The Catch: The Exposure Compensation assigned to the lens control ring is NOT affected by the auto-reset option.

It turns out the control ring doesn’t reset. It stays where the last setting was. This seems odd to me since these control rings are “fly-by-wire” unlimited rotation rings — they don’t have physical hard stops like old-school aperture rings, so there is no physical reason they couldn’t be reset by software.

Because I don’t want to manually reset my EV comp every time I wake the camera, I have deactivated the lens control ring functionality for exposure compensation and gone back to using the default rear dial.