A fast 135mm prime changes how faces, backgrounds, and light behave, and small flaws get loud at f/1.8. If you’re a portrait-focused photographer choosing between a flagship lens and a cheaper alternative, this matchup decides whether the premium buys visible gains or just peace of mind.
Coming to you from Matt Irwin Photography, this meticulous video puts the NIKKOR Z 135mm f/1.8 S Plena head-to-head with the Viltrox AF 135mm f/1.8 LAB using a side-by-side rig that keeps the variables tight. Irwin runs two cameras at once, with the lenses only about 6 inches apart, so you’re not comparing two different moments or two different lighting shifts. He keeps long takes on purpose, with adjustments happening live, so it’s harder for any “best frame” bias to creep in. You see bokeh highlights at different focus distances, then a backlight test straight into the sun with no hoods, which is exactly where some lenses start to look confident and others start to look nervous. He also frames the whole thing around price, calling out that one lens sits around $1,000 and the other around $2,000, so every difference has to earn its keep.
The bokeh test is not a quick montage, and that’s the point. Irwin manually pulls focus at measured distances so you can watch how highlight shapes change as the focus plane moves, including moments where the Viltrox highlights skew more “lemon” shaped toward the edges. He repeats the idea across multiple distances because one pretty frame does not tell you how the lens behaves when you actually work a scene. Then he pushes into backlight and talks through focus speed, noting that the Nikon tends to snap in faster in his runs while the Viltrox can show a small pulsing behavior in certain conditions. If you’ve ever shot wide open with bright haze, specular water, or harsh sun and felt AF confidence drop, the way he stages these scenes will land.
Sharpness shows up in two ways here: obvious edge behavior and the kind of difference you only see when you stop pretending you never zoom in. Irwin calls out that wide open, the Nikon looks cleaner on the edge in his example, then he stops down to f/8 and checks again with both lenses in the same framing. Later, he hunts for purple fringing under conditions that make it easy to appear, and he notes a tiny amount on the Nikon in one instance where the Viltrox looks cleaner, which is not the direction most people expect. He also points out that both lenses look extremely close in many frames, to the point where you’re forced into pixel-level nitpicking if you insist on declaring a winner from one still. You see him acknowledge how hard it is to make lens testing perfectly scientific when the camera positions are separated by only a few inches but the subject is far away.
The part that will influence real shoots is not just the optics, it’s the way the lens behaves as a system. Irwin says in-body stabilization seems to work better with the native lens, and the handheld segment is included specifically to make that visible instead of theoretical. He also does a run-toward-camera test to see whether tracking sticks, and he ties that to the “conversation” between lens and body rather than pretending it’s only about glass. Along the way, he shows how focus point placement on fine texture can change outcomes, even when both setups are set to single-point AF, which is the kind of detail that explains why your hit rate can swing from “easy” to “why is this missing” in the same spot. The video stays in motion because Irwin wants you to see transitions between frames, with footage captured on bodies like the Nikon Z9 and a quick check-in on the Nikon Z8. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Irwin.
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