Nikon Plena lens teaser debuts on YouTube

UPDATE: Nikon has announced the Plena lens.

Nikon has published a video teaser for a new lens called Plena, which is due to be announced on Wednesday, 27th September. While not much is known about it at this time, the yellow-coloured font is similar to that used by Nikon with the Nikkor Z 58mm F0.95 S Noct and a nod to the Zeiss cine primes.

The new Plena lens therefore is almost certainly aimed at the cinematography/filmmaking crowd and targeting the rental houses. While it could feature AF, if it is a cinema lens it is likely manual focus only and expensive (upwards of £3.5K more likely above £5k).

Judging by the emphasis on the blur disks in the video, the lens may be a medium telephoto with close focusing capabilities and feature what Nikon used to call “defocus image control” (control of the out-of-focus regions; in front and behind the focus plane) – found on the AF DC-Nikkor 135mm f/2D and 105mm f/2D  introduced in the 90s.

Canon has a similar model in its RF lens range, the Canon RF 100mm F2.8 Macro IS USM.

While I don’t like postulating too much, my thoughts are that it’s a Z-mount version of the AF DC-Nikkor 135mm f/2D, possibly with an F1.8 or F1.4 maximum aperture.