Nikon Z8 Final Review: What's the Catch?

[Music] hello I'm Chris Nichols and you guys have recently called me your Peta Papa I will try to live up to that awesome title today we've got a brand new production Nikon Z8 and we are going to get testing this right away let's get to it So today we're starting our video I'm actually coming to you from inside the original grounds of Fort Calgary which then soon evolved into the lovely city that you see behind you and yes we've got a Nikon Z8 here full production but we're not going to be reviewing this quite the same way because we made an excellent video already on a pre-production Nikon Z8 and I really encourage you guys to watch that because that talks a lot about the specs and the features we're in Yellowstone National Park it's gorgeous the photos are better than anything we're gonna get today so you should definitely watch that and then watch today where we're going to talk about the things that we weren't able to test on that camera but we can now test on our final Z8 here's a little known fact did you know that Calgary does have a sister city it's not some adorable Village in Japan somewhere it's actually Quebec City right here in Canada very little known fact okay so let's actually get down to the testing that we want to cover so when we're in Yellowstone National Park we had Apple opportunity to shoot stunning Wildlife shots with really nice long lenses and actually did a great job unless it rained remainder snowed heavily that's the only thing we really found messes up the autofocus here but I haven't had an opportunity to at that point shoot a lot of portraits so here in Calgary I bought an 85 millimeter 1.8 and I went out and I shot odafest which is a local anime convention as well as just portraits and a running test of Jordan so first for more static portraits I found that actually the Z8 went right to the iris did a really good job I really didn't lose any shots where it was misfocusing in the wrong place so that was very impressive and much improved from what I've seen on you know the Z6 and z7 series of cameras but then we also want to do Jordan's running tests so here I used a 70 to 200 F 2.8 at 2.8 and I'm shooting in Focus priority autofocus continuous 3D tracking with human subject detection because that's how I would normally shoot a situation like that and actually the running tester did a great job even the Jordan's making weird faces and his eyes are sometimes closed and he's like growling like some sort of wild animal it actually did a fantastic job tracking him following him and so I really think the z8's autofocus is improved I like the way that the implementation is for 3D tracking it's intuitive and simple all in all it's a winner so one of the major changes from the z9 to the Z8 is that we no longer have dual CF Express card slots we have a CF Express and an SD card slot and we're very eager to test how that's going to detect our buffer shooting rates okay so Jordan can you just put like a nice black frame here you can put all the text there it'll be easy to read thank you so one of the big strengths the Nikon z9 was just how long it could shoot Raw photos at a blistering 20 frames per second without stopping on basically a thousand plus shots in a row it's really incredible and of course with the z9 you can do that whether you're going to one card or back up to both cards at the same time raw plus jpeg it's all really good and we're really going to test today the high efficiency plus raw mode because it's an efficient file but the quality loss is negligible so what happens we go to the Z8 well shooting here with the CF Express card of course we can again shoot a thousand shots wonderful you still have that capability but what happens if you need to rely on just the SD card alone so I do want to mention I'm using a Sony tough v90 card very fast and so let's get to our testing here when we did raw plus highest quality jpeg just to the SD card 20 frames per second we buffered out in about 33 shots I mean that's about what we expected when we went to just raw only no jpegs at all that did improve things we got up to 55 shots on the card before it slowed down but then we want to see what if we can use this as a backup so this is very interesting we wanted to go our raw files to the CF Express card and then just the high quality jpegs to the SD card and we only got about 45 shots Max and we just couldn't even break that even when we went just Raw photos only to both SD card and CF Express card we still buffered out around 45 shots so what this tells us is look okay shooting TSD card it's a perfectly viable option as long as you're not shooting fast bursts Wildlife sports that kind of stuff but if you really want to shoot that you absolutely want to get CF Express cards for this camera the other can conclusion we can come to is if you're the kind of person who wants to have backup where files are going to both cards at the same time the SD card slot is going to slow you down pretty much no matter what you do so our video seems to be turning into a bit of a history lesson here on Canada and just while I'm sitting on them look at the iconic red Canadian color the silver maple leaf motifs it doesn't get more Canadian than that okay these were built sometime in the last 100 years could be 10 years it doesn't matter either talk about the case okay sorry oh yes okay Jordan so let's talk about battery life on the Nikon Z8 this does use yes a smaller en el 15c not the gigantic battery getting the Nikon z9 and we're getting about 340 shots the super rating for this which is roughly half of what we'd expect on the z9 now that being said we know cipa is not very practical I can say when I was shooting out in Yellowstone I was getting well over 1200 shots keep in mind firing it very fast bursts before I had to change batteries out I mean that's pretty impressive but it's not going to touch with the z9 can do for battery life now I want to fully admit a mistake that I've made okay when we reviewed the Z8 we failed to point out the fact that it's missing some very important features from the z9 that are absolutely critical for photojournalists sports photographers working in the field this camera does not have an ethernet port it also does not have built-in GPS and these are things that actually are absolutely appreciated by a lot of people in the z9 Jordan and I don't use those features so we didn't really focus on it I should point out that there are workarounds for GPS and ethernet but they're not very elegant Solutions so I can use the snapbridge app on my phone and then I can take the GPS data from the phone I can then automatically embed it into the XF data on the files but that's slow and clunky and for ethernet I can go from USB to an ethernet adapter the nice thing is is that it has two USBC ports so I could be powering the camera through the power delivery port and still have something connected through the free USBC data Port that's great but then you're using dongles I mean first off the ethernet port locks in on the z9 whereas where the dongle here I mean I just hate dog I hate saying the word dongles I hate buying dongles I hate losing dongles I do like finding them again but then you know it's like they're gonna unplug I mean dongles okay fine sorry yo Gage running move back but anyways dongles suck okay so we're mid video here and I just want to take a second to implore you guys to subscribe to the channel if you haven't already we've been asking pretty much every week I know you're sick of it and anybody who has I really appreciate you have but there's still some holdouts so turns out on the internet if you show adorable pet photos people subscribe to your channel so I promise you if you click right now I will show you adorable pet photos of my brand new puppy penny so click it all right here you go as promised foreign [Music] quality here this camera shoots the exact same shots as an icon z9 but because it's an electronic only shutter there's a dynamic involved which some people are still confused by so yes on the z9 and Z8 you are going to have worse noise you're going to get more noise in the shadows you're going to get a little bit less dynamic range than the exact same sensor setup with mechanical shutter that we have in something like the Nikon d850 or Nikon z7 too and so if you absolutely need the lowest amount of noise or the best dynamic range those two cameras are the way to go however if we look at the fact that these cameras all have base isos of 64 we're getting more light than a lot of other brands contemporary high resolution sensors and so in that regard although there is a hit here compared to other brands it's still actually very similar and I think that most people you're not going to notice the loss of quality there it's not really going to impact you and I think it's important to talk about the evf here on the Nikon Z8 it's the same evf that we found on the Nikon z9 and I'll be the first to admit that when I first saw that it was 3.69 Million dots I thought oh compared to contemporary cameras that's very low and there are some downsides to that I mean it's a decent evf but certainly if I'm doing in playback and I want to zoom in or if I'm trying to manually focus with punch and more dots is better absolutely but there's more important things to evfs than just how many dots they have because the evf in here has first off no lag I mean if you're shooting sports Wildlife action especially on a mirrorless camera you don't have any sort of lag you don't want to have any sort of throwing off of your timing and this evf works great you can also boost the brightness on it quite significantly so if you feel like you just want a more bright vivid evf you can really push it here so I actually have learned to appreciate that even though we don't have that many dots we have an excellent tool for composing and capturing images here oh yeah I've got a uh got a good segue here okay so it's time to segue to Jordan Drake he's going to talk about the video features of the Z8 and I've got a perfect opportunity here because I don't know about you but when I see rugged men mounted on on horse I think about Jordan Drake I don't like that segue do it over no it was beautiful it was professional it was tasteful it was a great segue they all love it no cut to Jordan Drake everybody okay Jordan here to talk about the video performance on the Nikon Z8 which is filming me right now and basically everything I said in our initial review still stands and aside from the smaller battery there's very few compromises made compared to the higher end z9 but one thing I wasn't able to test both because it was very cold and it was a pre-production camera is overheating so I've got some extreme overheating tests planned now I did all of my testing in a controlled room temperature environment using a delkin black CF Express card to write these files and I thought I'd start with the most demanding so I went with the 8.3 k n raw at 60 frames per second Now using this I did get an overheat warning after recording 16 minutes but then I was able to record for almost 40 minutes before the camera shut down but remember that's close to two terabytes of data that I recorded and generally when you're using raw 60 frame per second it'll be for occasional slow motion shots in filmmaking or things like that I don't think it's a big problem what could be a bigger concern is even if you're not recording in raw and jump over to the h.265 4K 60 the oversampled mode then I got basically the same time frame on it after letting it cool down for half an hour I got 35 minutes there so very similar to the end raw actually slightly worse so if your entire project is in 60 frames per second and you need very long clip length you might want to shoot the sub-sampled option which you can toggle in the menus now if we drop down to slower frame rates whether it's 4K 24 raw or 4K 24 h.265 10-bit I was able to record over an hour and still didn't have an overheat warning on the camera so I don't think that's going to be a problem bear in mind though these are indoor tests at room temperature if you're planning to use it outdoors in direct sun your mileage will definitely vary so most situations I don't think overheating is going to be a major concern and I was also really happy to find that the usability of the formats from this since the z9 was first released have really improved the NRA implementation in DaVinci Resolve is very intuitive a Nikon has released a new lot for the N log in the z9 and Z8 that I find just gives much more consistent results where I had to do a bit more color correction with the old one there's still a little bit of room for improvement I did find the autofocus struggling when it was snowing heavily in Yellowstone and the in-body image stabilization can be a little bit jerky from time to time even when you're in sports mode but overall this is just an extremely compelling camera and even though the Canon EOS r5c is a more video optimized body if I had pick one to shoot my next project I would take the Nikon Z8 because the Nikon offers it's over sampled 4K 60p recording and I prefer working with n log to Canon C log 3. now I'm just hoping that we see a lot of these features trickle through the rest of the Nikon Z mirrorless lineup in their next versions so now that I've played with a production Z8 honestly I find that I love it even more than I did when I played with the pre-production because things like the autofocus seem to be very solid image quality is beautiful I just love the way it handles and you know yes for this price I think it's an excellent choice now a lot of people ourselves included are calling this a baby z9 and that does make sense because a lot of it's borrowed from the z9 all the technology and the capabilities however I do also think that they are not replacing the z9 I mean if you're a photojournalist who needs the most rugged body Dependable battery life ethernet connectivity GPS I think it still makes total sense to look at the Nikon z9 but if you compare this camera to other ones in its price point Jordan hates when I say that like the Sony a7r5 or the Canon e s R5 this is very compelling it is by far the best hybrid camera of any of those options I would still probably myself choose the Sony a7r5 just because the autofocus is so effective I like the higher megapixel account and I don't need a fast shooting camera but as an overall camera handle everything including intense Wildlife Sports in action this is a better buy for sure and I do think this camera actually punches well above its price as well when you compare to cameras like the Sony A1 or the Canon EOS R3 this is able to handle a lot of the intense situations that those cameras can handle so as long as you're okay with some of the limitations like the SD card slot as a backup or the fact the battery life is maybe not as good as other cameras around there I still think that this is going to usher in a golden age for Nikon much like the d700 did so I hope you guys enjoyed our final look at the Nikon Z8 as a production camera please do check out our Instagram and Twitter go to those follow those subscribe to the channel I already gave you adorable puppy pictures and yes there will be more puppy pictures in your future if you subscribe although to be honest she's going to be all over our Galleries and it does anyways so subscribe or else no puppies okay thank you guys so much for joining us we'll see you soon with more episodes on petapixel foreign

Channel: PetaPixel

Views: 130,682

Keywords: PetaPixel, Jordan Drake, Chris Niccolls, Chris Nichols, Jordon Drake, Nikon Z8 Review, Nikon Z8 overheating, nikon z8 vs z9, Nikon z8 buffer, nikon z8 banding, nikon z8 autofocus, nikon z8 vs sony a1, nikon z8 vs sony a7r V, nikon z8 vs Canon EOS R5, nikon Z8 vs Canon EOS R3, best camera for sports, best camera for wildlife, best mirrorless camera for video, nikon N-Raw, nikon N-Log, dpreview, dpreview TV, best mirrorless camera, nikon z8 vs z7 II

Id: Rn5CatbKrkM

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 03 2023