Nikon Z9 First Impressions Review

so there's no mechanical shutter on this kit so i don't know is this even a camera is this like a full-frame digital camera obscura i don't what do we call this picture box picture box nikon picture box bold welcome back dpv2 viewers it is chris nichols here we're once again coming to you guys from seattle we've got a very exciting product to look at we do have a pre-production nikon z9 to play with here today now we're very fortunate because we actually have a couple z9s so jordan's going to shoot the entire episode on a z9 he's going to rely on the autofocus mostly for this episode see how it works and shoot mostly oversampled 4k we're at the shoreline stadium we're gonna have a couple days of shooting shoot a lot of sports we've even got some wildlife flying around here should be a good shoot [Music] [Music] all right so carrie is still down there getting some shots but we might as well talk about the handling right off the bat on this camera the first thing you notice is it definitely feels a lot and looks a lot like a classic nikon d series pro body i mean the grip i do like that's a little bit skinnier it's still a full size grip but a little bit thinner a little bit more comfortable to me than maybe like a d6 you do have a vertical grip for people who are into that sort of thing but the weight is interesting here so with a battery and memory card we're about 340 grams okay and the thing about that is it's it's basically heavy i mean you know when you look at something like the sony a1 or the canon eos r3 they're really going for a pro feeling body but definitely smaller and definitely lighter weight this is 20 smaller than a d6 but it's only 60 grams lighter basically fully loaded and so it really does feel like a full-on professional camera now some people are absolutely going to like the heavier weight of this camera especially if you want to balance longer lenses but everybody else seems to be going lighter nikon's going a different direction that's a factor to consider now i also like the fact that the controls are very reminiscent of a classic nikon d series pro body it should feel very similar very familiar but i do like that we've got three function buttons here on the front of the body now that you can customize that's a nice touch and i also like that we have this button over here now this is very similar to what you'd have on any d body like a d850 for example autofocus control we have it there i can hold this down and press it and then use both my dowels to go quickly between autofocus single point autofocus continuous or go between all my other modes like wide area pinpoint 3d tracking and so on now of course this big vertical battery grip holds our large battery it is an el 18 form factor but it comes with the new d series battery this does promise more battery life we don't have official sepa numbers but over the next couple days i'm going to update you on that yes you can though absolutely use all of the older enel 18 series batteries in here and the camera will usb charge anything from el18b or newer as well so that's convenient i am excited to see how long this thing will last now being the prepared traveler that i am i brought a couple of very large very fast sd cards because i figure every camera planet takes an sd card somewhere not this one this one actually takes twin cf express cards and it's a cf express b type so you can use those or xqd i didn't bring any of those with me but i did steal one so kerry rose from dp review he's just working with our model david here and as you can see we're using flashes because this is an important thing with this camera being an electronic shutter only no mechanical shutter which is normally what you'd use for flash exposure uh you're going to be concerned about the sync speed but we're getting 1 200 of a second not bad at all certainly puts it on par with something the sony a1 and actually slightly faster than the canon r3 [Music] i like to manually meter on my scenes like a professional it makes me feel like a professional [Music] all right so we've changed locations we're at the jerry baker belladrome it's been closed down for us we've got cyclists doing some stuff here very nice access but we have a bit of a low in the action we're going to talk about displays on the z9 so first off we've got a very interesting back panel 3.2 inches just over 2 million dots touch screen of course but what's interesting is just how you can articulate this it's very cool i would say you kind of have like two phases i can pull it out just a little bit like this i can still get some verticality for shooting low angle stuff i can tilt it a little bit if i then further extend it out but even further extended out if i want to tilt it for vertical shots i can still do that seems robust and rugged enough i mean i'm not going to hang the camera from it just yet maybe in the full review when we don't have a nikon execs here with us but about the only thing it won't let you do is selfies well the last time i checked journalists and sports photographers aren't huge on selfies but if you are this isn't the camera for you but now let's talk about the evf worth 3.69 million dot evf that's quite low i mean that's like nikon z5 territory especially when you consider what the competition's offering it is quite low now i will say it's a clear screen nice optics absolutely and i will also say that that resolution never drops when you're doing something like focusing for example that's nice i do like that some of the other avfs they do drop in resolution when you're doing things like focusing now another issue that might be even more serious for a lot of sports and journalistic style photographers is actually the refresh rate on the screen the evf we don't have exact numbers but it looks like it's pretty close to 60 frames per second nowhere near 120 frames per second like some of the other evfs in this kind of competition class and that's unfortunate although there's no blackout when you're shooting which is great you might still want to have a higher frame rate just to find it's easier to track fast action movement all right so i know it's not one of jordan's most beautiful compositions but i really asked to be in the shade because it's hot and i don't want to get heat stroke and pretty tired so uh anyways let's talk about the internals of the camera the sensor things like that now we've kind of alluded to already this is quite a bold thing from nikon this is a shutterless camera no mechanical shutter whatsoever electronic shutter only and again jordan i talked about how we think the industry is going this direction anyways uh you know mechanical shutters on some of these cameras that have really fast scan rates are kind of in some ways redundant but nikon just said let's get rid of it all together to protect the sensor when the camera's turned off you'll notice there is a very shutter like object there there's a closure a protector in front of the sensor and it's actually a very thick material i'm not going to poke at it but it looks way stronger than a standard shutter would be something of course you never want to touch in any situation now as for the sensor we've got a 45.7 megapixel full frame sensor backside illuminated stacked cmos this is a unique sensor that we have not seen before but it's obviously very similar to what we've seen in the z7 2 at least as far as resolution goes and they both share that base iso of 64 and on the z72 that gave us the best dynamic range that we've seen out of a full frame sensor we hope to see the same or better on this camera but what that also gives us is a very fast scan speed because if you don't have a mechanical shutter electronic shutter only that is key from our limited testing so far we're guessing that the scan speed's around 1 270th of a second that gives us fast flash sync speeds that gives us minimal rolling shutter i'm shooting here at the bellow drone we've got lots of sideways movement i'm not seeing any rolling shutter on the posts and poles behind us so so far so good [Music] [Music] let's talk about raw files and buffer rates on the z9 we're gonna start with raw files because things have changed on this camera so first i'm gonna point out there's no more 12-bit raw format options on this camera it's all 14-bit only which is good the other thing i want to point out now is they've dropped the uncompressed raw format that's fine because there was never really a reason to shoot uncompressed raws so we've got lossless compressed that is something we see on the other zed cameras now we also have high efficiency star and then high efficiency now high efficiency star is about half the file size of lossless compressed and high efficiency is a third the size now before we talk about buffer let's talk about burst rates so this camera can shoot a maximum of 120 frames per second at 11 megapixels with autofocus tracking and you can also set it for 30 frames per second in full resolution but in jpeg normal quality you have those options they automatically downgrade your image quality appropriately to give you those rates but at full raw quality you can shoot 20 frames per second now we do normally show robot stapek but i wanted to shoot raw right now to see what our buffer rates were and this is what we found it is very important what kind of speed of card you use we're using a fairly fast cf express card here there are faster cards out there but this is what we found with our testing okay so first lossless compressed at 20 frames per second i was getting about 40 shots before the camera slowed down a little bit so a couple second burst lossless compressed now when we go to high efficiency star which is only shooting on most of today's shots with now i'm getting about 70 shots in a row so not bad a nice improvement when i go to the standard high efficiency setting now i'm getting basically 150 plus photos now nikon is saying with ideal card speed you basically get an unlimited buffer if you use the lowest high efficiency raw setting they see a thousand plus shots 50 seconds of shooting buffer rate which would be impressive now over these two days of shooting i'm primarily relying on 3d tracking because i do like it it's come back and that's really something that i want to try out heavily there are a couple things i do want to say about it first off how the subject detection autofocus is working is when that box gets close to something like a human face or human eyes for example it will then go gray and then i know that if i engage focus that's where it's going to jump to i'd like to be able to change the size of the box you know try to get things even a bit more pinpoint or maybe open the field up the other thing i have is kind of a silly complaint to a lot of people but honestly i don't love nikon's yellow only auto focusing box color i do wish that we could easily change the color to something that might contrast against different color uniforms or different kind of lighting situations and i honestly feel like that would be a very easy thing to set up but there is some customizability when it comes to silent shooting you see the shutter sound is purely synthetic of course on this just gives you an auditory idea of when the camera's firing and when it's not but you do also have three visual aids that you can set up so one is where the screen will just flash black almost like you're shooting a traditional slr with the mirror going up and down the second option is you get four lines around the outside of your frame and they will flash and that could be nice they're not colored they're a little bit discreet but you do notice in your peripheral vision and then the third option is to have two thicker gray bars on the left and right hand side that will flash either way i do like that i get some customizability in how that works it's wrote here at the tacoma lawn tennis courts and this gives a good opportunity to shoot not only outdoors but indoors we haven't been able to do that yet so you know we can see things like how's the camera handle auto focusing and image quality in low light situations to some degree but also i wanted to see if there's any flicker problems considering that we have electronic shutter only camera or shooting under artificial lights so given that we only have one light source here to test i will say that uh with the first series of shots i didn't have any sort of flicker protection turned on and the camera still handled it really well i didn't really notice any major exposure changes or white balance changes and certainly no banding and that's something that could really wreck your photo so i was happy to see that i then turned flicker protection on it's more of a classic and basic way of just seeing when the lights are at the brightest and then delaying the shot till then it worked fine i did notice a slight delay as normal it doesn't have sort of advanced way like the canon eos r3 where you can set your shutter speed uh based right off of the actual hertz timings of the cycling of the lights but it still worked very well and again with the protection off i still didn't really have any issues now high iso keep in mind we can only look at the jpegs we cannot analyze the raw and this is a preview so all i will say is this we got to shoot a lot of very extremely high isos in that light and i really didn't have any issues there it looks a lot like what we'd see out of a z72 and that is to say very good i want to talk about battery life next first off jordan's been shooting videos both days extensively he hasn't been able to go below 60 i've been shooting about a thousand to 1500 images a day albeit in burst modes absolutely but again multiple shoots over the day and i haven't gone below one tick on the battery life so i of course would love to have solid numbers but i would say compared to something like the canon or the sony this is probably gonna be the best battery life that we've seen out of a flagship camera so by far the thing that we were all most excited about when it came to autofocusing on this camera is the return of 3d tracking and i know you know that's an slr thing originally and it was a very intuitive and effective way to start focusing and tracking on a subject on an slr but you were limited by the amount of focusing points you had there here we now have the mirrorless advantage of having far more coverage than you would ever find on slr and now we also have the addition of the subject detection modes like people animals and vehicles and this just enhances the intelligence of that tracking system even further the face and especially eye detection on this camera worked incredibly well i was often amazed how small a subject could be and yet how accurate the nikon would be unlocking on those eyes and really the eye detect was bang on the hit rate was incredibly high i will say there was some situations where you know even though you would set the camera to things like stay sticky on one subject delay before moving to another it could still sometimes get confused by another player crossing in front or something like that but again it's pre-production and those moments were few and far between so we shot cycling we had a couple different issues here because of course the riders have visors on you cannot clearly see their eyes at all so the camera wasn't able to pick that up when i left the subject detection in auto it would then pick the bike which makes a lot of sense but it would tend to focus center mass and the riders heads were still always kind of out of focus at wide apertures i didn't really like that so what i found worked very well there is having the option to turn subject detection off easily that way i could just try to get a 3d tracking box on the actual helmet it would then just track that in a more traditional 3d tracking way and actually that was quite effective the only thing i'm going to say there is out of the box there's no easy or quick way to turn subject detection on and off and you know in the heat of shooting i really want to be able to do that i don't want to have to go in the quick menu then go down a box then find it then choose it then turn off i mean it's too much stuff so i did the classic sort of nikon workaround of setting subject detection as my top of my menu and then setting a custom button so that when i hit the custom button it automatically goes there that worked very well but of course that ties up that slot i'd say that nikon is absolutely a strong contender in all of the sports and journalism market of having a camera that focuses very easily and very effectively we are consistently impressed and i think the key thing is we all came away with a sense that when shooting the z9 auto focusing is a very confidence inspiring experience the impression i'm left with using the z9 pre-reduction for a couple days is this it feels like a big departure from the z6 and z7 as great as those cameras are this really feels more like a flagship camera a continuation of the professional d series line nikon's really pulled out a lot of the stops here and they're making a camera that i think is going to compete very well with sony and canon and it's going to be an interesting battle we're going to have to revisit that when we have final production of all those cameras and really kind of see that's going to be an exciting battle and so looking forward this kind of leaves you with a couple questions that i want to see answered as we go into a full production camera first off the buff rates do seem to be heavily linked to whatever kind of compression you're using for the raw file so i really want to know what kind of image quality loss am i going to sacrifice in order to get those higher buffer rates we want to see how good or bad that will be and the second thing because this is basically the first of this kind of camera that's electronic shutter only are there going to be any hiccups any issues as we do more and more testing moving forward but otherwise so far this is a very impressive foray from nikon do also check out jordan's video where he's talking about all the video features of z9 so much that we couldn't just cover in one video here so you'll want to check that out that has launched of course go to dpreview.com you'll find our sample galleries as well as sample galleries from the other staff that we're shooting at this event and there'll be tons of articles about this as well you don't want to miss it thanks for subscribing thanks for checking us out and we'll see you guys again very soon [Music] you

Channel: DPReview TV

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Keywords: Nikon z9, nikon z9, nikon z9 review, nikon z9 specs, nikon z9 vs sony a1, nikon z9 vs canon eos r3, nikon z9 3d autofocus, nikon z9 image quality, nikon z9 120fps, nikon z9 battery life, nikon z9 raw, nikon z9 compressed raw, nikon z9 lossy raw, nikon z9 autofocus, nikon z9 3d tracking, nikon z9 hands on, nikon z9 video, nikon mirrorless flagship

Id: l5wgMI5fNck

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021