Thom Hogan and Mark Comon discuss NIKON Z9

good evening everyone and welcome i'm mark coleman from paul's photo and the creative photo academy it's my great pleasure to welcome you all here today for our presentation our discussion with tom hogan and myself on the new nikon z9 the new nikon flagship camera and um you all know tom from his you know for by dom by tom.com oh my god that that always gets me every time doesn't it so you know what a great inspiration he is with great knowledge and great thoughts and so we want to thank you for coming tonight and helping support our small family camera store in torrance california you know tom will be the first one to tell you to support your local store and if you guys don't have a local camera store in your neighborhood please give us a call we'll be glad to take care of you like you we're right down the street so um without any further ado tom are you ready yep i'm ready and by the way tim the answer is yes well but so but it's trains planes and automobile focus right we'll talk about it but the answer is yes the answer is yes so um so what we're going to do is um i'm i've got a presentation that tom and i are going to talk on if you guys have questions put those into the chat if there's an immediate relevant question to the slide we'll answer it if not we'll take the questions at the end you okay with that tom yep i'm fine awesome here we go and i just hope this works because it's always fun on zoom all right so tom can you see the slideshow yes i can but you've taken up my whole screen ah well you can drag me to the side yeah i know i gotta i gotta change that but uh so you guys can know how to do that you can drag the slideshow over and see tom and i in the side please open up the chat window and if you've noticed i've left a lot of white on the slide of the side of the slide presentation for the chat window and yes debbie we are recording it so those of you who registered tonight will get the recording tomorrow so i want to welcome you to our presentation on the nikon z9 and you've got mark and tom here so wow we got a lot to do tonight don't we tom a lot to talk about um and a lot of details that are um getting glossed over a little bit by some or or or causing questions to come up and that's one of the things that i hope that we can try and address uh today is is tamp down some of the questions get the answers to you so tom do you still love the z do i love anything um you know people call me a uh an old uh sarcastic guy who doesn't like anything but i actually love photography i love a lot of cameras the z's have worked really incredibly well for me um you know i think uh nikon's been underrated yeah curmudgeon is the word i was looking for thank you uh robert and ed um the uh you know that i think the disease has been underrated by a lot of people and of course there's a lot of there's a lot of disinformation and fanboyism on the web that tries to tries to play down uh products from uh competitors and and that doesn't help either it kind of just makes for noise where you can't actually see what's really going on but yeah definitely the z's have been great cameras so far everybody i've talked to you know i've talked to i deal with a lot of pros i help some pros uh with with uh some of the things that they're trying to do and you know so every pro i know that's gotten into disease i mean they they instantly like lots of things about these cameras and and it's not just the cameras the lenses are have been incredibly good so far so um does that answer your question no yeah and i just wanted to chime in that i've never been happier with a camera than i am with the z72 i'm excited about the z9 and i've never been happier with a kit than i have been with the z kit you know my 14 to 30 24 to 70 70 to 200 kit that i carry every day i carry that camera with me everywhere and it's amazing and from mark as a photographer to mark a camera store owner i can tell you how much my customers and students love the z because of the better performance the lighter weight the the new features that we talked about during the z6 z7 2 presentation we did tom and we'll address some of that tonight but my answer is yeah i do love it and and one thing i don't one of the reasons why the z9 has generated so much interest is that it does solve a few of the things uh and and clear up some of the frustrations that some people have had with the with disease you know if you try and shoot at 10 frames or 14 frames per second with the z6 or c7 there are some things that will might start to frustrate you at 5.5 frames a second it's a great camera both of them yes i agree um and so the z9 is now pushing that 20 frames a second 30 frames a second 120 frames a second with some dependencies and you know in my brief handling with the z9 the viewfinder at 20 frames per second is phenomenal you know it allows us to capture images and see things is through the viewfinder with the benefits of electronic viewfinder without the detriments of the electronic viewfinder in my opinion right so mark's showing some of the nikon has shared with us uh uh almost all of their their launch images uh so we can show some images that are coming from the z9 um and uh you know the they're all great images images that most of us would be proud to to have in our portfolios and they all show off kind of different aspects of the camera um and so we'll talk about those aspects as we get into it so first impressions of the camera well it's it's a professional camera um you know it's it's not us you talked about the z6 and z7s and in your kit being small the z9 is a little bigger camera it's a little heavier camera it is smaller than um the d850 with the motor grip on it in terms of height and depth but it's not a small camera so you know the first impression is that it's it's like the d1 the d2 the d3 the d4 the d5 the d6 it's a big rugged camera yeah and i am very excited to be able to photograph with the z9 you know for my sports and wildlife photography the z9 is not a camera for everyone i i've told a few of my customers you know z9 is may not be the right choice for you because you went to the z to lighten your load to get a smaller camera you traded in a d850 or a d5 to get a z7 so why would you go back to a z9 unless you need that extra performance so there's a question do i have a z9 here with me no i don't have one with me i've only been able to like mark i've only been able to handle it briefly um the thing i'd talk to say about the for a large camera the grip feels right um if nikon did anything correct on this camera is that they've got the grip positions and the control positions pretty nailed down you know nikon makes a makes a statement about is 20 smaller and overall area than a d6 that doesn't isn't the thing that i would be looking at first the first thing i looked at when i picked up the camera was how does the grip feel because this is a camera that i'd be using you know all day on a wildlife city ferrari all afternoon at a sporting event i'm going to be holding it for a long time so if the grip doesn't feel good that would be a problem it feels really nice though and i think that tom comes from the thinner body design on the mirrorless design some of it yep absolutely yeah all right so i wanted to talk about you know nikon you know nikon loves the c9 and it's been very very clear even in the build up to the announcement that nikon executives managers product managers the nps staff everybody who was starting to hold on to the camera and even the photographers that i knew that had a chance to use it were all really excited about it so nikon has made a number of claims relative to the competition which is unusual nikon usually doesn't they didn't say specifically who they were targeting with each of these claims but nikon usually doesn't make these kinds of claims spot on to the competition it has the most subject recognition of any camera so it recognizes humans dogs cats birds trains planes automobile automobiles motorcycles and bicycles and even beyond that it it's very clear in looking at examples uh and working with people that it recognizes other animals as well but those are the nine things that nikon will claim there's no other camera out there right now that that really looks at so many different subjects and can distinguish them and that'll come up again in 3d tracking by the way it has the world's fastest continuous shooting yes it's 11 frame 11 megapixels but um i'll remind you that the d3 was 12 megapixels in 2007. we were really really happy to get uh what was it 10 frames a second out of that we basically you know got an order of magnitude faster now with essentially better image quality too it has the fastest scan rate on an image sensor still being discussed is exactly what that is uh dp review is saying 1 270th of a second is what they measure nikon's being a little coy they're talking about it's the same speed as the shutter a mechanical shutter which would be 1 250th of a second moving across the frame so tom what does that fastest scan rate what what does that mean to us as photographers means that you you can treat the camera exactly the same as if it had a mechanical shutter you don't have a mechanical shutter sitting there flapping and wearing out all the time and making noise but you can treat the camera exactly the same as you've been shooting with any camera that had a mechanical shutter the first truly blackout free viewfinder and specifically and this is something that's come up you know i have a sony a1 and i use the sony a1 for some work i prefer my nikon d6 for sports i prefer the sony a1 right now for animal and wildlife photography but that may change with the z9 we'll find out really really quickly um but one of the things i noticed about the a1 is that while it has a blackout free viewfinder every now and then it just seems to have a stutter hesitancy or a skip and and it doesn't bother me but nevertheless it's there nikon's claiming they don't do that they're also claiming they have the brightest evf on the market by three times three thousand candelas per meter squared which is what a net is and that one that's one i look forward to to seeing um by the way they also have put in a night vision um capability into the camera as well to protect your night vision when you're shooting uh with the evf so that's a really interesting uh uh bit that you need to know i'm really excited about that because you know we do a fair amount of night photography star trails that kind of thing here photography doesn't stop at happy hour no well i hope not but yeah so it's always been and it's great because you see when my group is out there in the field you see i can see where everybody is because you see the the viewfinders and the lcds you know blaring across the desert right exactly and uh you know it has class leading video resolution and internal recording capability as far as i know there's not another another mirrorless slr type camera that can do uh internal 10-bit for 2-2 prores hq it has the longest recording time and nikon called that out specifically 125 minutes versus competitors uh 30 minutes so the thing to take away from this is nikon is boldly making claims about this camera they are incredibly confident about how good this camera is you generally don't see nikon marketing being that confident they they do marketing and they tell you all the things about their cameras that are good etc but this time around they're hammering very very specific points so then the second part of this if you move to the next slide they also made a bunch of comments uh specifically about claims to the z system itself the one that gets the most attention is that's the first nikon cam camera with a four axis uh rear lcd but there are some other ones there that are more interesting it's the fastest startup of any nikon z camera they specifically are claiming 2.5 times faster it's starting up that comes out of the xp processor as well that it's just able to get the camera cycled up and ready to take that first shot faster than a z7 or a z6 and and those are no slouches i mean i i have no problem turning my camera off turning it on pulling up my face and taking a shot but the z9 is going to be even faster than that they also talk about more autofocus targets in auto autofocus so we have big boxes in the z6 and the z7 we have 81 of those boxes in auto area they're fairly big the boxes in the z9 are smaller 493 of them versus 81 in the same uh frame space so the discretion of where the camera is actually focusing in auto area is higher and that gets to some of the auto focus stuff that we'll talk about has 12 times faster readout speed from the sensor than the z72 it has a 10 times faster processor than the z72 it has reduced hdmi output latency i know there's been a few video people who are recording to atomos and other recorders who say yeah there's a sync issue especially if you put your microphone into the atomos and you have the video coming in from your camera you can get a latency issue that you have to deal with they're talking about the best latency that they've had and then they're talking about full functionality uh with 90f mount lenses with the ftz2 so those are some of the claims that i just wanted to put them out there because nikon is making very very specific and bold claims up front which means they're incredibly comfortable confident about this camera we should all expect it to perform quite well so we just put together a couple of slides to help you guys understand what's new and so this is the front of the camera the first thing that i see there are three function buttons on the right hand side which is really cool and i'm excited about that right and when you handle the camera you're going to find that when you go to the vertical grip position function button number three is about in the same finger position as uh for the vertical grip as function button number one is on the horizontal grip uh i wish they had had had completely duplicated it but it does mean that you can get a front function button that works with both vertical and the horizontal grip the same and i i use the camera i tried the camera both in landscape and portrait and it flips very well had a very nice feeling there so yeah again the the two grips are pretty much identical now we're just looking inside the front of the camera and one of the differences is the sensor now nikon's saying this is a new sensor so on the left is the z7 sensor the best picture that i have of it so far and on the right is the z9 sensor the best picture of it i have so far and the things that you look at trying to figure out you know there's the question who made this answer i don't think it matters but the things that you look at are the connects so you'll notice on the z7 sensor there's connects all the way around the sensor that are pretty evenly exposed and on the z9 sensor that has definitely changed um and um so it definitely came off of a different fab than the z7 sensor so when nikon says it's not the z7 sensor it's not the z7 sensor it's a new sensor it really is a new sensor so tom there was a question about the cropping of the scent he asked why is a crop the sensor crop he noticed as you pointed out the difference in the megapixels yeah we're going to get to that coming up okay i kind of want to withhold that one for the moment okay um because it comes up with a specific part of the way the camera functions um and i i don't want to start talking about that before we get to that great perfect the back of the camera as you can see is classic d3d4d5 d6 kind of design with the controls repeated for the vertical grip as best as possible the one difference is that these uh you know if i this is a z62 that i've got here this the way these buttons are organized on this camera nikon is trying to replicate um that as best as possible across all their cameras now so there are some changes to where certain things are like the the one that keeps coming up is oh but the play but the playback button is no longer in the upper left hand corner um yeah nikon's trying to put it in a place where you can get to it with single hand operation if you really need the playback button in the upper left hand corner note that the upper left hand corner is function button number four and you can assign playback to it i did i did manage to verify that so um you know if that's what you want you can get it sorry about that tom so there was a question about the anti-aliasing filter what have you heard there is the anti-aliasing filter there is none yes there was a confusion based upon the early nikon wording um on the day of the announcement they they talked about the filter layer over the sensor and they used a word that i think confused everybody as far as i know there's no anti-aliasing filter over the sensor nikon seems to have confirmed that several times now what is over the sensor is two different layers um that have to do with uh dust and and trying to keep dust from building up on the sensor so there's now a new anti-static coating layer that attempts to make it so that dust doesn't cling to the front of that filter and then the very front of that filter is now fluorine coated which means that it will tend to shed water and dust and anything else that sticks that comes and hits that front of that filter now you still have to have a filter on top of your sensor because what you want to do is you want to you want to eradicate uv and uh near ir light so that's what that filter is now doing it's it's repelling dust and it's doing uv and near ir filtering but it is not doing low pass filtering great so people are asking questions about the customizable buttons and i don't know all of them yet um so i can't tell you about all the customizations i did notice one thing that i hope is going to change and that's that a lot of the customizations you get a choice between type a type b type c instead of it being defined as something there is help that tells you what type a means but this is sort of the thing that i had the problem with with olympus's menus which which was you know there's type 1 type 2 type 3 type 4 things so i i can't remember what all those things mean and type a for this setting might is different than type a for this setting so um i hope that changes at some point in the firmware i've only seen a camera with early firmware so far and and so i can't verify that that's the way it's going to be but there's a lot of customization one of the things i can tell you about there are banks so we have photo shooting banks we have uh we now have a new set of banks which is um video recording banks i mean i don't believe we've ever had that before um i've got i got to pull my last camera that would have had that is this one so yeah so so this is a d6 and it does not have video recording banks so this would be the first camera as far as i know that has a video recording banks and it does have extended banks so if you're if you know anything about banks extended banks are a way of being able to uh keep an exposure mode and other things along with um the the bank information itself great so please gang if you have questions type your questions into the chat and please chat to everyone right so we and we will we will go back over all these questions i know we've lost over a a bunch of them have i've seen them flow by um we will go back and answer them in the questions session at the end but it's really important that we get through some of these things because there are some things you probably haven't heard that we're going to be talking about so if we can move forward the top of the camera we still have an led you'll notice that around the shutter speed button we have on off and we have the light position that you can turn on backlighting the backlighting works for the top um led but it also works for a set of buttons it works for the four buttons you see on the upper left there in the cluster and it works uh for the buttons that are down in the this side of the camera the right right side of the lcd and i'm not sure about these two buttons i think it's uh it also works for those two buttons as well so which one are you talking about tom the the the protect and the uh delete button i'm pretty sure it works for them as well i i think so too i can't remember off the top of my head there's just so many things that have been thrown at me and then the other thing gang is you know the cameras that tom and i have seen are pre-production samples they're not the final version so will there be major functional differences no will there be these small little changes absolutely some of the buttons may not even be fully active in the in the the samples that we've seen i'm pretty sure the buttons were all fully active at the camera well but you know the functions are not fully defined yeah that's possible yeah yeah so moving forward um the the big news that you know nikon made essentially two big claims for stealth photographers one was frame rates and the other one was focus so the frame frame rates you're able to set a self timer you can set single frame you can set continuous low from one to ten you can set continuous high at 10 12 15 and 20 frames a second and all those have no real restrictions on them you can shoot lost lossless uh another thing many of you might not have figured out yet is that there's no such thing as 12-bit raw anymore all raw files are 14-bit um so there's no restrictions on 12 bit or anything else up to 20 frames a second at 30 frames a second the only restriction is you can't shoot raw if you're shooting jpeg still functional camera every autofocus works metering works everything continues to work as before if you set the camera and that i believe is called uh 30c as the as the frame rate at 120c again this could change at 120c you get 120 frames a second but you get 11 megapixel jpegs again focus and metering and all the other stuff is still all active at 120 frames a second which i that's the part that i think everybody's finding incredible when you again go back and think about it the d3 in 2007 was uh 10 frames a second at 12 megapixels and suddenly here we are in order of magnitude faster it's mind-boggling and i agree you know somebody asked me so mark why would you shoot 20 frames per second or 120 frames per second if you're not doing super fast action you know and this was a portrait photographer and i was telling you know you're photographing a little child and you want that exact moment of the smile you know at 20 frames per second you're certainly going to capture it and there's always a different way and one of the cool things that i love is these new capabilities give us a new way to photograph you know tom and we can do the the 120 frames per second and then build a slow-motion quicktime video from it you know that stuff is really and that it'll make that video built into the camera as well so yeah there are other reasons why i want 120 frames a second but it's only for a few things it does open up a whole new realm you know so one of the things i've been playing with uh recently is motion and taking a fixed background with motion against it in the foreground right and the the trick with that has always been trying to get a motion there motion here motion here motion here and motion there that doesn't overlap well 120 frames a second i get more choices of where to put um you know the the motion um even at 30 frames a second i get plenty of choices um 10 frames a second not so much five frames per second definitely not um you know i'm stuck with what the camera did so the the thing i think that and you see this with all of nikon's presentations and you hear it from people like mcnally and others where they're saying that this opens up new possibilities to them it makes them think about hey there's something i couldn't do before that maybe i can do now i'm going to experiment i'm going to try something and i think that's that's the better way to think about 30 frames and 120 frames a second 20 frames a second is perfectly fine for most action that i shoot and we'll see new new forms of photography new ideas in a couple of months that are only possible with the technology that's available and i'm real that's one of the things that always has me so excited is you know what it you know and it's not me it's not tom it's what are you guys going to think of what application are you going to invent what do you mean 20 frames per second i want to think of it don't let them pick it up i want to think of that yeah but there's 200 of them and only two of us that's the problem that every pro faces is that is that there are infinite number of enthusiasts and amateurs out there that are trying things and we can't try all the possible things that they're trying so yeah it's really hard to stay on top of the top of the heap but anyhow moving on well but somebody just asked about what about the picture quality on the 11 megapixel file that's what the d3 was 12 megapixels and we you know some of you chopped off your left arm to buy a d3 and here we are now at 120 frames per second with with uh 11 11 megapixels so well i i mean i i go an entirely different way we can't we can't really talk about image quality very much right now we have examples that nikon has shared with us and it allows us to share we can't share anything of our own yet we will as soon as we possibly can but you know we'll talk about image quality and a subsequent presentation in great depth i'm sure right now what i'm seeing i like um so we'll just stick with that so 3d tracking autofocus so in the dslrs 3d tracking autofocus so the this d6 that i have here when it tracks it's using a sensor up in the viewfinder that is actually an image sensor and that image sensor is tracking is capturing color information and shape information so there is some recognition in a d6 but it's somewhat crude um but that's what it was doing so it would find a pattern and a color within a pattern and this worked ex exceptionally well with face tones because a face is a pattern and a face tone is within a fairly fixed range so once a d6 found that it could track that throughout the entire autofocus area so there's two differences um that are coming up with the z9 one is it can track auto 3d track across the entire display so now from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen from the left of the screen to the right of the screen it's actually ninety percent ninety percent i believe um but beyond doing color and shape and f and focus distance recognition of a subject it's doing one other thing it's tracking all those subjects that we talked about before humans cats dogs birds trains planes motorcycles uh bicycles and cars so if you have like in this shot you have a human it found those humans and tracked one in this case it i'm not sure how the 3d tracking was started so i'm not sure how it found the one with the yellow cap which of course is significant for nikon because nikon's corporate color is yellow yellow and that's the one that's going to get to the marker first and a lot of people missed the metaphor there but it was tracking this individual using the human subject as well as color as well as shape so that's new um and of course it's doing focus information at 120 frames a second so there's 120 frames of focus information that's coming into the xp processor which is allowing this this tracking to happen so talking about focus detect another thing that's not getting enough talk about is that we you know everybody talks about oh how good is this the eye detection how good is the face detection nikon has done something a little different than that so for humans they can recognize torso head face and eyes so imagine if she turned around for a moment what would the camera start focusing on the head if the shape of the head is still distinct they can see the back of the head and focus on the back of the head if it can't if for some reason something blocks the head it uh or partially blocks the head it can still see the torso so one of the things that's not talked about so much yet and i want to hear more from nikon about how they're doing this is that it's it's almost like there's a hierarchy i recognize a torso i recognize a head i recognize a face i recognize an eye and i'll go to the smallest one of those that i can find which is usually the eye so when it's doing human detection it'll go to the eye if it can find it but if you can't find it it'll go to the face and i can't find the face it'll go to the head if it can't find the head it'll go to the torso it's always doing human detection so then in the other modes oh and i want to add here tom if you guys watch the launch videos all of the ambassadors who spoke said that these features were changing the way they were able to photograph and how it made them gave them more confidence right you start watching the composition more than what the camera is doing is one thing that happens absolutely and that's exactly what i want to have happen with my cameras is that i'm spending more time watching the framing that i'm doing and the timing of what's happening and not worrying about what the aperture is or the shutter speed or what setting i've got set on something then i'm able to not have to spend too much time with those things so with animals um specifically they talk about three types of animals they recognize cats dogs and birds but it's clear from all the examples that they've shown i mean they showed fish they showed bears they showed lions they showed small showed pikas they showed small rodents i mean it's clear that it recognizes more than just cats dogs and birds and again it's the same thing they recognize body they recognize head they recognize eyes so the the there's a hierarchy they're trying to find a body if they can find a body that's what they start to lock onto if they can find a head on that body they'll go to that if they can find an eye on that body they'll go to that um and so that's a that's a uh that's another thing to to to pay attention to um and then moving on to the last category which is vehicle so with vehicles it will look at the entire vehicle it will go to the cockpit of the cockpits loosely defined of the vehicle and it will go to the front of the vehicle so you may have noticed in one of the examples that they showed is that the box started on the car went to the front of the car and went to the headlight of the car that's a perfect example of how the camera was starting to prioritize down into a smaller space now the question that came up when those first examples started to appear on the internet was but i don't want to focus on the front of the car i don't want to focus on the front of a motorcycle i've now seen enough images coming off the camera from other shooters it's clear that if you've got a motorcycle rider and it can detect that there's a rider on the motorcycle it's going to go to the rider on the motorcycle if they can see it so i'm not at all worried that it's only going to focus on the front of a vehicle again it's the same hierarchy system as before and this is one of the exciting parts is that there's not a lot of limit to this camera um we can go out to 900 seconds which is 15 minutes we can go to 32 000 of a second and i'll talk about that a little bit more and what that opens up in a little bit but it's important to know that's an incredible shutter speed we have a shutter speed range and we really haven't had that before and it does open up again it's the same thing i said before the cameras opening up opportunities for photographers to explore and i agree all these features and for me the shutter speed tom like you is exciting you know i was excited to get 900 seconds on the z62z7 ii you know because of our astro low light photography that we do around here but now to be able to explore super fast shutter speeds to be able to explore shooting you know f 1.4 lenses at iso 200 in bright sunshine is also something that i'm very excited about and what about you know none of us you presses the shutter speed high enough to see what extra action we can stop you know to get the sweat on the football player's face to get you know like you know you we talked about you know the the how it froze the golf ball and the head of the golf club here and how amazing that is and it's just yeah well this new new thing new new areas to explore and i i for one love new areas to explore i'm just a curiosity to start with but um so i'm i'm more than happy to to explore that um you know the iso range is basically the same as the z7 we can't really talk about what that really means yet because we can't really talk about image quality um and and as soon as we have cameras and we can start really testing them and putting them to their paces against other cameras we can but right now we really can't talk to that the flicker-free viewfinder again if you've never used a sony a9 or a1 you you just you you need to and now now you can add a z9 to that as well uh you really need to because it really does change things i talked to earlier about um you know concentrating on composition one of the toughest things in sports is to keep your framing um you know even with the d6 running as fast as it can it has a really really short blackout time but even with its d6 sometimes i find myself at the very end of a sequence i'm not quite on the framing exactly the way i want and that's partly because i'm i'm getting that that blackout that's that's that's kind of affecting me seeing stuff it's a whole different experience when the viewfinder never blacks out now i knew this from way back because i used to be a video shooter i mean i was shooting video news back in the 70s so so i had a blackout free viewfinder all the time and it was great because i could see exactly where to point my camera at the football player um you know i never had to worry about the shutter flapping in my way and then me wondering whether or not i was following at the right speed because you know football players will change speed is in the middle of the play um and and you need to be following that and if that starts to happen in the middle of a blackout sometimes you get a little off so this is really one of the things i think is going to change at least those that shoot action whether it be wildlife or sports and even some events event photographers well and you know it's always been you know with an slr camera it's what you see is what you get but it really is what you didn't see is what you get and you know i was a rangefinder photographer for many years tom for exactly that reason because i wanted to feel the click and know that i got the magic moment a lot of people don't understand that why why did all the photojournalists use leicas correct it's because they were seeing through the viewfinder all the time and there wasn't anything blacking out on them when you think back to those old mechanical days of film film cameras um there could be significant blackout where you weren't seeing what was going on whereas uh when you used a rangefinder you were seeing everything all the time so it's exactly the same thing all over um photojournalists are going to love having a a flicker a blackout free viewfinder for sure you know and for those i got to see the canon r3 over the weekend and it has the very same look and feel so for those of you who are canon people you know your the r3 is coming that will give you that experience but you know a number of you in the chat work you know saying is it bright enough is it clear enough is it great i love the viewfinder through the z9 and you know the feel of it the look of it at 20 frames per second was just phenomenal and i couldn't go back to an optical viewfinder you know i'm i'm really spoiled by the live exposure and all the information and now with the z9 the customizable information that you have in the viewfinder to make it work the camera work the way i want it to and that's one of the things that we all need is we need the camera to work the way we want it to you know i notice a couple of you are raising your hands so please just type your questions into the chat that way we can get to them um any other comments on the view while you move to the next slide i'm going to answer jeff jeffries point he says the animal detect image looks manipulated on natural blurring no not at all and it's something i'll talk about a little later it's it's a very fast lens very close to an animal and focused on a very very very narrow range you have to remember nikon made a knocked an f 0.95 lens well you can have a literally a focal plane that is as thin as i've ever seen on a camera now whether you think that looks unnatural or not is a whole different story but it's a another one of those examples of i can now start trying and doing things that i wasn't able to do before um so video um i don't know how many people here yeah i don't think we have a big video crowd with us tonight yeah probably not a big video crap but um this is definitely a good video camera the video i've seen coming off of this uh is impressive um you know being able to shoot 8k for 125 minutes at room temperature yes 73 74 degrees i noticed somebody very much earlier is how how did how is nikon able to do that well there's a fair amount of heat dissipation plus the other thing is the same thing that's happening with the apple macbook so the more processing you put into a smaller spot you can sometimes make that work with less heat dissipation so hip size coming down is one of those things that tends to affect that so tom for your video work do you have a separate video camera or are you using your mirrorless camera in the video mode for your video production stuff these days well i used to have separate video cameras i had a whole bunch of them as you know i sent you some of my b-roll cameras because i started getting rid of my separate video cameras but i'm actually about to go back to having um a dedicated video camera or two however those are gonna be studio video cameras when i set up the new offices um and start doing more of this kind of thing i'll have two dedicated video cameras that are they're looking at me that's generally better for that you know i've got this switcher that i can switch between so tally lights on the camera help me there are lots of reasons to go to a dedicated video camera but for most stuff i mean certainly for the things i'm doing video right now um the the mirrorless cameras are just fine great um you know can you shoot a 115 degrees 8k video well i think you can i just don't know how long um i mean it seems like mcnally and some of the others we're doing that so clearly it works uh in hot temperatures it's just a question of how much reduced the time would be if you're really into video you probably want to know about bit rates these are the bit rates that we know about from the settings that are currently available in the camera you notice that it can record 10 bit 422 internal to the camera and it can do that in apple prores 422 hq uh which is a really high bit rate that's an incredibly good looking file the 8k at h.265 was still a pretty good looking file that i saw so this camera is actually outputting some uh some some pretty uh remarkably good uh video and that's even before we get the raw capabilities there will be a a firmware update that adds capabilities to this camera particularly in the video area um that are going to go even further than this so this is awful good as it sits right here unless somebody asks a video question we should just move on to the still stuff yep so everybody wants two cards and to get the speed up guys you need to think about the compact flash express cards you know the two compact flash express cards you know the compact flash express is the most most robust card on the market i know it means that most of us are going to spend a lot of money on memory cards but i think it's oh it's well worth it to get the performance um do you have comments about the cards tom well if you yeah i mean this these were from your test uh this is from my test so go ahead and and so you were reporting how many seconds of buffer so if you go to the next sign slide so i just want to explain how i i mean this is a nonsense guys i had 15 minutes with the camera so we took the z9 in manual exposure manual focus 14-bit raw lossless compression plus fine jpeg so rod plus jpeg at continuous 20 frames per second with an xqd card the top xqd card the sony i got about two seconds before the camera buffered so what does that mean you press the button right two seconds on the sony the hoodman gave me three to four seconds the delcan black six to seven seconds and the pro grade cobalt for eight to ten seconds so this is really important if you're going to be doing video or if you're going to be doing high frame rate continuous shooting if you're going to be doing landscape photography on a tripod with a with a remote release it doesn't make any difference but i want the z9 to be able to rock for me if i want to do that fast action so here's tom's slide so i've been collecting as much information as i can about cards and this is sort of a summary of many of the things that i've seen and i know matt granger posted a new video today with some new tests and they kind of correspond into these same numbers you're going to find that it it's a little different in everybody's test because no two raw files are exactly the same size it depends on how much detail is in the image as to how much how big the file actually is so unless we all standardize on taking photographs exactly the same things you can't exactly compare matt's tests with richie's tests with my tests with somebody else's tests but generally speaking this the the the c uh cfe type 2 cards are you know getting 60 or more frames before they hit the buffer um and that's at lossless compressed where things start to get really interesting is in high efficiency star which creates a smaller file size you'll look at those numbers suddenly start to really go up very very fast now one of the things that matt talked about in his video that he posted today was the sustained right performance so i've actually been doing some look up of sustained right performance um lexar doesn't publish theirs sony doesn't publish theirs but a number of the other ones do i actually think matt got one of his numbers wrong he's his conclusion still correct but one of his numbers wasn't quite correct so for pro-grade cards pro-grade makes gold and they make cobalt for this same size uh pro-grade card the gold has a sustained uh write speed of 400 megabytes per second whereas the cobalt has a sustained write speed of 1400 megabytes per second so if you want really high numbers you're going to want cards that have that higher sustained write speed that's not the right speed that's on the front of the card um you know let's see i think i've got a card here yeah yeah they all say 1700 or so on it this one says 1700 megabits per second and it's a it's a pro grade gold well guess what when you totally stress it and have it recording constantly it's not 1700 megabits per second it's 1400 megabits per second which is still really good and that's why you know you're getting hundreds of high efficiency raws before the buffer fills so the delcan black is also 1400 megabits per sec megabytes per second in its sustain rate the angel bird xt is guaranteed not to drop below 1480 megabytes per second while the regular angel bird card not the xt but the regular one is a thousand megabytes per second except for the 256 gigabyte card which is only 550 megabytes per second the wise cards are different for each size so the 64 gigabyte card is 140 megabytes per second the 128 is 230 megabytes per second and then the 512 gigabyte and higher is 400 megabytes per second so i just spewed out a whole bunch of numbers what does it really mean pro grade cobalt delcan black angel blurred xt those three have the highest sustained throughput they're the ones that are going to give you the most buffer um on the z9 the ones you probably want to avoid the y is 64. it's only 140 megabytes per second that's one-tenth the speed of the pro-grade cobalt so it's gonna it's gonna start to the buffer much much faster so one of the things that i'll try and do as soon as i have my camera and can robustly test all of this myself is i'll try and give you some better idea of exactly what cards you really probably want to be using for action but right now prograde cobalt dalkin black angel blurred xt those would be my choices if i think i'm going to be using the high frame rate all the time and buffering it so you want to talk about this one mark well yeah i and i forget where i heard it or saw it i can't remember whether it was on the nikon launch or someplace else but i heard someone say that this is the most rugged and highly sealed camera that nikon has ever made and that makes me excited because as much as i take care of my camera i don't want to have to baby my camera i want to be able to take my camera and make the pictures that i want if it's drizzling a little bit outside if it's working if it if it's all of peter can you give this to cheryl please or is everybody else gone okay sorry sorry guys um so i want my camera to be able to take the pictures that i want to take regardless of the situation and having the cameras rugged and and put together right is gonna make it give me the pictures that i want and that that's important mark's showing the front uh ceiling and that's the rear ceiling uh if you look at my little picture um there's extensive ceiling but the real interesting thing is when you look at the frame of the camera um the frame of the camera is you know you notice that the only place there's holes in the camera are where there are controls basically and those if you go back a slide um you would see that every one of those holes is sealed so this camera is going to be particularly robust and the other part of that which doesn't really get talked about as much let me see if i see where that is here real quick i'm gonna find it i've got all these images here i gotta find the one i'm looking for but uh when you look at the lenses the lenses also um are well sealed so tom i'm gonna let you share your screen go ahead okay do what do i want to share or what do i want to share i don't know what i want to share let's share the desktop share the desktop oh i haven't been doing this for a while so i have to hold on just just a moment so the green box in the bottom share screen and uh i i i haven't unlocked apple changed their system of course and i can't i can't do it until apple says i can do it right share screen no what i really want to do you you want to zoom up my my picture so this guy up here you want to zoom okay so so everyone you can grab tom's picture and you can just make it bigger in the view so the the point the point that that you know nikon has made and almost all these um z mount lenses have really good ceiling um you'll see that they're this is the 24 to 120 there's one two three four five six seven different areas that are completely sealed off on this lens so you combine lens ceiling with the with the camera ceiling you put flooring coating on the front of the lens and guess what you're relatively impervious to light water that's um you know mists light rain that sort of thing you don't worry about it as much you know i've used this this beast i've used this beast out in pouring rain and it does just fine as long as you make sure all your covers are closed that you've got a hot shoe cover on the top um that the car door is closed you know there's no access points that are like i've got this flap that's open right now that would not be a good thing the z9 is going to be exactly the same way exactly the same way i could be afraid to use it during a football game when it's raining all right i lost my chat hold on so the dual articulated screen has everyone excited um i will tell you that you have to get used to it it doesn't just flip out it only works it it's but it's this is going to be a feel thing like i said i had 15 minutes with a gang so it flips out and then out so we've got a good feel for it and generally so you're going to be in the portrait mode and you want to flip it out or you're going to be in the landscape mode and you pick flip it out that it's going to work awesome for that right and and in terms of how much it goes it will move so in the horizontal position i'll go 90 degrees up and it'll go 43 degrees down and the vertical uh in the vertical position will go 90 degrees up and 23 degrees down so it's not it's not 180 degree flip screen uh it has limits to how you can position it but in the very short time i had to play with that it had pretty much all the positions that i would be using it from the back of the camera and that's i agree that's really all i was concerned about and someone asked does it does it reverse no you know i put a a uh a gorilla glass cover on on mine i use the promaster crystal protective screen cover thingies and they work great doesn't have just doesn't hurt the touch screen you know it works perfectly so the new battery enel 18d battery um has the power that the z9 needs you i'm told that you can use any of the enel 18 batteries the a the b the c the or the d um the new charger the mh-33 battery tiny for those of you who've seen the chargers for the other batteries they're big takes two batteries at a time they cost about 300 bucks a piece if you if you ever lose or break one of the chargers but the new charger is tiny it's just a half an inch bigger than the battery itself the new small charger i'm told will only charge the new batteries the enel 18d batteries yeah um needless to say we ordered as many batteries as we ordered cameras from nikon when are the camera one of the batteries gonna ship we don't know we'll talk more about shipping later um but just to give you an idea so that um d version of the battery is 36 watt hours i have the c version of the battery i just pulled out of my d6 and that's 27 watt hours holy cow so you really do want to use the d batteries if you can you're going to get more life out of the camera longer life out of the camera i did ask around and um let's see it's down here somewhere it's on it's on my page you can usb charge a b c or d battery in the camera okay you can't charge the original or the a in the um okay and um can the camera be powered by usb yes and any battery can be in the camera when it's powered via usb but i think you have to have a battery in the camera i'm not a hundred percent sure about that last one but it doesn't matter what what battery is in the camera but we're going to see some fallout the fall off between the different batteries that because nikon has kept goosing the amount of energy in these batteries over time so if you've got old original or a or b batteries even the c battery um you're probably going to want an extra d battery um to play it safe that's going to give you the best bang for the buck in terms of length of time that you can shoot with it you know a couple people have talked to me tom about so mark why did they go to the big battery why didn't they use the e l15 batteries because all of this performance comes with the need for power and more power higher higher higher power input so that you can perform all these these tasks and also i don't know about your response your experience with the d6 is i can shoot all day pretty much on one battery and not have to worry about changing at a football game or an event i can go the whole day on one battery well you know it's going to change from the d5 and d6 to the z9 and i just don't know how it's going to change yet uh i used to be able to shoot with my d5 for almost a week in africa without pulling the battery and putting a new one in so you know two weeks safari all i needed was two charged batteries um i don't think that's going to be true with the z9 i think i'm going to be charging batteries occasionally but i don't know what that is yet we won't know until we have cameras in hand and can put it into real life testing correct all right so now we're off to any now we're off to the lenses you know the lens that almost everyone you're pretty much universally asking for is the 100 to 400 lens very excited about this lens and it's got really good mtf numbers again nikon's mtf numbers are theoretical not measured but nevertheless it has really good numbers and so i expect it to perform quite well um you can use a tc uh teleconverter with uh it uh which is interesting um and i noticed that a couple of the sample images that nikon gave us uh use the teleconverter um the image on the left there was that 400 millimeter right with f56 i know for sure um because i've been looking at all these images uh carefully but uh the eyes are perfectly sharp on that in fact i've had those i had those we can actually look at that i know nikon probably doesn't want me to do that but if you can put if you can put that screen up as the main screen can swap us out i can't because we're equal presenters they can draw they can drag me smaller okay so if you want to drag him smaller and see i'm in lightroom with pictures it was supplied to us by nikon i just zoomed all the way in it looks pretty damn good yeah i mean i'm not going to complain about that at all so if that's what this lens does i'm happy i'm going to be happy too so yeah so what are we going to use the 100 to 400 for for wildlife for sports um you know you see you saw some handball pictures earlier you know very tough situation to shoot indoors extremely low light and focusing super fast action with a 5 000 a 5.6 so somebody asked the question about the 70 to 200 with the tc2 versus the 100 to 400 the 100 to 400 will be better i'm i'm convinced of that the 70 to 200 with the two times converter is actually pretty good it is really good yes i've been using it for a number of things i'm i'm not displeased with that at all yeah you know most of you who know me know i'm not a fan of teleconverters uh i stopped using them for a long time uh with the dslrs because they just took too much away but uh you know the 1.4 on the 70 to 200 is really really good and um the two times on the 70 to 200 is good um you'll see on my site if you go to zsystemuser.com um i have some preliminary takes on my use of those converters uh so there's more words than what i just said but it still says the same thing great with the 1.4 good with the two so the new walk around lens as i like to think of it the 24 to 120 you know a lot of you have asked for something a little bit with a little bit more zoom power so here we go 24 to 120 that's been a classic in the nikon stable for oh my gosh 20 years now the 24 to 120. right just be aware that it does uh extend uh with sound yeah so krishna asked do you think it's going to be better than the 24 to 200 i certainly hope well yes it's an s line lens it should be given that designation again the proof is in the pudding with all of this we're very early on we're all excited we all want to get the stuff in our hands and start using it um to see just how good it is but you know the images that i've seen that nikon has shared with us and and marcus showing some of them uh here i've looked at them at 100 played around with them looked at them a little more carefully they're all very good images so i'd be perfectly happy with uh that level of image so a couple of questions is the one 100 to 400 pf no somebody asked how is it going to balance on the z6 it's this pretty much the same feeling spec as a 70-200 so if you if you have a 70 to 200 or if you have a local camera store go in and try the 70 to 200 um we'll see yeah the specs seem to be very close there yeah so here's the new ft z2 um i've been told that functionally it's identical to the fztz1 the only difference is it does not have the tripod mount on it making it a little bit sleeker and one of the reasons why they did away with the tripod mount is for those who use the z6 and the z7 with the battery grip on it it's really tight on the battery grip and i'm here it's the same thing on the z9 no it's worse it's worse on the z9 if you in fact the z9 that i handled had an fdz on it at the time i mean the you can't get your fingers in oh yeah okay because the the tripod mount is going to hit your fingers before you can break your hands around the grip so it definitely they needed to make a new ftc adapter but it's no different than the current one in terms of function as far as i know great perfect it's 10 grams lighter for those of you in europe all right and one of the lenses i'm most excited about because 4028 is my that's my sports lens and that's my africa safari lens and to get 4028 with the 1.4 extender built in is very exciting for me yeah i mean again i i want to see the lens and see how it handles and what its weight is yeah everything else because the 400 and the balance and the feeling it's exactly the same thing the 400 to 8 is my favorite lens yeah some of the pictures that you may have seen of my africa safari with with the uh with the uh z6 and z7 uh some of those pictures were with the 400 millimeter f28 lens uh um it's definitely a lens i take with me if i have the chance to take it with me but it is a big heavy lens i don't always take it with me especially and i'm hoping that canon you know nikon uses the similar designs so canon and sony have really shrunk the weight on their super telephotos i'm hoping nikon uses that similar technology to get the get the weight down so we'll see without compromising quality of course quality first yeah i mean we've seen that with some lenses the 14 to 24 millimeter for instance f28 um is a very i mean compared to the dslr lens it's lighter and and and more light and it takes filters on top of them so that was a big improvement as far as i was concerned now 24 to 70 f28 also smaller than the 24 to 70 f28 on the f mount so nikon nikon's definitely heard the make it smaller lighter they're just not going to make it worse correct they want to make it better so if they can do all of those things they are um if they can't do all of those things they're going to make it better first yes i agree and i i i would support that 100 so right so somebody asked about the pfs if you look at the the silhouetted lenses on this chart it's actually pretty interesting and pretty incredible that 85 millimeter has to be an f 1.2 lens it's it's a fat boy and it has to be a fast lens it's got it's either one 1.2 or maybe it's faster than that i don't know but 1.2 for sure um but all the rest of the lenses i i don't know if you really paid an attention to this the new 26 millimeter lens is smaller than the tc 1.4 which is like oh it's a pancake the 24 millimeter dx lens which would be equivalent to about a 35 millimeter lens on full frame also small as small as the 16 to 50 millimeter zoom collapsed yeah interesting that's nice i like that the 12 to 28 millimeter dx lens look at it it's smaller than the 50 millimeter f28 macro lens that's the one that got me really excited because my carry around camera all the time is my z50 so a z50 with the 12 to 28 and the 50 to 250 or maybe the 24 to 200 would be a two lens travel kit for me that works really really nice and that's a small lens to keep on the camera then we get up to that 600 millimeter s line on the far right in the back that's definitely one of the exotics it's likely to be a f4 with the normal exotic glass i wonder if it has a tc built into it like this 400 does if you look if you look at the 400 you know if it didn't have the tc in it it would be about the same size or shorter so but we're just guessing here guys we don't know anything yeah but it'd be nice to if the 600 also had a tc 1.4 in it that would definitely mean that you have a 400 500 600 800 combination and two lenses which we don't have in the dslr world yeah um but the two surprising ones um you know the the 400 millimeter is the same size almost in terms of length as the 70 to 200 and the 100 to 400 collapsed that almost has to be a pf if you look at the if that's an accurate size it could be anywhere from f uh 4.3 4.5 to f56 in terms of maximum aperture i don't think it can hit f4 but any of those would be happy for me um and then the 800 millimeter also looks like it has to be a pf uh one of the things about the pf lenses okay so with the exotic telephotos they tend to be in fact all tail of the photos they tend to be if it's 300 millimeter telephoto it's 300 millimeters from the front of the lens to the the focal plane that's the traditional design optical design for telephoto lens that's been known it works it's easy to make really great lenses that way and that's why everybody does it that way so 300 millimeter lens is 300 millimeters long approximately but a 400 millimeter lens that's as long as a 200 millimeter lens has to have an optical uh design that's different than traditional telephoto lenses so it could be do like canon does it could be pf like nikon does it has to be something different that changes the light path within the lens itself and that i would say that's true of the 800 as well so i i would place a pretty big bet that the 400 and 800 or pf lenses don't know what their apertures would be but um when you think about it we also have 300 and 500 millimeter pf's that we can put on the fdz adapter so think about that 300 400 500 and 800 pf's awesome and then a 400 with a tc and then if we had a 600 with the tc also would be awesome that would be a great way for nikon to expand out its lineup very very rapidly and have something that nobody else has at the at the telephoto end and it looks like that's exactly where they're going so paul asked why don't we see a 3028 and i'll answer in my opinion that we did 3028 in the dx range when the pro lenses were dx and since the cameras went to full frame 400 has become the sports lens for me well i i would say the 400 and the 120 to 300 correct forget about the 120 to 300 i know a lot of sports pros now who just are in total love with the 120 to 300 yeah uh it gives them a lot of flexibility um and especially if they flip to crop mode occasionally yeah um you know they're that it's just an awesome uh awesome uh lens and i noticed that a number of nikon's examples that they shot with the z9 were with a 120 to 300 yeah and probably for the same reason it's a really good lens to start with but it has that focal range right in a range where it gives you some flexibility for a lot of sports i'd rather have that eventually than a 300 f28 yeah i agree okay so nikon's introduced some new software and if you haven't seen on my news views page i have a chart of how all the software kind of integrates together now nx mobile air is interesting it's sort of what we've been asking for for a long time i've been doing this in a slightly different form with my camera so when i'm on the sidelines i have my phone mounted uh to the side or on top of the camera and it's connected to the camera with a usb cable and every now and then i squared everything off via usb into photos and then from photos i can do anything i want on my iphone to get it to clients or etc so you know i'll be on the on a football field and for the first quarter i'll shoot i'll have been making my selections we now have cameras that allow me to quickly scroll through my selected images i'll take those i'll squirt them over via the usb cable to my phone and then from my phone i'll squirt them out to the client well nx mobile air is an attempt to essentially give you that same capability in a little better form doesn't use photos there's some nice aspects to this i i don't know how they work yet but um iptc captioning is in in that i use that from time to time depends on the client and the sport and voice annotation so i can i can say hey photo editor this is a picture of uh so and so doing such and such um and um so you can voice annotate i think i saw somewhere you can voice annotate to text so you can speak and have it translated into text um the uh that that'll be out at the end of the month i think november 24th is when they plan to have that available um and it works with other cameras than the z9 with certain phones um it's exactly what all of us pjs and sports photographers have wanted for a long time we have to get images to our clients literally in minutes or else they don't want to hire us so that's the problem that nikon is trying to solve there and then the other piece of new software sorry is um not michelle waldberg but no next tether and uh that's a new tethering uh piece of software um you'll see that he's plugged you know what happened to camera control pro well it's still around the camera control pro is not just focus on tethering this software is focused just on tethering i still trying to find out whether it does wireless tethering or not i think it does with certain transmitters uh and that's another thing that people aren't catching on the the wireless transmitter in the z9 is like a wt6 not like the snap bridge transmitters that are in the other cameras tethering is connecting the camera to your computer directly so when i take a picture it pops up on the on the computer in the studio when we have clients standing there watching us take pictures we want them to be able to see what they're what we're taking and have them be able to comment on that so this example here is exactly that you can see that the image that the photographer on the left is taking of the model is up on a big screen where everybody can see it that's a tethered solution that software will be out i believe on the fourth which is thursday and again it works for more cameras than the z9 so if you're into studio tethering you might want to take a look on thursday and see if that works with your camera and solves a problem that you might have so i i've had over the last few months the pleasure to get to know michelle walberg she's a nikon canada ambassador she's a canadian geographic photographer and she was one of the testers on the z9 and she was able to use the z9 and the 100 to 400 lens and sent me some images and michelle in her in her um eloquence said the z9 is ridiculous it completely changed changes the way she's photographing and she did this amazing shoot i'll post a video of it tomorrow with a hoop dancer in her studio um amazing fun images and she also shared with me images made with the z9 and the 100 to 400 and these are shot with the 100 to 400 and a 2x extender because she said she's a long lens junkie she loves to hump the 800 millimeter 5.6 with her in the wild and was just very impressed with the performance you know on the 100 to 400 with the 2x that means f11 and the focus was snappy and quick and i want to show you this one look at the out-of-focus background and she was using the i detect on both the eagle and the raven and the z9 she said snapped right in and for those of you who are interested michelle will be here at paul's photo on sunday so she's going to be doing a live fully a live portrait workshop here you can sign up for that there is a fee for it but she's also going to give a talk at 10 o'clock in the morning west coast time we'll talk about this in just a minute talking about her experiences with the z9 it'll be a round table discussion michelle myself and our local nikon rep together talking about the z9 so you guys are welcome to sign up for that the talk is free and it's going to be an online presentation if you sign up for the workshops you'll be able to come to the workshops we'll have a live shoot we'll have cameras and lenses for you to try um we're in torrance california larry it's certainly worth a small plane ride to get here to hold the hold the z9 on sunday and you won't be able to shoot pictures with the z9 because these are still pre-production samples the the slot with the memory card will be taped closed so that you can't put your own memory card in it but you'll certainly be able to hold it to your eye and push the button and make it go click so tom you want to talk about some disinformation so one of the things that and i noticed nikon's trying to deal with this too so there's a lot of things that you need to just kind of watch out for there's some general things that are happening so people are comparing general product lines versus a specific camera so you know the sony a9 is a great camera no doubt about it i i like my sony a1 and it's it's a it works for most of the things i need to do it for but you know my sony a7 is not the same as a sony a1 even the sony a7r mark iv is not the same as a sony a1 um there are some great cameras from each competitor the sony a1 the canon r5 r6 those are really good cameras no doubt about it but be really careful about when somebody generalizes and says nikon cameras suck sony cameras are better those people just haven't used all those cameras and can't make solid judgments about that um there's another thing that keeps coming up oh the z9 is a response to the sony uh a9 or or a1 now all these camera companies you know the z9 had to have started in terms of its development probably four years ago the sensor probably at least three years ago um so this whole notion that oh you know sony came out with a camera six months ago that is really great so nikon had to respond micron was already going to do something they were already in progress with the z9 cameras are not generally in response to anybody and i saw another piece of this information pop up today about canon which is oh canon's going to introduce a r1 in the end of 2022 in response to nikon z9 no if canon introduces as uh r1 in 2022 it's going to be because they've been developing it for a while it's just as simple as that and then there's this other notion that sony is the only sensor maker in the world that's not true there are a number of them um you know i did and i don't think it makes a lot of difference sony licenses technologies from others that's how they got stack sensors that's how they got phase detect autofocus that's how they got dual gain nikon licenses technologies from others canon licenses technology from others the sensor the image sensor market is very promiscuous there's a lot of cross fertilization going on it doesn't really make a difference as to who makes the sensor but uh it doesn't seem like this is a sony sensor but i couldn't care less doesn't make a difference nikon specified the sensor they specified it the way they wanted it it looks like it's going to be a really great sensor and then you see all these other little pieces of information that just start to pop up one that came up and somebody had forwarded me to today is that the sony a1 has almost 10 more resolution than a than a z9 well that's somebody who's math challenged because that's not true um it's more like four percent difference in resolution and that's not enough that you can see it yeah actually you can't really see 10 the historical studies say it takes 15 to 20 percent change in resolution before people can uh see a difference between two images and so what's happening right now and niko i see nikon responding to this but i thought i would try and respond to it too which is there are a lot of people nipping at the edges trying to find fault with the z9 well first of all the z9 is not actually out in our hands and so we can't really say how good or great it really is it's going to be in that realm it's going to be at least a good camera it's probably going to be a great camera you know it can only sync with flash in certain ways i don't know how it syncs with flash yet because i haven't tried it um people who have tried it say it works just like a dslr so i'm not sure what the real downside there is oh the sony has a faster flash sync speed but that as it turns out is only under certain circumstances the mechanical shutter not the electronic shutter uh you know the buffer is not big enough yeah okay uh buffer seems like it's gonna be perfectly fine for me even with an xqd card uh you know i don't sit there mashing the shutter for 30 seconds um two seconds three seconds four seconds five seconds six seconds worth of uh buffer is perfectly fine and the other thing that a lot of people don't talk about is that some of these competitive cameras when the buffer fails the camera is dead to you the early sony cameras once your buffer failed if you took your finger off the shutter release you could not change menus you could not change camera settings you couldn't put your finger back on the shutter release and start taking pictures again one of the things i've always admired about nikon's buffer is that it will keep chugging um so you know if you are running at 20 frames a second and the buffer fills the camera will keep running at the rate that it can write images to the card and oftentimes that's two or three frames a second and that's enough to make sure that you catch the tail end of something but the other part of it is lift your finger off the shutter release and put it back down you'd be surprised at how fast it's back to 20 frames a second or you know 14 frames a second or 10 whichever you know all the nikon cameras operate the same way there in that respect and the camera is still operative in every way shape or form so all this nay saying about buffer is just naysaying um and i'm getting tired of people trying to find a problem with the camera you know frame rate it only does 20 frames a second um well it does 30 frames a second jpeg and most of my most of the clients that might want 30 frames or 120 frames are only going to want jpegs in the first place so i don't see the problem the overall size is too big the sony's so much smaller okay well sony also is not going to last through a torrential rainstorm on the sidelines without some sort of protection is my guess i can't use you know as good as the sony a1 is um it's coming up winter here and when it starts snowing i put gloves on the way it's going to start getting hard to find those buttons and that's never been a problem with the nikon pro cameras um and you know the lcd is awkward well i don't think so but that's up for you to decide you can try it you know when cameras get into the stores and see if you agree with that you know the evf doesn't have nine um nine million dots and it does only doesn't work at 120 frames a second well i hate to tell you this but i'm not using my sony a1 at 9 million dots and and um and at 120 hertz refresh rate because that has implications on what the camera can do in terms of speed of capturing images so i'm using it at a lower uh dot rate and at 60 hertz anyway so i'm not sure what the big deal about that is and then the whole issue of battery uh just one thing cipa ratings the typical cipa rating says take your camera put it on continuous shooting at one frame every 30 seconds without um letting the viewfinder or the rear of lcd go dark and use a flash if there's one in in the camera cipa ratings are more about how long the camera lasts so when you see a separating that says let's just say 600 frames um that's divide that by half and you have the number of minutes that that camera could be shooting uh continuously so 600 frames separating is 300 minutes 300 uh just 300 minutes is how long it's a long time right it's five hours how many shots can i do at 20 frames a second in five hours quite a few so i don't think we're going to find that the number of charges per uh battery a number of images per battery charge is going to be an issue so when these things come up and people start saying but the camera probably has this problem first of all they haven't used it second of all none of us have used it to be able to verify what it can and can't do and give you real solid information about uh all of these things and three what they're really trying to do is they're trying to denigrate what looks like it's going to be a really spectacular product so i just thought i'd throw that out there i don't usually talk about that but this has come up a lot um recently that there's been a lot of naysaying you know it can't be possibly as good as as as we think it will be that was happening all before the before the before the announcement and then suddenly after the announcement you'll notice that a lot of the naysaying went away but it's still there they're just nipping at the edges trying to find something that's wrong with the z9 i doubt that they're going to find anything tangible okay mark so when will we know who we know tom when when will we know i'd like to think i'm going to know starting december 4th but yeah you know we don't know i mean we will know when we have the cameras and you guys all know that the world is in a turmoil with production logistics you know nikon has a target that they are keeping very close to the vest i sent an email to all of the people who have ordered cameras from us you know that nikon has said this year does that mean thanksgiving hanukkah christmas or new year's eve um i don't know we'll see i i don't know either but the thing i do know is nikon is in extremely eager to get cameras into people's hands so they're going to do it as fast as they can yeah so you put this in there you want me to put this in there comment yeah you and i were talking about yes when people will get cameras i i don't know we don't know and nobody knows nikon can game this and get cameras out faster but it's going to require a number of things on their part to do i know they're excited about this camera so they very well may try and steal a little bit of production from somewhere else to be able to get more of the c9s out faster but it's all going to be different determined by nikon and how fast they can how fast they can get the supplies and how fast they can pivot and get the production done i agree and i think this may be the the strongest release that nikon has ever seen on a camera so people have asked so what's the price so 54.99 when is the delivery 2021 the 100 to 400 the 24 to 120 the ftc the enel 18d the charger all of these things they're related but they're unrelated so the cameras are going to come when the cameras are going to come the lenses are going to come when the lenses are going to come and we're doing the best we can to get the cameras for you so and the lenses so i know a number of you have placed a you've you've placed our pre-order with paul's photo i know many of you have ordered other places if you haven't ordered yet you know we do a priority pre-order and we ask for a deposit so that you guys have a paid order and so nikon considers a paid order as a stronger commitment than just putting your name on a list that's why we do that for you and for those of you who are here tonight we'll off make an offer for you so free 128 gigabytes cfe card if you order no tax if it's shipped out of california and you get a guaranteed place in line so what that means is somebody can't pay more and go in front of you people who pay for their camera in full don't go in front of you we keep that line in tact and you know right where you are and how things are how things are going so um remember if you're an mps member you get you can ask for priority delivery through the nikon nps site and you're just going to specify authorized dealer delivery and choose paul's photo as your dealer portal so yeah any questions about that tom or comments tom oh they're asking what kind of card you're going to give them which which is it's the hoodman steel cfe card that's they stepped up to plate to subordinate a little bit of that cost it's a 200 card guys so yeah that's one i didn't look up i will look up the specs on what a sustained rate is but um generally hudman's uh specs are usually pretty good yeah exactly so where are we going okay there you go so i i wanted to talk i mean you're all talking about you want a z9 but i also wanted to talk just a little bit about where we're at with full frame mirrorless um just really briefly and we'll try and zip through this there are three entry-level full-frame cameras that you can get the best one in my opinion is the nikon z5 the second best is the the a7 mark ii the canon rp and the sony a7 mark ii are kind of getting long in the tooth um and um you know i think the best all-around entry full-frame camera if you're interested in in getting one is going to be the z5 so from the entry we go to base at the base level i'd say the best camera that you can get there is probably the canon r6 um it's only a 20 megapi of megapixels but it's basically the same as an r5 in almost every other respect so the focus performance is is really good um it's really really well considered camera it's more expensive than the nikon z62 though if you if you need fast frame rates i'd pick the canon over the nikon but if you don't need fast frame rates if you don't need above 5.5 frames per second i'd probably pick the nikon over the canon and again you know sony just announced the a7 mark iv so i don't know how it does but the mark iii was showing its age even before the the mark iv was introduced i would clearly say the nikon was a better camera than the sony mark iii then moving up another level to the high res camera i don't kind of put these in any order they're all really good cameras um you know so it sort of depends on what features and other things that you're looking for as to which one of these you would get obviously if you want the most megapixels you'd go sony if you wanted the best video you'd probably go canon but i'll tell you the nikon z72 just like the d850 puts out remarkably good image quality remarkably good that's my daily driver that's what i carry in my bag every day well my bag every my everyday bag that has all my common gear that i carry around for assignments is a c62 z72 and the trio of f28 lenses so yeah i i'm never displeased with picking up anything out of that bag and then the last category is what we've been talking about today the true top-end flagship cameras again i wouldn't put them in any order at this point at this level you're probably already in a mount so stick with the camera company that you're dealing with whether you're moving from dslr to mirrorless or you're already in mirrorless just want to move up to a flagship if you're a nikon user buy the nikon z7 if you're a canon user buy the canon r3 if you're a sony user buy the sony a1 again if you can afford it and if you need that level of camera so i i agree with that you know wanted to put all of that out because it's it as much as we're all caught up in the z9 and it is a very dramatic event it's a d1 type event where the world is just kind of changed a little bit and the future is going to be different than the past as much as we want to talk about that there's a whole range of really great cameras on the market today um ranging you know from a thousand dollars for a full-frame camera that's pretty damn competent to you know sixty five hundred dollars for a really remarkable other camera you've got plenty of choice here you need to sit down and realistically think about what it is you need what it is you're trying to do and pick the right camera for you and no it's not a z8 because it doesn't exist correct so i want to talk to you guys again michelle valberg will be here s sunday so live in the store in the cpa classroom so sunday marks the reopening of the creative photo academy classroom um you know we've been closed since february of 2020 to be awesome to have a real class here we're going to have models and shooting and all kinds of fun stuff but 10 o'clock she's going to give her z9 testimonial talk it'll be a round table discussion it's free go to the creative photo academy website events michelle wahlberg you can sign up for the free talk or for the workshops and tom and i are proud to announce tom's next visit with us right so we i've been promising this lecture for a long time and all kinds of things came up so i wasn't able to do it but people wanted to know how i got all those great shots in africa in 2019 with the z6 and z7 and why i was saying that the nikon autofocus is best perfectly fine if you take the time to learn it so on the 23rd at 5 p.m i'm going to give a paid talk about taking cameras mirrorless cameras to africa some of the things that are involved with doing that but very specifically the meat of the talk in the middle is going to be talking about optimizing autofocus performance and the things that you need to be watching for the things that you can do the things that you want to do the things that mirrorless cameras are great at that you might not have realized um that dslrs aren't as great at uh in africa so i'll go through all of that i've been putting that off for a while again i did that trip in 2019 i was originally going to do this as a in person lecture here on the east coast in 2020 and we all know it happened in 2020 and then all kinds of other things happened in between so i've been postponing that but i have a really good solid talk that i want to put together for that and this is what it'll be great and i'm excited to hear that because the questions that we all get i have my system for optimizing a camera it's just like photoshop tom has his way i have my way it's not better or worse i want to see what tom does and it's going to certainly be worth 49 guys to get your camera optimized to get the most focused performance and whether you're using a z6 or z7 z62 z72 or the z9 the focus settings are all very similar right and the priorities and the parameters are very much in line even the z50 and the zfc to the largest absolutely yeah and and you know mark's seen the slides that i prepared for this lecture so he he knows that there's a lot of meat on this presentation um as with all the presentations the presentation will be available uh um it'll be recorded so you'll have access to it for a certain period time after the after the lecture itself and of course i'll answer questions um and then the next thing assuming that nikon says they're going to do everything they can to get me a camera before i leave to africa i'm leaving for africa for what i call the three safaris and a wedding tour i'm going to three new lodges that i haven't been to before and scouting them and then i'm going to a wedding of a very good friend in africa and so hopefully i'll have a z9 with me and assuming i do we'll have a free event um after that um so just after christmas and i will tell you how things went and what i found out um i'm keeping a we're going to go back and look through the questions and make sure that we've answered everything in the chat but i'm keeping a set of questions on my website as a kind of a live document that i keep updating as i find out new things that's the length that you need it's been updated every day since the z um does this here so here's a new question that just popped up with the z9 still work with snapbridge yes um so i'm trying to keep track of all these questions and answer them in one spot um it's a live document so it keeps changing every day and you know you'll want to bookmark that and come back every couple days i'm using color to highlight new information versus information that was already there so you'll be able to tell new stuff as it as it gets as it gets posted and like i said here guys i'm going to send you a link to the recording of tonight's session and in that link will be this the link i don't expect you to write down that url it's a little big so um yeah all right tom do you want to start in on the questions yeah i'm going all the way back to the beginning here to see what questions came up uh uh does the c9 still have oops he just changed my chat on me thanks oh sorry [Music] now i've lost that question just completely changed the scroll to to i'll find it again i'm trying to find the start of the questions and we'll just go through them in order as fast as we can i'm going all the way back to the beginning these are all the introductions um more introductions should i trade my d500 and d850 for a z9 um you have two really great cameras so what the heck is it that you're missing um i mean nikon certainly would love to sell you a new camera and you know the z's are are really good cameras from the bottom of the lineup all the way to the top um so you know that's up to you but those are two really really good cameras that i mean tell me a crop sensor camera that's on the market today that's better than a d 500 there is not one there's none not even close not even close it's five years old it still tops every other crop sensor camera that's out there so if crop sensor is important to you you're not going to find a better crop sensor camera simply not d850 i still say it's the second best all-around camera that you can buy with the sony a1 being the one that i say is the best i don't know where the z9 fits there the z72 kind of fits right behind the d850 in in terms of that it's not a camera that you turn in lightly it's a really really good camera well but and and i but i will chime in that if you want to convert to z i have customers who switch a body and keep all the f-mount lenses but i also have customers who push you know they buy a z camera and one lens and try it for a while to make sure they like it and then push in all their f stuff that is has z replacements to get the smaller lighter weight and the better imaging quality that you're going to see from the z lenses right so i mean maybe you keep the d500 because it's a great crop sensor camera and you trade the d850 for a z72 right that's a that's a maybe not a that's what you do um and the reason why you keep the i mean in the telephoto range we don't have a lot of telephone lenses out yet so if the reach is your is of your interest which is probably why you have the d500 then you're keeping the d500 for the time being i still have fine tune focus tuning in the setup menu yes it does uh in dp review today there was a arctic uh an interview with uh nikon manager talking about why that is i'm not sure i agree with his answer completely there are people that do like to change the focus and back focus or front focus slightly from where the camera wants to do it but the real reason why autofocus fine tune is there you've got when you put an ftz adapter on your camera you now have two mounts uh any mount tolerance at all starts to become slightly an issue older lenses do tend to lose a little of their pace uh in terms of their ability to focus fast and sometimes that will affect focus a little bit so there are reasons to have it do you need to fine-tune focus uh a a nikon c camera i've not found that to be the case yet but that doesn't mean there won't be a case um can i tell you what the the the head of the nikon service department in the la area told me what with their number one setting on on nikon cameras fine fine focus adjustment is zero zero yeah and they spend more time undoing the settings that people have falsely put in than actually making any corrections well i mean even with dslrs um if you've ever been on one of my workshops in africa or any of my wildlife workshops the first thing that my teaching assistant tony and i do is we sit down and we af fine tune everybody's camera we want to make sure that it's working and um generally speaking we're never anywhere out of plus three to minus three and most of them are left on zero um and at plus three or minus three i might even leave it on zero um because you know heat and other things will affect focus performance so um yeah no it's it's not a big thing should i rent a z9 or a second c7 for botswana next year if you're going on one of my workshops um you you've already just got an email from me for next year email me that question directly uh i can't answer it if you're not on one of my workshops i don't know what you're where you're going or what you're doing or what your interests are um the 100 to 400 versus 70 to 200 with the tc i already answered that one the 100 to 400. um another sella d850 that's going to be a common question here i think and the answer is not unless there's something specific that you gain by moving to a new camera uh it's an incredibly good camera to start with yeah but tom there is a factor of some people dislike the newest of the new yeah well that's fine i mean if you want something that's a whole different thing i can't answer should you buy a new camera or not if it's all about what you like yeah or what you want or or you need you need you need to max out your credit card again for some reason to collect airlines or something i i can't answer those questions but do you if you have a d850 you've got a really good camera takes really great pictures use it to its fullest um does the dr match the z7 that's an image quality question we can't answer them yet nikon's not answering them nobody's answering them everybody who's used the camera that i know of seems to be really satisfied with it i've looked at a lot of images from it they look good so what else can i say does it have closest subject priority no i do not think it does i'm still trying to get the definitive answer on that but i'm pretty sure it doesn't um do i have any thoughts on the 24 120 versus the 24 to 70. well again i pointed out that the 124 to 120 does extend when you zoom for some people that might be an issue but not sure it's a big one um that's an answer that's a question that um is going to take having the lens in hand and testing it before i can really answer it um you know the 24 to 70 f4 is a really good lens it's probably the best kit lens i've seen from anybody certainly at full frame and i love that lens because it's so tiny which c camera would i suggest as a d7000 replacement z50 or a zfc uh can you record video in portrait mode with a z9 well sort of are you talking about that i mean you can turn the camera sideways uh you could certainly do that but what are you going to do with that footage when it gets into final cut pro and premiere there are maybe tick tock there are there are ways to take or footage that was recorded that way and make it look like tick tock in a in final cut pro and premiere but um you can't do that in the camera that i know of is there a z8 around the corner i wouldn't expect one into for at least a year probably a little bit more uh the problem with evs is they don't hold dynamic range rail well guess what this one has three times brightness than uh the others so you might have to re-evaluate that i already told you who the woman behind me is that's my test head can i move the bottle in the foreground i did that you know uh but is the autofocus of the z9 not better i don't know how to answer that question uh how do you think the train plane autofocus is going to work everything i've seen so far looks really really good um so i think it's going to work come on sunday and hear michelle she'll talk about that yeah i think it's going to work exactly the way you want it to work um for short birds i believe z9 solves a lot of problems in those scenarios yeah i think so um certainly if you need a higher frame capture rate and sometimes you do with small birds and small shorebirds to get the thing that you want but the big birds you can generally go at a slower frame rate but with the small birds and especially you know the rollers that are going all over the place a high frame rate probably is better and the z9 is the best high frame rate camera that nikon is going to be making for the immediate future and look what christie odom did with the pikas right so that to me is a very similar type approach how does the high iso performance we don't know uh how many raw images before the buffer fill we've covered that one uh there there were i noticed a lot of questions about high efficiency raw and nikon's being kind of coy with that right now there is a file format called high efficiency image file format or heif and hike files which are what apple and canon and now sony have done in their cameras are a form of hype i'm not sure if this isn't another form of hype with some sort of codec that i don't know about we just have to wait to get cameras and start dissecting files to be get a good good idea of what's going on with high efficiency raw now nikon is saying that lossless is like uncompressed and high efficiency raw star is like the best previous compressed and visually lossless i think they've returned to that word visually lossless so that bodes well i just need to see it and be able to verify that can't do that yet is the z9 a d850 and a d500 replacement same question um i've already answered which canon sony will beat the z9 i don't know but if you're a canon user you should be looking at the r3 and the r5 and the r6 if you're sony user you should be looking at the a1 the a9 mark ii the a7 mark iv and maybe the a7 mark 4 that just came out again another camera i can't speak to how soon do i think nikon will trickle down the important c9 features i think that xp 7 will probably trickle down in 2022 any camera that's introduced uh in 2022 by nikon which we're sort of expecting at the end of the year might be a z63 and a z73 i would tend to expect those are xp 7 cameras and not xp 6 cameras don't know about underwater subjects yet i certainly don't have a z9 but if i had a z9 i wouldn't be submerging it at the moment and i don't know if anybody has even got a got a something to put it in to take it underwater so it's gonna be a little while um will the three times spider evf make a meaningful improvement uh i think so how about panasonic like pre-capture at a high frame rate well actually olympus i think was one of the first ones that did that where they captured where they're capturing if you have your finger half pressed on the shutter speed they're capturing a burst and putting it into the buffer and then if you press your finger they'll actually save some of the stuff that was in the buffer um the z9 to my knowledge does not have that um there are only a couple cameras i know that do have that it is a useful feature if uh if you've ever tried that that's one of the nice things i like about the the om1 uh how did nikon get around the 30-minute video restriction um well the 30-minute video restriction originally partly was because of european tariffs uh those are now gone but then the next thing that happened was that if you have if you run silicon really hard for a long time that starts to overheat so people were putting arbitrary limits what nikon is telling us is that the video doesn't overheat the way you might expect it to so that's probably based upon the silicon uh any advantages of the z9 over the z7 for landscape photography as it stands right now i haven't heard anything in particular that i would say aha that is something that definitely stands out now whether or not there is or not is another story so wait wait 10 pin if you have 10 pin remote control for some kind of a like the lightning capture the interval tom inverometer um the flip up screen for doing for doing low angle in portrait mode well that would be the one thing that i i would point to in landscape that oftentimes i want to do more than just tilt the screen up and down uh that there are definitely times i want to see it from the side uh when i'm down low in landscape photography so there are probably some things that you might think are better but i there's just nothing that really stands out in a way that would make me say oh i've got to have a z9 instead of a z7 for landscape uh are there things that address workflow yes absolutely one of the things that stands out to me and i've only i mean i saw this very very briefly but it was exactly what i want which is the ability to be marking frames as i'm taking them and you know when i'm on the sidelines i'll be i'll be chimping stuff and trying to mark stuff so that i can find it faster so we now have abilities to scroll through just by marked frames and that would mean that it would be really easy to find a marked frame squirt it out via snap bridge find my next mark frame squirt it out via snap bridge so there are a whole host of workflow things like that that that um you would would find for the z9 sensor or you cropped a tab you mean 23 by nine by uh 35 by nine uh that's pretty common uh it's what the number of fixed pixels that fit into the space and then they round the number um so there's no real crop there um well function one transaction transition function and horizontal ustream i don't know the answer that question of whether or not it transitions or not i wasn't able to look at the custom settings very deeply um this dynamic range and we've answered that and we're not answering that because we don't know what is the customizations we can do with the various buttons i've heard that they've been expanded from what they were before i don't know exactly what that is i didn't have a chance to scroll through the entire list um and i didn't see um i didn't they didn't take anything away as far as i could tell they may have added stuff and tom i was told that the menu on the customization of the buttons looks like it does on the z72 where you have all of the functions and that you could actually bring there was a bill an ability what what did he tell me you could bring other stuff in there if it wasn't there i i heard that too but i haven't seen it so i don't know what that exactly what that means and what other stuff you can or couldn't bring in well i would i would think that to be as let's say for example you wanted white balance to be on custom function four and custom function four didn't have i mean function button four didn't have white balance as an option because that's a buttonable thing you could make it make it an option there that's how i heard that that's the way i interpreted it too but um yeah we're guessing guys there's a camera in my hand that's finished for me to answer that question for sure do we have pixel shift not that i know of um highlight alerts zebras and ef for still shooting i'm not sure about that one do we have a photo at the bottom of the camera no nikon did not supply one of the who did nikon work with to design the z9 are you talking about the styling of the hand grip etc i'm pretty sure they did that themselves but that's still all based on uh the italian designer from a long time ago they're still using design cues that he he gave them but they're now working that through themselves is there a focus assist light no i don't know if the flash focused assist light can be used yet uh i did have mark when he had the camera test red sensitivity uh of the focus system and it seems like it's more sensitive to red than the current cameras but we don't know anything for sure there uh will there be more well you don't have a you don't have a low pass sensor so there will be circumstances that generate moire does it have you ever shot with more have you ever had murray tom yeah yeah exactly when you don't want it uh you know it it's never there you'll look for it and you'll look for it you'll look for it and then you'll be out on a shoot and it just pops up at exactly the wrong time um yeah that's that's a tricky one i just had it once on a screen on a window i was shooting a house i've seen that uh the one thing if you're shooting models in a studio or even you know sometimes we go out and shoot sports figures with their uniform on in poses and kind of semi studio stuff we take our lights out and set it up and and do post shots with them you have to watch with you have to look at the fabrics of the uniforms and stuff very carefully and see if it's likely to trigger marie and if it is then you have to do some more investigation does it have focus shift shooting yes i believe it does that was the answer i got from nikon when i asked any expectation of 30 fps lossy raw infirm in a firmware update expectation i can't say is it possible i think it might be um so we'll see um shutter rate dial on the left screen only now i'm not sure what that question is i'm still only halfway through the questions will the original f2 tz adapter work yes it will but if you put it on the z9 the tripod holder is going to be in the way of the vertical grip space um 120 frames 11 megapixels that's jpeg only not raw there is no medium size raw there's no small raw there's no 12 bit raw it's all large full size full resolution raw at 14 bits no matter what raw setting you set um is the 11 megapixel line skipper full fx frame yes it's full xf it's the full frame um you do a 120 frames per second burst with the custom button i don't know the answer to that question i suspect no but remember there's a drive button up on the top of the button so it will be very easy to get to no matter what um were there any computational features like live composite pro capture none that i saw uh that doesn't mean there aren't um things buried in the camera there are definitely a lot of changes and we even saw some changes uh which a lot of people passed over uh with the z62 and z72 firmware updates this whole ability to change tint of essentially skin tones is on top of your ability to change tints with white balance it's a very nice uh thing you know wait wait so i think matthew jordan smith in his presentation talked about shooting in sepia so well okay again so with all the nikon cameras now you you have creative picture controls and you have picture controls and with the creative picture controls the very interesting thing is that you can mix them with a regular picture control so if you just want a hint of sepianess to a regular jpeg you know you just want to throw a little grading sepia grading you can do it and you can do it in any intensity that you want so how do you do that well the thing that people have not been picking up on anywhere near enough and i need to do a need to do a seminar on this or a quick video on this we have live view on these cameras and the i button gets us to almost all of this stuff really really quickly and allows us to like just set it and watch what happens yep um so you can you can change and do that mix of picture control while you're looking at the scene in front of you so you can make that decision in real time as you can with white balance as you can with hue as you can with virtually everything that's going to change the look of a jpeg for settings is there ability to save settings to something other than one file per card i don't know the answer to that yet we do have banks on the camera and we have it in multiple places and we have extended banks so i wouldn't be surprised if we have ways to save those uh what about shutter lag don't know what the shutter lag is what i mean i was able to press the shutter and quite frankly there's no real shutter lag on a z7 2 so i mean it's almost as good as what the pro cameras were 10 years ago so no lag lag isn't an issue and uh viewfinder lag is not an issue as well okay i'm getting almost two-thirds of the way i've answered those questions before can you shoot stills while capturing video i don't know the answer to that but i do know the answer that you can extract stills from the video that you shot in the camera so you get a 33 megapixel still from 8k and you get a 8 megapixel still from 4k so you're getting an 8 gonna get a 33 or an 8 megapixel jpeg from the video file that's correct um and you can you can do that on the camera and you can pick the still and scroll through and find exactly the frame that you want which i find to be more i find that to be more of a useful feature than pressing the still button in the middle of a video and getting what you want trying to get what you want i don't know if i agree with that i on my sony i actually do take stills while i'm taking video okay and there are times when i found that useful so i would like to see that in the nikon cameras as well uh how is high efficiency decompressed we have no idea the minute i know you'll know as angel bird and off brand heavens now angel bird is a a strong brand very hollywood-centric they've been doing you know stuff for big hollywood cameras the red cameras use some of them can use angel bird cards um yes cfe cards can get hot generally speaking well generally speaking what i found is that the ones with high sustained frame rates don't get as hot as the ones with lower sustained frame rates it's another reason to buy the more expensive cards unfortunately can the screen be reversed to protect glass we answered that no ah he already told you he's giving as many batteries as cameras he hopes i bet not but we ordered as many batteries as cameras well i said you hope yes um what do you think about the use of stepper motors versus linear motors you know what i think is does the focus system work and if the answer to that is yet yes i couldn't care less if it's a stepper motor a nano motor a linear motor dual motor single motor wave motors got there's a ton of other kinds of motors that could be nikon is obviously using stepper motors for a reason and they've gone to the i don't know if you've caught it or not but they've gone to the point where they're making their own um electronic chip to drive stepper motors so they have a specific chip that they stick into lenses that's optimized for their stepper motors so so far i haven't had any problems with focus on zs and so stepper motors are just fine uh will the lenses and ftc ship at the same time as the camera no as far as i know everything's coming out as soon as night gun can get it to you and those will be different dates for each of those is what i was told um ergonomics of the z9 versus other brands i've used well i mean i like the z9 grips uh compared to other cameras i like the nikon positions of controls and i think i've talked about this before with people there's a reason why nikon's hand positions are where where they are so i can keep my finger here on the shutter release while changing settings with my middle finger on the front command dial in my thumb on the rear command dial now it used to be that they had all their buttons on the left side so it was really easy to do you press a button on the left side and then you change stuff with the right side but my finger is still hovering over the shutter release all the time now canon had rows of buttons with multiple functions on them right behind the shutter release and then they had a horizontal and they had two vertical things and that sort of made you move your finger off the shutter release to change settings i much prefer the nikon approach sony sort of adopted the same approach panasonic sort of adopted the same approach i think it's the preferred approach and the italian designer who told him to do that in the first place was right so let's not change that please there are buttons on the left side up here on the z9 and there's of course the focus mode button comes back on the z9 so there are left hand side buttons that would be really fast to change while my finger is still sitting over that shutter release lighter weight i don't know yet no um uh we talked about that already are we gonna get new cameras every couple of years yes of course we're gonna get new cameras every couple nikon's not going out of business guys they're gonna keep making cameras and and then nor is sony and nora is canon right but you don't buy new cameras every two years in fact it used to be and nikon had it set up so that the big new camera release was every eight years um and that was perfectly fine in the film era um you know i could about after about eight years i really wanted a new camera because i had abused the hell out of my old one in the dslr era that moved to four years and that's plenty enough if you're moving to a new camera every four or five years you're getting a lot that's improved if you're trying to do it every year or every two years you're you're not going to get as much that's improved except every now and then when a a camera comes out like the z9 that changes things considerably or like the a1 did those would be reasons to move to a new camera off your regular schedule perhaps but generally speaking most people should be skipping generations you know if you bought the z6 wait for the z63 if you have bought the d800 wait for the d850 you know skip a generation is the right thing to do most of the time uh we answered the tethering stuff you answered where you're located we're getting towards the end um any security features to lock the camera out and deter armed robbery yes there is believe it or not not the feature you're thinking about it has a kensington lock capability on the side so you can lock up your camera with a kensington lock and chain a lot of us do leave our cameras vulnerable when we're shooting sports and it's a nice thing to be able to do but i think you probably mean do i need a uh can do i have to enter a password to get into the camera no that's not not not there uh do my f lenses have any value at paul's camera well i can answer that question uh some of mine that i've traded in at good value um so you know then paul's is one place you can trade him there are other places you can trade him but he's he's done a good job uh good deal with me uh not displeased with the money he's given me on the things that i've traded in uh what features might flow down to the firmware updates for the z626c72 that's a tough question because it's using the older processor and it's using sensors that don't have the same readout speed so it would be things that don't require that can they improve the focus on those cameras i think so a little bit will they maybe i don't know that's up to them they keep saying that they're committed to doing firmware updates that add functionality so i think we probably see some more they just did that they added some interesting functionality with this latest z62 z72 from our release and i think we'll see a few more of those things happen uh have i met mark cruz yeah i answered that one in the in in the mail mark is incredible guy he's exceptionally smart he's really good at remembering and understanding all these things and explaining technical stuff um him and mike i think him and mike did a wonderful job in the launch you know i can't praise them too much for their ability to kind of keep it all calm insane while mcnally like wants to it's a great camera um you know that that it was a it was a really good presentation and it was well well uh organized and mark came through with a lot of details and he's still coming through with a lot of details so um he's a great guy um will the c8 be 61 megapixels i'm guessing no uh but that's a guess will bmw prevent nikon from naming a camera ca i don't think so can we buy the presentation afterwards um you can get the video you'll get it in the link and we'll keep that that was during when we were talking about your z6 africa i think we'll do the same thing there we'll leave it up for people who paid for it we'll leave it up for a period of time so they'll be able to look at it again um pixel shift i answered i'm almost to the end any sense that the z9 has cross sensor like behavior you know i gave mark some tests because he had more time with the camera than i did um to try and it seems this seems to indicate it might er but i didn't get the right subjects to photograph to try right and and it's going to take some testing to answer that for sure but it certainly seems to be more red sensitive than before uh best camera for sports uh if you want in focus images i'd say a d6 um followed closely by a sony a1 and perhaps a z9 as soon as i have a z9 i'll be able to answer that question where it fits nikon is thinking that it's better than a d6 and if that's the case great that's the camera i switched to for sports uh we answered that question are there any raw images available for download anywhere not that i've seen um and there's no way to read them yet how many minutes of ak 30k video on a 256 gigabyte card i actually figured this out and then i've lost my piece of paper i wrote it down on i was trying to figure out if if i like maxed it out absolutely pro res 8k video at the highest frame rate for 125 minutes and i know the answer was i would have to change cards um but i can't remember the exact the exact answer listen these bit rates that are being thrown out and the amount of data that's being thrown out are huge um so if you're doing video on these cameras you want a one terabyte card i'm pretty sure you certainly want a 512 gigabyte card at least and be prepared to switch it often exactly first impressions on the new menu system there are good things and bad things about it i think i mentioned the thing i didn't like type a type b type c give it real names don't don't use the type a thing over and over again however on the flip side playback menu is not the first menu on the camera photo shooting menu is the first menu on the camera playback menu which we rarely use is farther on down the menu system now so nikon has listened to a lot of things that we talked about in terms of improving the menus for us to get through them pick things it's easier to say okay on stuff so there are good things in the new menu system for sure i just don't know all of them yet because i had literally maybe 60 seconds to look at menus and part of that time i was just trying to memorize everything i saw um you know so uh just this we answered that one are you staying with f lenses or transitioning to z well that sort of depends so my z6 camera the things that i've been using it for events and stuff like that um i used it for um when i shot the lacrosse championships i used the z6 for the when they won the champion the team i'm covering won the championship i picked up my z6 and the 24 to 70 and was running around trying to run around and keep up with these guys as they were celebrating all over the field um you know for that sort of thing i'd definitely be going with z lenses uh for sports and wildlife i mean there's some really great uh f-mount lenses for those things and for the time being i'm sticking with them until nikon gives me something better uh that and that's my answer and i'll stick to it uh we're almost to the end do you have the front control dial in a mode configured to open the aperture when you push it to the left i.e the old nikon way typically yes and i have my exposure bar the old way too not the new way so so you know plus on the right minus on the left no i've got it the other way around mainly because that's the way i've been using nikon since the 60s will there be any more z6 and z7 firmware updates don't know i suspect so have i considered offering my guidebooks in print form so my guidebooks are all over a thousand pages you can't bind a thousand page book reliably so the answer to that question is no not unless i want to have a z9 volume one volume two volume 3 volume 4. now with the smaller books i've been doing that you can find my zfc book and my sony a1 configuration book you can find both of those in printed form on amazon so i'm trying to handle requests as best as i can but there are some things that just don't make any sense and that question just popped up see d750 user interested in getting a 70 to 200. i like my d5750 but should i consider trading my d750 for something like a z5 and get the z version instead of the fl the fl is one of the best and until in fact until the mirrorless cameras came out it was the best 70 to 200 i've ever seen it's an incredibly great lens nothing wrong with that lens the z version is an itsy bitsy teeny with weeny bit better i wouldn't call it incredibly better or exceptionally better it's a teeny bit better and most people aren't going to notice that so um if you want to buy a lens that's a dslr lens and then bring it over to the ftc uh when you eventually go mirrorless you can do that you're not going to really lose out in that particular case now there are other lenses i might not say that about but the 70 to 200 absolutely i i i don't care which one is on my z cameras the difference is small enough that it's just whatever's happening and but i would make a comment to her with his d750 i certainly wouldn't do a z5 i would do a z6 or a z7 or even a z6 or c62 i think that's a better crossover than a zebra right as a matter of fact for how many people we we still have 150 people here that's probably where probably we're saying this so in in nikon terms uh a d600 and d610 is a z5 uh d700 750 is a z6 uh 800 810 or 850 is a z7 and a d45 or 6 is a z9 so if you're if you're thinking about making a straight over transition that you like this class of camera in the dslrs and you want something similar in the in the in the in full frame mirrorless that's the way you do it d600 users move to the z5 d750 users moved to a z6 d850 or d800 users moved to a z7 and of course the d5 and d6 users moved to a z9 where's the d 500 and zero the z mirrorless it is missing in action at the moment but i will repeat what i said before and people really need to hear this there is not a better crop sensor camera on the market today than a d500 and it's a five-year-old camera not a single one and i can tell you tom our sales on d500s it's just like 850s we get them in they go out almost immediately now the only caveat i'd put on that statement i just made is if you're doing high-end video the d500 is not a video camera no um it does video but it's not a high-end video camera some of these later latest crop sensor cameras even even the zfc that i'm looking at right now will do better um high-end video than the z500 will but in terms of stills you're not going to top it the fujifilm xt4 doesn't top it um the om1 doesn't top it um the sony a 6000 series there's not one there that tops it as far as i'm concerned the d500 is the best crop sensor camera that you can get so the next question that came up is uh will anybody still buy the d5 or d6 well i would hope so the d6 is an incredible camera a lot of people don't realize how far it went from the d5 it didn't seem like a lot of change to it but i'll tell you that focus system just like the what nikon is talking about with the z9 focus system as being a step forward the d6 focus system was a clear step forward over the d5 the d6 system is sticky it's fast um it doesn't have some of the liabilities when you start getting to the small apertures that the the d5 system did you you don't lose cross sensors as fast if at all in some cases it doesn't have gaps in the focus sensor area like the d5 and the d500 had they had small gaps that you had to be aware of it has the ability to configure groups the way you want groups done i mean d6 incredible camera there's i mean if you've got f-mount lenses and you're doing the kinds of photography that requires that level of camera absolutely you'd still be buying it and did i try fast birds flying with the z9 no because there were no birds where the camera was when i was holding it uh there wasn't much of anything that was moving uh other than me or if i was holding it so i can't so michelle's gonna talk about eagles on sunday if you have questions she'll she'll have that she because she photographed eagles with the with the z9 so anyhow i think it's probably about time to wrap this up i agree um why would i change from a d6 over a why would it change from a d6 over a d850 be appropriate specifically high frame rates with uh incredible focus that would be the reason to move to a d6 over a d850 and that's the only reason i could think of but for sports photography um the d6 is an incredible camera somebody i i didn't answer this because somebody asked about when will my d6 book be out well if nikon keeps releasing cameras it's going to be a little while more but i was trying to finish it and finish it up this month but it's it's it's it's iffy i'm well into it i've got a lot of stuff to cover there were a lot of interesting changes that are subtle um and it's currently at like almost 1200 pages so holy cow it's it's a pretty big book it'll be out soon all right and so thanks for everybody hope you enjoyed thank you tom thank you everyone who's still left we've got about a little less than half the people still with us we were close to 300 at the max so thank you guys thank you all thank you tom thank you for your continued support of paul's photo we want to be your local camera store wherever you are if you have a camera store in your neighborhood please support them if you don't give me a call we'll be glad to take care of you i can't wait to talk to you again tom and maybe next time we'll both have new cameras right [Music] maybe the next time's going to be the z6 and z7 in africa i think that's still going to be a couple days before i get my camera but we'll see i'll keep my fingers crossed and nikon if you're if you're hearing this you really need to get me a camera there's a lot that i can show people what to do with that camera all right guys good night everyone thank you

Channel: PAUL'S PHOTO

Views: 37,479

Keywords: Mark Comon, Pauls Photo, Photography, Cameras, Camera, Lens, Lenses

Id: R5CO7S2XiTU

Length: 163min 13sec (9793 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021