Nikon Announces D6 Camera and Z-mount Lenses

[VidThreeNorth]

"Nikon announces new flagship D6 camera plus two new Nikkor lenses for Z-mount"
posted Feb 11, 2020 by Dave Pardue, Imaging Resource
"Nikon announces new flagship D6 camera plus two new Nikkor lenses for Z-mount"

Due to a long pre-announcement leak Nikon made clear that this camera was "coming" as far back as September 2019, and it was anticipated as a new flagship sports/news camera. Oddly, I still don't have a price or shipment date, but I think I probably just missed it somewhere.

 

[TWX]

I find it interesting that both Canon's and Nikon's newest top-end pro cameras are in the 20 megapixel range. I have to assume that given the target market for these cameras are true professionals, if someone can't do it with 20 megapixels, they probably can't do it at all and really don't have a lot of business using this camera at these sorts of events.

 

[zulu42]

I still don't have a price or shipment date, but I think I probably just missed it somewhere.

MSRP $6,500 available 04/2020

 

[Designer]

We wonder why this is called their "flagship", given the depressing lack of any real advancements.

 

[TWX]

We wonder why this is called their "flagship", given the depressing lack of any real advancements.

If the camera was perceived by its users as being nearly perfect, do you think that they're going to change much?

Based on this comparison it looks like the changes are entirely evolutionary. They've improved shutter speed, added electronic shutter, improved the autofocus system slightly, updated the media to newer/faster, improved the video recording runtime, improved connectivity out of the camera to computers, added extra audio and video codecs and extra file formats for still images, and added what basically amount to filters or presets for various shooting modes.

If you're a professional that already shoots with the predecessor(s), would you want to have to learn a brand new camera interface or all-new features? To me this makes sense, if the old camera was entirely well-suited to its target users and just needed a few usability tweaks and a very mild amount of new features to keep up with demand, why change much?

 

[Derrel]

The D850 is for the megapixel chasers. The D5 and D6 have lower MP counts because the target market wants around 20 megapixels, tops.

 

[TWX]

The D850 is for the megapixel chasers. The D5 and D6 have lower MP counts because the target market wants around 20 megapixels, tops.

It wouldn't surprise me that even if they might like to have more than 20MP, they want fast continuous shooting speed and the ability to continuously write to media even more. Both the new Nikon and the new Canon are sixteen frames per second through the viewfinder, the Canon is 20 frames per second in live-view. That takes a LOT of processing power and memory to do something at 20MP with all that data, any higher resolution would undoubtedly come with lower continuous shooting speeds in order to keep the battery life up and the heat from the microprocessor down.

General improvements in microprocessor technology might allow for higher write-speeds, but then the companies would have to decide if they want to apply those write-speeds to even faster continuous shooting speeds, or to resolution, or to apply some improvements to both. I'm going to guess the first, since it appears that professional quality results don't even require 20MP.

 

[VidThreeNorth]

A lot of what is happening with the latest Sports/News cameras has to do with getting the pictures to the market. It is "extended workflow" looking at the Internet. There is also some video upgrading. As I have written before, I think that video does not really fit this market, but I could be wrong. . . .

 

[jcdeboever]

Wow, as Designer keenly seen as I, what the heck is going on with those specs? Thats the D6? Really? Doesn't look like a Nikon flagship upgrade to me. What a joke. I'm not talking about megapixels either, its for low light and sports action. Might as well save your money or move over to Canon.

 

[Braineack]

Maybe now I can finally afford a D4s

 

[tirediron]

The D850 is for the megapixel chasers. The D5 and D6 have lower MP counts because the target market wants around 20 megapixels, tops.

And for studio work... it's no low-light queen, but for studio work, the 850 can't be beat. That said, the D6... somewhat underwhelming. Are we getting to the limit of technology? Sort of the way we did with computer CPUs a few years back?

 

[tirediron]

Maybe now I can finally afford a D4s

Definitely looking at adding a D4s / D5 to the stable.

 

[JoeW]

The D850 is for the megapixel chasers. The D5 and D6 have lower MP counts because the target market wants around 20 megapixels, tops.

Derrel is spot on from my experience. People in the field who may be using a sat phone or their cell to transmit photos back to the editor don't want files that are 40 megapixels. It's not that there isn't value in having a ton of megapixels available. It's that for most journalists, you are expected to do very little editing--maybe some cropping, exposure, sharpening. But you're not supposed to substantially change the image through your edits.

 

[Derrel]

I shot sports for two area newspapers in 2005 -2006 and we sent final images in at 200 ppi, 800 pixels on the long axis...and they looked good...i used the 2.7 MP Nikon D1h and the 12.2 MP Nikon D2X...plenty of resolution. Great "file economy" ... full coverage on a high school track meet would be around 700 frames with a camera that shot at 5 frames per second.

Here are a couple of publication frames downsized. For faster transmission over the modem line . Plenty of detail from downsampled 12-megapixel images from the d2x

 

[cgw]

Nikon "gets" the needs of its pro market far better than what's left of their prosumer/"enthusiast" segment. The belated foray into MILCs suggests that. Besides, how thick is the margin on a D6 sale?