Z6 - First Impressions

[Pixeldawg1]

• Why does the bottom protrude lower than the bottom of the body so it can't stand up now. What a strange design. This piece is an integrated tripod mount, but I can't imagine when I would want to mount the tripod to the adapter, rather than to the body or lens. Not a big deal, just an odd design decision.

When you use a modern tripod, you will understand and appreciate it. The triod socket is located in it, and allows for both camera and lens to be dismounted while leaving the other on the tripod. It works quite well, actually.

 

[Pixeldawg1]

I recently picked up a Z6 and wanted to share my first impressions, similar to this thread from @Peeb last year.

Diopter adjustment

• This might not be particularly useful for most, but this could have been a deal breaker for me. I wear glasses, really dislike pressing my glasses to the eyecup, and haven't been able to wear contacts for a long time. I've always adjusted the diopter and added a correction eyepiece so I can see through the viewfinder clearly without my glasses.
• I asked in this forum. I asked my local camera shop as well as Adorama. I even contacted Nikon support. They all told me the same thing - the Z6/Z7 use a different eyepiece than SLRs, and the standard rectangular eyepiece accessories will not fit. There are no correction eyepieces available for their mirrorless bodies.
• As it turns out, all of them were mistaken - the DK-20C rectangular correction eyepieces fit just fine. I'm not sure if it interferes with the eye sensor just above the viewfinder, but it fits and it works.
• More importantly, the diopter range on the Z6 is wider than with prior DSLRs I've owned, going all the way to -4.0. This was actually sufficient for me, so the addition of a correction eyepiece was not needed. I just thought I would document that here in case it helps someone else, since I was unable to find this information elsewhere.

Battery

• My biggest question right now is how long the battery will last compared to a DSLR. I've heard everything from a few hundred shots to 1000+ shots and still going at the end of the day. I understand it is more about how long the viewfinder is on than how many shots I take, so I'll have to wait and see how it goes.
• It comes with an EN-EL15b battery, which I understand is basically identical to the EN-EL15 spare batteries I already own, but can be charged via USB. Also, the Z6 does not include the USB charger and I don't plan on spending $60 for it, so there's really no benefit to to this as far as I'm concerned.
• It uses the same MH-25a charger that came with my D500

The first shot

• The shutter has a very quiet muffled sound. I guess a quiet shutter is one of the benefits of mirrorless, but there's just something so satisfying about the solid ker-chunk sound of a DSLR shutter. I'm sure I'll get used to it soon enough.

That's about it so far. The one potential deal breaker for me was the diopter adjustment and availability of correction eyepieces, and both turned out to be non-issues. I'm excited to try out the eye-AF, and of course use some of my fast primes on a full frame body for the first time. Additional posts to come as I get up to speed.

I told you that it would fit! I checked it with one of my other cameras. You read it here FIRST!!! Hahaha!

In regard to battery life, I think it is at least as good as the other premium Nikon cameras. I am very pleased with the battery life.

You will get used to the shutter noise and eventually love it. Bothered me when I first had my Z7, but now, seems all of the other DSLR's are noisy.

 

[adamhiram]

When you use a modern tripod, you will understand and appreciate it. The triod socket is located in it, and allows for both camera and lens to be dismounted while leaving the other on the tripod. It works quite well, actually.

I still think it’s a flawed design, and a quick Google search found many people had the same complaint. Here’s why, in my opinion.

• I can’t imagine when I would want to attach the tripod to the adaptor, unless it helped balance the camera a little better. If a lens is big enough that it includes its own tripod foot, I’ll mount that to the tripod. Otherwise I want the tripod connected directly to the body. QR plates make connecting and disconnecting from the tripod a fairly trivial task.
• If someone is using a mixture of F-mount and Z-mount lenses during a shoot and using a tripod, it will interrupt workflow. For example, consider a portrait shoot using a Z-mount 50mm and an adapted F-mount 85mm. The 85mm needs the QR plate removed from the body to fit the FTZ adapter. The 50mm will need the QR plate reattached to the body once the FTZ adapter is removed.

I think an L-bracket is the best solution here. The Kirk bracket I looked at has built-in Arca style dovetails on the bracket, and provides sufficient space to attach a Manfrotto RC2 plate on it if needed. I’m not in a rush to pick one up, but it’s a little frustrating that Nikon actually created a new problem to solve.

Edit: Wow, it turns out this is a big enough issue that there are products available to solve this specific problem. Here is one option I came across, though there were quite a few others.

Edit #2: Here's a better video explaining the problem and simple solution. Kirk L-bracket seems like a good option, and will likely be added to my kit soon.

 

[adamhiram]

More updates and observations...

• Shooting in AF-S single point is actually very usable. Selecting focus points in the EVF actually isn't much different than doing so in the viewfinder in my D500, even with more focus points. The big difference is they cover almost the entire frame, which is nice.
• EyeAF works quite well in good lighting when I fill the frame with the subject's face. This applies to both AF-S and AF-C. Once the subject gets a little further away or a shoot a little wider, it loses the eye and does a decent job with face recognition. I still need to test how well it works with darker skin tones, low-light, and darker skin tones in low-light.
• Subject tracking works very well as long as I keep the subject in the frame. Otherwise, it hunts a bit and seems to have about a 50/50 chance of either finding the subject or just giving up.
• Continuous shooting is pretty impressive, but it's not actually 12fps. Continuous-H is 5.5fps, and continuous-H-extended is only 9fps if you shoot in 14-bit Raw instead of 12-bit. I'm still not really sure what the difference is with the faster extended mode; it used to be that AF continued to work but exposure was locked after the first shot, but that seems to have changed with a firmware update.
• I am still undecided on whether I like more things being controlled electronically. For example, they freed up 3 slots on the control dial by moving continuous shooting and self-timer to a dedicated button, which I don't mind. However they also got rid of the AF-mode/area button, as I mentioned previously, and moved lens VR toggle to electronic menus for native Z-mount lenses, which are much more convenient to just have switches or buttons. It's still a learning curve, but at least it is very customizable with 3 custom user settings on the control dial and quite a few buttons that can be reassigned.

 

[Pixeldawg1]

More updates and observations...

• Shooting in AF-S single point is actually very usable. Selecting focus points in the EVF actually isn't much different than doing so in the viewfinder in my D500, even with more focus points. The big difference is they cover almost the entire frame, which is nice.
• EyeAF works quite well in good lighting when I fill the frame with the subject's face. This applies to both AF-S and AF-C. Once the subject gets a little further away or a shoot a little wider, it loses the eye and does a decent job with face recognition. I still need to test how well it works with darker skin tones, low-light, and darker skin tones in low-light.
• Subject tracking works very well as long as I keep the subject in the frame. Otherwise, it hunts a bit and seems to have about a 50/50 chance of either finding the subject or just giving up.
• Continuous shooting is pretty impressive, but it's not actually 12fps. Continuous-H is 5.5fps, and continuous-H-extended is only 9fps if you shoot in 14-bit Raw instead of 12-bit. I'm still not really sure what the difference is with the faster extended mode; it used to be that AF continued to work but exposure was locked after the first shot, but that seems to have changed with a firmware update.
• I am still undecided on whether I like more things being controlled electronically. For example, they freed up 3 slots on the control dial by moving continuous shooting and self-timer to a dedicated button, which I don't mind. However they also got rid of the AF-mode/area button, as I mentioned previously, and moved lens VR toggle to electronic menus for native Z-mount lenses, which are much more convenient to just have switches or buttons. It's still a learning curve, but at least it is very customizable with 3 custom user settings on the control dial and quite a few buttons that can be reassigned.

Where did you see this would be 12 FPS? I have only seen 9.

Cordially,

Mark

 

[adamhiram]

Where did you see this would be 12 FPS? I have only seen 9.

From the Z6/Z7 user manual - 12fps in 12-bit Raw, 9fps in 14-bit Raw. Z7 is 9fps and 8fps.

 

[Pixeldawg1]

Where did you see this would be 12 FPS? I have only seen 9.

From the Z6/Z7 user manual - 12fps in 12-bit Raw, 9fps in 14-bit Raw. Z7 is 9fps and 8fps.

View attachment 198060

Just checked my Z7 and it says 9. How interesting. A sure way to check is to photograph a digital stop watch and see how many frames are fired within a second. I think a cool experiment to try.

 

[adamhiram]

Just checked my Z7 and it says 9. How interesting.

I am still not clear on the difference between “continuous high“ and ”continuous high extended”, other than a higher frame rate. From what I’ve read, with extended mode auto exposure only worked for the first shot, and the exposure would remain locked for the rest of the burst. However it sounds like this changed with the 2.0 firmware release (they are on 3.1 now), and quite frankly it didn’t sound like much of a limitation anyway, especially if you’re already shooting in full manual. I’ll gladly take the 9fps over the slower 5.5 if I need it, but otherwise I don’t know what else is actually different.

On an unrelated note, I like to have the beep enabled when using AF-S single point focus, so I turned it on in settings. However now it also makes an audible beep on every tap when I use the the touchscreen, which is definitely not something I want. I am finding there are a number of settings that are less granular than they were on previous DSLRs.

 

[adamhiram]

I got a chance to set up some strobes over the weekend to see how I liked shooting with the Z6 in a studio environment, and I found it very enjoyable to use.

Something really interesting I found is that the EVF shows you what your actual exposure will look like. That's great in semi-automatic modes like aperture priority, or in manual mode when relying on natural light. I wasn't sure what to do when using strobes, where the first thing I do is step down the exposure to eliminate ambient light. I thought I might need to switch to aperture priority to focus, then back to manual to shoot, or at least rely heavily on modeling lights. I was pleasantly surprised to see that when it detected the flash trigger in the hotshoe, it adjusted the image in the EVF to show my composition and allow me to focus.

Focusing is a breeze. For still objects, AF-S with pinpoint AF worked best, but single point AF worked just as well. With a human subject, single point AF-S is usually my go-to, but AF-C with auto-area AF (Eye/face tracking) worked very well.

Here is a low-key product shot I did for some of the gear I will likely be selling soon.

• Key light camera right in a vertical 12x56" gridded strip box to create the vertical highlights.
• Rim lighting from a horizontal 10x24" gridded strip box behind and camera left
• Black seamless background, and a wooden board wrapped in black Duvetyne for the tabletop.

Hopefully the brightness and white balance look right. After having to rebuild my iMac, I also switched to a new calibration tool (DataColor SpyderXPro) that feels like it leaves my display too bright and slightly warm, so we'll see how that affects my editing moving forward.


20200927-DSC_0189a by adamhiram, on Flickr

 

[JBPhotog]

Nice review of the studio experience.

Might I recommend some white reflector cards to illuminate the gold descriptors on each lens, some are too dark to read easily. FWIW, most online sellers choose a white background, it shows off the product better.

What nit did you calibrate to with the DataColor SpyderXPro?

 

[adamhiram]

What nit did you calibrate to with the DataColor SpyderXPro?

I calibrated to a brightness target of 120 cd/m^2 and white point of 5800, which I recall being the same as with my SPyder4Pro (which became obsolete as soon as I updated to macOS Catalina). For now I am going to trust the calibration, since I just spent a week working on an uncalibrated display that started a bit cooler and automatically dimmed in my office's indirect lighting, so perhaps I just need to readjust.

 

[JBPhotog]

Typical post processing monitor WB is set to D65(6500K) unless you are outputting to print with is normally at D50(5000K).

However room illumination is a consideration and for the really nerdy type, they will calibrate based on time of day if located in an open office scenario. For the best PP workflow, controlled room illumination is better.

 

[Pixeldawg1]

What nit did you calibrate to with the DataColor SpyderXPro?

I calibrated to a brightness target of 120 cd/m^2 and white point of 5800, which I recall being the same as with my SPyder4Pro (which became obsolete as soon as I updated to macOS Catalina). For now I am going to trust the calibration, since I just spent a week working on an uncalibrated display that started a bit cooler and automatically dimmed in my office's indirect lighting, so perhaps I just need to readjust.

If you want a simple, fool proof way to set your color, and know without a doubt that it is 99.97% correct, you should try the ExpoDisc. I use it on every shoot and boom... no color correction. When I was writing for Popular Photography & Imaging eons ago, I did a field test of this device and was sold on it. The hardest part is being able to do a custom white balance. Here is the article if you're interested in seeing/reading it:

Field Test: Expodisc

Hope this helps to make your life easier. I have no affiliation with this company, other than being a very satisfied user.

Cordially,

Mark

 

[adamhiram]

Another limitation I came across is that I cannot disable automatic DX crop when using DX lenses. Several of my DX lenses are quite usable on full frame - my 17-55 resolves well from 28-55, my Tokina 11-16 is usable at 16mm, and even the cheap 35mm f.1.8 looks okay with a very slight crop. Unfortunately the option is grayed out when a DX lens is connected, resulting in a 10mp file. It’s not something I would have used in the long run, but it would have been nice to have now. After all, every full frame Nikon DSLR I’ve used has this option.

 

[adamhiram]

One additional note. I debated waiting for the second iteration of the Z6, but with nothing official other than occasional rumors I figured why wait. Then less than 2 weeks later, Nikon announces the Z6II product launch in 2 weeks. Now technically the launch date is within my return window, and I suppose if there's a compelling reason to upgrade I can do that. From what I've heard it may not be anything special - it will likely have a 2nd card slot and better AF, which I would love, but otherwise it sounds like pretty minor improvements. However, it's probably going to cost $200-400 more, probably won't include an FTZ adapter which will be another $250, and most importantly, probably won't ship for a while, just like all the new Z-mount lenses they announced. I guess we'll find out in 11 days!