Photography – Wade Tregaskis

Bipolar customer support

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 22:37:30 +0000

Consider these two examples involving Flickr, that occurred within just one day of each other.

Nice gal Amanda

I submitted the following feedback, not really expecting much of it. In fact, I fully expected some useless, boilerplate response that completely ignored the point and directed me to the upload requirements page (despite it being the very first thing I myself pointed to) or was nothing but mail-merge platitudes.

And in retrospect I could have phrased this more respectfully, too. So I wasn’t even going in as a great customer.

Per https://www.flickrhelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404079649300-Flickr-upload-requirements, Flickr still doesn’t support modern, more efficient formats like HEIF, WebP, and AVIF (for images).

It’s also unclear what video codecs are actually supported, since they’re not specified – merely container formats. e.g. does AV1 work? Or even just HEVC?

Being relegated to JPEG makes my files way larger and therefore uploads take a lot longer, and also precludes use of high-quality images featuring e.g. greater than 8-bit depths and HDR support.

(I realise TIFF is nominally supported and does at least offer 16-bit support, but the article notes that it’s degraded to JPEG anyway on the server, plus even compressed TIFFs are still huge and particularly slow to upload)

On your end, you’d save a lot of storage space if you supported and prioritised modern, more efficient formats – not to mention bandwidth costs (every browser of note supports WebP & AVIF at the very least, so you could even transcode from older formats).

What I got surprised me greatly, in the best way:

Hi Wade,

Thank you for reaching out to us! My name is Amanda and I’m happy to help you.

I understand you would like to see more photo formats accepted on Flickr (namely: HEIF/HEIC, WebP, AVIF). I’ve passed a feature suggestion along to our product development team for review regarding this. Hopefully, being able to offer support for these newer file formats is something we can address in a future site update.

While I do not have a timeframe for if/when this would be put into effect, they are aware that this is something that members of Flickr would like to see as an option.

You also mentioned some specific video codecs. As these aren’t listed in that Help Center article you linked, I’m double checking with our team to see if these are supported or not. As soon as I hear back from them, I’ll follow up and let you know here.

In the meantime, please let me know if you have any other questions or suggestions. I’ll keep an eye out for your response!

Warmly,

Amanda
Flickr Support

Holy shit. A humane response from a real human. Better yet, a couple of hours later that was followed by (unprompted by me):

Hi Wade,

Thank you for your patience! I checked with our team and it appears AV1 and HEVC are not currently supported. I have added these along to the other formats you had already asked about in our feedback to the Product Development team.

If there is anything else I can help with, please do feel free to reach out!

Warmly,

Amanda
Flickr Support

Even though these responses made no conclusive promises (regarding support for these file formats), I was thrilled. Beyond the pleasant tone and clear demonstration that Amanda actually read and comprehended my feedback, just knowing that my feedback actually got to the intended recipients (the dev team) is heartening; it made me feel good about choosing to use Flickr for all these years.

But then…

Bad guy Marc

Coincidentally, while Amanda was getting back to me I ran into a bug in Flickr’s file upload API. It was apparent from the logs that Flickr was the cause of the issue, but nonetheless I took the time to first confirm that with the Photo Upload plug-in’s author. Then, I submitted the bug report to Flickr:

When trying to upload some (but not all) files, the upload ostensibly fails – it hangs for a while after the transfer is complete before finally concluding with a 504 error from CloudFront. e.g.:

Log

Lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 22:23:07 +0000

I don’t know why, but it’s apparently impossible to directly import a Lightroom catalog from one computer into the catalog of another. It always fails at the end of the import with the same infuriatingly useless error message.

However, I seem to have found a fairly reliable workaround:

If you’re directly plugging in a removable SSD, as your means of moving files between computers, then skip to step 2.

Copy the catalog-to-be-imported, along with all the original files it references, to local storage on the target computer. You must preserve their relative paths, so it’s easiest if you pre-arrange your source catalog’s files (the “.lrcat” file and its entourage) to be in the same root folder as your original files (images etc)¹.

Any attempt to import directly from a network drive will fail, always.

All the following steps are performed on the target computer.
Open the catalog-to-be-imported in Lightroom on the target computer.

This will automatically close whatever other catalog you have open, first.
Choose “Export as catalog…” from the File menu.
Adjust settings to suit, and export to a new catalog.

Note that this will duplicate all the files referenced by the catalog, into the new catalog. So it might take a while even though it’s all localised to the one computer (and even if it’s on the same volume – Lightroom is not smart enough to perform APFS COW clones).
Open the target catalog.
Import the catalog you just exported (“Import from Another Catalog…” in the File menu). Make sure to choose to copy the files to a new destination, not just reference them.
Delete the temporary catalog.

In my experience you must perform the export-to-an-otherwise-pointless-new-catalog after copying everything to the target computer. Somehow, something about copying Lightroom’s files from one computer to another [over a network] “breaks” them such that Lightroom will refuse to import them.

You can do this by – on the source computer – selecting all the photos in the catalog and using the “Folders” subsection of the left panel to adjust their location on disk. Typically by selecting an existing location, right-clicking, and selecting “Move Selected Photos to this Folder”. If necessary, you can first add the desired location by clicking the ‘plus’ icon to the right of the “Folders” section header, and choosing “Add Folder…”.

Yes, Lightroom’s file management UI is a pain in the arse, and badly designed. ↩︎

Z9 II wishlist

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 01:33:36 +0000

Note: I originally wrote this in early 2022, after a few months with the Z9, but I forgot to actually publish it! I realised this in November 2023, so I corrected that oversight after a quick update (e.g. I originally had a wishlist item for a “portrait-grip-less Z9 without any other changes”, which is basically the Z8 we did in fact get!).

What follows is a list of things I wish the Z9 had / could do better. I believe these are actually viable – I’m avoiding the common but perhaps unrealistic items like massively improve dynamic range or noise performance or whatever.

Autofocus

Better low-light autofocus

The Z9’s not bad, but it could be better – all cameras could – and in particular I’d love to see some of the caveats eliminated (like having to compromise between accurate exposure previews and autofocus performance).

Better red light autofocus

Purportedly (per chatter on the interwebs) mirrorless cameras typically only use green and/or blue sensels for autofocus, not red. I’m not sure how accurate that is – it’s a strange choice on the face of it, and at least partly false since you can focus on a purely red object – but it does partially track with the actual behaviour of the Z9 (and the Z7 before it), which is to really struggle to autofocus under predominately-red light or with purely red subjects.

This is particularly a problem underwater, and of course in conjunction with many low-light focus aids such as on some Speedlights and strobes.

For my typical subjects and subject matter it’s not a big deal, although in a way that just makes it even more prominent when I am in that situation.

Better subject recognition

This is a broad area, but any improvement in any direction would be good. Things like:

Recognition of a wider range of subjects (particularly wildlife).
More reliable detection of eyes (as opposed to e.g. ears & nostrils).
“Iris” detection or whatever you want to call it – the ability to focus specifically on the iris rather than e.g. eyelashes.
Better recognition of subject’s heads when they’re not closer to the camera than any other part of the subject.

All too often the animal is in a profile view, or even facing away from me but with their head / face / eyes still in view, and the Z9 very often loses the face and reverts to “centre of mass”, which is usually the animal’s side, or butt. The Z9 really needs to fixate on the head / face / eyes if those are anywhere in view, irrespective of their position relative to the body.

EVF eye tracking

I haven’t used the Canon R3 – and the reviews of its eye tracking are mixed, indicating it’s not quite there yet technically – but it’s clearly going in the right direction with its EVF eye tracking. This is clearly the superior way of selecting your subject / focus point placement.

Less fixation on detected subjects in 3D Tracking

If there’s a subject detected anywhere in the frame, the Z9 will always focus on it in 3D tracking mode, no matter where the focus point is. This is incredibly frustrating and hostile behaviour, especially while subject detection has so many false positives and doesn’t reliably prioritise the right part of the subject (e.g. ignoring the head in favour of the butt).

Instead, it should lock onto the detected subject only if I actually put the focus point over the subject detection box and then engage it. Otherwise, it should ignore detected subjects and focus on what I told it to.

It’s permissible if there’s leeway here, to allow for imperfect positioning of the focus point vs the subject, such as with rapidly-moving subjects. This could be something that’s configurable, to suit people’s differing tastes and needs for how “generous” the camera should be regarding precise placement.

No trade-off with correct exposure preview

All Nikon Z cameras to date – perhaps all mirrorless cameras? – force an unfortunate trade-off between autofocus performance and accurate exposure previews. I believe this is largely a false dichotomy.

The autofocus sensels are on the image sensor (as opposed to a completely separate sensor as most DSLRs) and their gain setting (ISO) seems to be tied to a sensor-wide value. Their performance relies on having a strong signal (i.e. enough light). Thus it’s important that the gain be as high as possible (without clipping). But that might not be what you want for the final exposure – perhaps you’re trying to preserve brighter tones elsewhere in the frame, for example. Thus your autofocus system might not be getting as much light as it’d like, and it performs poorly as a consequence.

The Z9 allows you to either see an accurate exposure preview – at the expense of poorer AF performance if your subject isn’t very bright – or inaccurate exposure (similar to the optical viewfinder experience).

I believe it could do the best of both at only minor inconvenience to dynamic range accuracy – it can adjust the sensor’s ISO to suit the autofocus system, then digitally scale the exposure in the EVF to represent your exposure settings. This does potentially mean crushing the blacks or blowing the highlights in the EVF’s preview (no such issues with the actual photos) but that’s a minor inconvenience in comparison to the alternatives.

Making the ‘strength’ of this tuneable could also help suit every individual’s preferences (e.g. allow up to N stops of such internal adjustment).

Note that it could also in theory adjust the autofocus sensels independently to the imaging sensels used for the EVF / LCD image, and that would of course be the optimal solution. I’m just not sure how viable that is for technical reasons. I also suspect that as autofocus systems continue to evolve into scene- and subject-analysis systems, they’ll need essentially the entire image anyway.

Same autofocus in video mode as stills

This applies broadly – right now in video mode you have more limited options (e.g. no 3D tracking, only the less reliable “subject tracking”), you can’t use custom buttons at all for customised autofocus engagement, and you also have a way less performant autofocus system in general.

It’s baffling that there are these differences. The limitations on button configuration are just arbitrary. And I don’t know what camera resources they’re overloading between autofocus function & video recording, that preclude them both being used simultaneously, but they should stop it. Add more dedicated hardware. Do whatever it takes to make autofocus work identically whether you’re doing stills or video.

It’s clear Nikon pushed harder than ever to make the Z9 a good video camera, so it’s baffling why they didn’t address these flaws along with the boost to recording resolutions, bitrates, and formats.

To elaborate, autofocus in video mode on the Z9 is disappointing. It doesn’t work correctly a lot of the time – outright refusing to focus, or focusing stubbornly on the background no matter what you or your subject do, or just simply missing acceptable focus. Switch to stills mode and autofocus often works perfectly, in comparison. In fact it’s such a dramatic disparity that I sometimes switch to stills mode temporarily just to autofocus. Yes, it’s very frustrating and I miss critical moments, but the alternative is all-too-often that I can’t get anything in focus at all.

Manual focus should of course not be the ‘workaround’, but even aside from the principle of that, it’s just not possible to accurately manually focus while recording video when you have 8k video (~33 megapixels) in a 1.2-megapixel viewfinder. Even in 4k (~8 megapixels) it’s very challenging. Let-alone whether you’re skilled enough to track a moving subject anyway.

Camera modes

Motion-aware aperture priority

The camera should be able to set the shutter speed automatically based on actual subject & camera movement. e.g. if I’m photographing a bird that’s perched, essentially immobile, in limited light, the camera should automatically drop the shutter speed in order to lower the ISO and thus minimise noise. If the bird suddenly starts moving, it should instantly raise the shutter speed to whatever is necessary to freeze the bird’s motion.

In all of this it should understand what shutter speeds are viable given the degree of perceived movement involved – factoring in focal length and recent image stabilisation performance – and including the recent history of camera movement so that it adapts to different users and situations (e.g. buffeting winds, being on a moving platform, etc).

Some cameras – like GoPros – already do a limited variant of this whereby they end an exposure early when they detect significant camera movement. Especially in video mode where you can benefit from inter-frame noise reduction, this is what helps make GoPro footage look exceptionally-well stabilised while remaining surprisingly consistent in exposure and noise levels.

The degree of ‘freezing’ could be configurable along two dimensions:

Strength. Different folks have different tolerances for blur, so being able to trade-off between pixel-perfect sharpness and noise is important.
Subject-only vs whole scene. Maybe you want to freeze your subject but don’t care about the background, such as when panning for a bird in flight or moving vehicle. I expect this’d be what most people want most of the time. But sometimes you might really want to freeze the entire scene, even if you’re panning.

This is analogous to exposure compensation settings for use with flash.

Subject-aware shutter priority

I’m quite surprised we don’t already have this, on at least one camera somewhere.

I want the camera to adjust the aperture intelligently to account for the subject’s depth and focal distance. So that I can just set it to basically e.g. “whole head in focus”, and not worry about micro-managing the settings as the subject moves closer or further away.

It should handle multiple subjects too – e.g. for a group photo where people aren’t all neatly in the focus plane it should adjust the aperture to compensate.

Whether intrinsically or through e.g. lens profiles, it should account for curvature of field.

This could be flexible like Programmed Auto mode, where you could use a dial to adjust the depth of field if the camera’s selection doesn’t precisely suit your preferences (since you’ll be making trade-offs between in-focus subjects and background blur).

Controls

Automatic grip selection

I wish the camera could automatically detect which grip I’m using, so that I don’t need to micromanage it with a lock control.

Possibly this could be implemented through some kind of contact detection in the two grips, to tell which is being held? I know it can’t use camera orientation, since it’s not uncommon to use either of the grips when they’re not oriented vertically.

It of course needs to be very reliable (erring, if necessary, on the side of allowing use of the controls vs ignoring them), and work in a wide variety of situations. e.g. with or without gloves, whether the camera / hands are dry or wet, across a wide temperature range, with hands of various sizes, with hand-holds of various types, etc.

Delete & undo

Currently to delete you have to push the delete button twice, because it prompts you to make sure you want to perform the delete. This is nominally required because deletes are immediate and permanent.

The vast majority of the time, I do want to perform the delete. Very rarely is it a mistaken button press.

Doubling the button-presses required gets real old when you’re deleting thousands of photos (and while it’s faster to delete them on a computer, I prefer to do an initial cull in-camera to avoid wasting space on my computer and backups – plus if I’m travelling I may have limited card space and cannot wait until I’m back home).

It also doesn’t add much actual safety – it’s just hard-wired into my muscle memory to double-tap delete, and occasionally I’ll delete something I actually didn’t want to, as a result. So the current system is inefficient and doesn’t work as intended.

What it should instead do is follow user interface best practices dating back to the eighties (if not earlier) – make the delete operation undoable, and therefore not need confirmation every time.

This could be implemented in a variety of ways, each with slight differences in trade-offs. Even a rudimentary implementation, that only allows the most recent delete to be undone, would still be a huge improvement.

An even more robust system would likely not be much more work – e.g. move deleted photos to a separate ‘bin’ folder, just like on a computer. The camera could also make them auto-purge, so if the card is full it’ll start permanently deleting files from the bin as needed to recover space.

Consequently it’d be much safer – even against completely accidental delete button presses – and in-camera image review would involve about a third fewer button presses (currently two deletes plus left or right to move between images for comparison).

Note: how you perform the undo, I’m not sure about. The most common case would be undoing the most recent delete so there should be a way to do that which doesn’t completely interrupt your image review (i.e. no making you use the Menu button or otherwise switch away from the image you’re currently looking at). It could be simply by hitting the ‘i’ button and having an ‘Undo’ option in that menu.

Fix the portrait grip lock switch direction

It currently rotates opposite to the main power switch (on the landscape grip), which is weird and confusing. i.e. push the tab away from you to unlock the portrait controls, which on the landscape control turns the camera off. When I pick the camera up I should be able to use the exact same motion to enable the controls irrespective of which grip I’m holding.

I’d love something that goes even further and lets you actually turn the camera on from the portrait grip controls, but I don’t see a good way to do that (it would interfere with the function of selecting which grip you want to be active). Though this would be moot if the aforementioned automatic grip selection were supported.

Subject detection configuration via customised buttons

It’s great that the Z9 returns the functionality that the D500 et al had years ago, of letting you assign AF-ON plus a specific focus area mode to many buttons. This is super essential for any camera in many circumstances – especially wildlife where you’re often dealing with obscured or unusual subjects. It was particularly remiss of Nikon to leave this out of all their prior Z-mount cameras, since they had such subpar autofocus systems.

However, it still has some limitations in terms of configurability. e.g. you can configure a button to turn subject detection on or off, but it has to be independent of actually engaging autofocus. And you can’t configure it to change the subject detection mode (e.g. from ‘All’ to ‘Animals’).

Ergonomics

Lighter

I almost didn’t call this out, except Canon proved with the R3 that you can shave a significant amount of weight with seemingly no downside. That would be appreciated – it’d be right in line with Nikon’s impressive improvements to their telephoto lenses to make them much lighter than their DSLR forebearers.

Symmetric function buttons in portrait vs landscape grips

It’s baffling to me that there’s three customisable buttons next to the lens mount for the landscape grip, but none for the portrait grip; you can only reach one of the three buttons in portrait mode.

They should add another two buttons for the portrait grip, matching the relative positions of the landscape mode.

There’s still a challenge of button function, if they continue to share a button between the grips, since in landscape mode it’s under your pinky or ring finger while in portrait mode it’s under your index or pointer finger. Ideally the camera would switch automatically depending on which grip you’re actually using, iff there’s a reliable way for it to detect that. If not, it might be worth adjusting the button placements so that you have completely independent button sets between the two orientations (and at least mirror the settings between each set – though I wouldn’t object if they could also be customised independently).

Smaller

It could be smaller without compromising ergonomics – maybe 10-20%. At least w.r.t. the grips. It barely makes the list, though, since the main way to make it substantially smaller is to remove the portrait grip, which arguably defeats the point of a top-line camera. That said, the Z8 (and the Sony Alpha 1 before it) have shown that there is a strong market for a flagship without built-in portrait grip.

Before I got the Z9 I was pretty sure a built-in portrait grip was not for me, though after getting used to the Z9 I’m now more on the fence. I’ve had detachable portrait grips for prior cameras, and I recognise that they just don’t feel as good as a built-in grip. They’re also heavier, and less robust.

EVF / LCD

Larger LCD

I don’t know how it might work ergonomically – good placement of physical buttons is definitely the priority, and there’s only so much space available on a reasonably-sized camera – but it would be really nice if the LCD were substantially bigger. Compared to what we’re used to today with phones, camera LCDs are tiny.

It would need higher resolution to compensate. I’m not thrilled with the Z9’s LCD pixel density, but it’s okay. As long as the pixel density didn’t decrease, it’d be okay.

Lower latency

Though the Z9’s EVF latency appears to the best of any mirrorless camera to date (according to various test reports I’ve seen), there is still visible lag (even in 120Hz mode). It’s not a big deal by any stretch, and the vast majority of the time I don’t perceive it. It’s only if I’m moving really rapidly, especially if changing direction frequently. However, even if I don’t typically perceive it, I wonder if it’s nonetheless having a negative impact on my performance with the camera.

I doubt that higher refresh rates are the solution, at least not directly. The problem is the time it takes for photons hitting the sensor to be reflected in the EVF. It might be technologically impossible to reduce the delay entirely (even before you hit the physical limits), but I hope there’s still improvement possible.

Higher resolution EVF

This didn’t initially make my list, but after much use I do think the Z9 EVF is a tad soft. I can see the pixels, and I do find it’s a bit tricky to judge focus precisely (without digitally zooming in) – moreso than with an optical viewfinder.

Possibly related, I’m a bit mystified as to why image review in the EVF seems so blocky and pixelated compared to on the rear LCD, given the latter is objectively much lower resolution. It seemingly can’t be a hardware problem – perhaps a software error? Whatever it is, fixing it would essentially increase the resolution too, for image review.

Note also that I’m focused on the EVF specifically here. Curiously I don’t see the pixels on the LCD, or at least I never notice them. I think because the viewing distance is so much farther away. I certainly wouldn’t object to a higher pixel-density LCD too, but it’s not something I really need.

The rest & the usuals

None of these last few items are what I would call critical nor actually highlight. They tend to improve incrementally over time in any case. Those improvements are important and appreciated but not noteworthy unless there’s an unusually big leap.

Though admittedly it would be particularly good to at least match the state of the art w.r.t. image quality (or even of much older cameras like the D850).

Less noise.
Higher resolution. Though I don’t want to sacrifice anything for minor resolution gains – e.g. to go up to 60MP. For a major jump – e.g. to 100MP – I might be willing to trade off other aspects of performance.
Better battery life when the camera is left on. As much as its start-up delay is relatively brief compared to most cameras, it’s still far from zero and in any case it costs time to locate & operate the power button every time I bring the camera to my eye.
CFExpress 4.0 support, for at least a doubling in write speed (although the Z9 currently uses barely more than half the available write performance of CFExpress 2.0 anyway, so in fact there’s room for nearly a 4x improvement with current technology).

Never import by copy into Final Cut Pro

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 00:04:30 +0000

By default, Final Cut Pro prefers to “copy” all files on import. Indeed you’d think this is the only sensible option most of the time, since most of the time you’re importing from a memory card and you do need to make a local copy somewhere on your computer.

However, Final Cut Pro has a design flaw which causes data loss. You see, Final Cut Pro never merely copies the files. It extracts their audiovisual contents and puts it into a new file. You might have noticed this already from the fact that Final Cut Pro’s copied version of the files is always a MOV container, whereas your inputs are more likely an MP4 container.

This would be annoying enough in itself – it means you can’t do simple bitwise comparisons of the files to e.g. ensure the imported copy is actually valid and not corrupt, before you erase the original from your memory card. But it gets worse.

Final Cut Pro doesn’t copy all the contents. It only copies some types of tracks – i.e. audio, video, and timestamp tracks. It does not copy tracks such as GoPro’s metadata track (GPMD). Final Cut Pro just silently discards those.

Those tracks can contain important information. GPMD tracks, for example, contain a whole host of telemetry from the GoPro including its location during recording, rotation & movement data, and much more. Even if you think you don’t care about things like geotagging, consider this: that rotation & movement data can be used to enhance image stabilisation. By losing the data at import, you’re losing the ability to ever utilise that enhanced image stabilisation.

So never let Final Cut Pro “copy” your files – always copy them yourself first, as needed, and then import them into Final Cut Pro by reference only (the “Leave files in place” option). Thankfully Final Cut Pro doesn’t mangle the files when you use them that way (underlining the question: why does it force a lossy conversion to MOV to begin with, since it clearly works just fine with MP4 originals).

Nikon Z9 doesn’t work with USB power on a flat battery

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 22:14:40 +0000

The Nikon Z9 is supposed to be able to work using USB power. And it appears to – if you have a battery installed that’s not flat.

Otherwise, it refuses to function – showing a “Shutter release disabled. Recharge battery” message in the viewfinder for a second or two before turning itself off again.

I know of no technical reason why this has to be. And it’s contrary to Nikon’s documentation.

(it also refuses to show this message on the LCD, just like for the 24-70/4 error message about extending the lens, making it challenging to figure out why the camera’s not functioning correctly)

I don’t know how much charge the battery needs before it will allow the camera to operate on USB power, but it’s more than one minute of charging and ≤20% charge (my two current data points).

This is pretty annoying. If I leave the camera on accidentally, as I did yesterday, then even on a fully charged battery it’ll be flat within eight hours or so. So it’s not actually uncommon to pick it up and realise it’s dead flat. And in that situation it’s a complete paperweight for some unspecified amount of time, until you’ve managed to trickle enough juice into the battery.

Welcome to the Internet

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 20:29:32 +0000

Nikon Rumors recently ran my Nikon Z9 second impressions as a guest post on their site. That was very flattering. It was also a novel experience for me – generally nobody reads what I post here on my blog, and it’s as much for my own benefit as anything else (e.g. a form of “rubber ducking” when I’m trying to figure something out, or simply a record of my thoughts for me to laugh at in years to come).

I was surprised how much traffic it brought to my site – my vague intuition was that with the content repeated wholesale there’d be no motivation for folks to visit the original.

I was also slightly surprised by the comments section (on Nikon Rumors), though upon reflection I probably shouldn’t have been. As Peter (Nikon Rumors admin) quipped to me, “Welcome to the Internet :)”.

Roughly-speaking, it seems to break down into:

Constructive

A very small portion of the feedback was constructive (and sometimes intentionally so, even), e.g. typos, my embarrassing mislabelling of a jaguar as a leopard, etc. Some was interesting in revealing unintended ambiguity in my phrasing – I always find it intriguing to find valid, different interpretations of things I wrote. It’s a worthy challenge to try to write without ambiguity.

I really appreciate when people provide useful feedback – even if it’s not well-motivated. It’s so rare in life to receive useful feedback.

Missing context

A lot of the feedback was because of missing context – many folks assumed it was a review, not merely a random collection of observations, and therefore meant to be balanced & comprehensive. Or that I’d only use the Sigma 150-600 C with the Z9 (I did mention use of other lenses, but apparently too briefly or obliquely for many to register).

That’s useful to know because it revealed I was unwittingly assuming folks would read the first impressions first, which provided a bit more context, and also assuming a lot about the reader’s mindset coming in – i.e. that they’d implicitly understand that a lot was tongue-in-cheek.

Missed sarcasm / irony / frivolity

It seems apparent from some comments that my sense of humour / writing style just didn’t sit well with many folks. I’m used to that – I hate irony and never use it all the time.

The Nikon Z9’s acrobatic abilities seemed to particularly rub many folks the wrong way, which even in retrospect I still find odd because it seems so obviously (a) a very minor concern in any case and (b) just funny, really. Many folks did wonder aloud why I had my camera loose in a car anyway, which is a totally valid question and one I didn’t think for a minute to address when I wrote the article.

(for the record, it’s mainly because I’d never really needed to before, and I like having the camera readily available – plus I’ve since figured out that I can kind of wedge the Z9 under the seats, in the rear footwells, so problem solved!)

Mean

Sadly, most feedback was acerbic and ill-intentioned. Thankfully the novelty of the occasion neutered the mean-spirited comments, and they’re easy to skim over because they tend to be repetitive, pithy, and thus easy to identify. I’m a bit mystified as to why those folks spend their time that way, though. Some kind of game? Catharsis?

Z9 GPS disables itself

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 05:35:32 +0000

I’ve been out using my Z9 every weekend, but a bit behind on actually going through all the photos.

Just now I was reviewing some and was surprised to realise there were no GPS coordinates. In any from that day. Where I was outdoors for hours in a flat grass field.

I then discovered that none of my photos from the Z9 have included their geolocation for a couple of weeks.

Lo and behold, in the settings on the Z9 I now find that recording location data is turned off. I did not turn it off.

I don’t have much idea how it could have turned itself off. ~~About the only thing I can think of is that it might relate to configuring or switching between setting banks. That’s the only thing I can think of that might coincide timing-wise.~~

Update: it’s now happened twice, and the second time definitely had nothing to do with changing any camera settings. My new hypothesis is that if the battery gets to empty it disables GPS recording, for some reason.

In any case, there’s no valid reason for it to have disabled itself. Rather frustrating.

As far as I can tell no other settings have been reset or otherwise modified from what I set them to.

It’s a long shot, but if anyone else sees this behaviour in their Z9 (or knows why it happens), please do leave a comment.

Z9 third impressions

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 03:35:37 +0000

More observations from my time with the Z9 (see also my first & second). It’s now been over a month and I’ve taken several tens of thousands of real photos with it (and something like fifty thousand more while doing burst performance testing 😆).

This’ll probably be my last post in this series of ‘impressions’. I’m simply running out of new things to say.

I’m quite happy with the Z9. It’s not perfect, for sure, but it’s the best camera I’ve ever used. I am curious to temporarily acquire a Sony a1 and see how they compare, but that seems pretty academic – unlike with the Z7, most of the time it’s me (or my uncooperative wildlife subjects) that’s the limiting factor with the Z9. The only other time I felt remotely like that was with the D500.

Autofocus

Animal subject detection is sometimes surprisingly good – although often it’s academically impressive, in ways that aren’t very practical. e.g. it can detect squirrels at great distances, and track them with absolute certainty as the camera wobbles & shakes around.

Tracking distant subjects is great and all, but if it has to be a trade-off, I wish Nikon had put more energy into having it track close subjects better – subject distances that are actually typical in real use and good photos.

The Z9 instantly detected this squirrel and I could not shake the AF tracking (short of reframing the squirrel out of view completely). AF accuracy was spot on – no confusion between the squirrel and the grass around it. And that’s even with a non-native lens (Sigma 150-600 C) which doesn’t have a particularly accurate nor reliable focus motor.

Subject identification and tracking is impressively robust against foreground obstructions. I’m now comfortable saying this is the best performing Nikon camera ever made, in this regard – and my opinion is still on an upward trajectory as I use it more and more. (I don’t have experience with current flagship Sony or Canon cameras, thus the Nikon-specific qualifier)

It can still struggle to find the subject if it’s out of focus or the scene is very busy, and in that case you have to give it a hand by getting it closer to correct focus first (and/or using 3D tracking to point at the target, rather than auto-area mode).

I wish there were an AF option to control whether it would exclusively focus on detectable subjects in the area AF modes, rather than falling back to picking some arbitrary focus point. The current behaviour is sensible in a lot of situations and definitely shouldn’t be discarded, but if & when I know there’s a bird hidden amongst the foliage I’d actually like it to focus hunt for it rather than throw up its hands and just focus on leaves.

The Z9 was impressively tenacious about sticking with this Anna’s Hummingbird, which it reliably detected as an animal. It didn’t really detect the eye, but it did get the head pretty consistently. Actual AF accuracy wasn’t great (I took a burst of photos with AF-C) but the variation was within the depth of subject (i.e. some were on the silhouette head feathers, some on the beak, some in-between).

…and it’s even more impressive when you realise just how obstructed this hummingbird was. To clarify, this is the same framing – with the bird in exactly the same place – but I manually focused a little closer. The Z9 couldn’t find the hummingbird by itself when focus was this far ahead of it, but as soon as I manually moved focused back a bit – such that you could see a bird-shaped blob, albeit still out of focus – the Z9 identified it and locked on.

Sometimes the Z9 really impresses me with how it recognises a subject that’s wildly out of focus.

I hadn’t really thought about it much before, but the subject recognition task for these camera AF systems is actually way more challenging than you might think. Recognising a human face in an already in-focus photo is one thing, but recognising that this vague light brown blob is actually a face – just out of focus – is another.

The Z9’s certainly not perfect here – you definitely still have to help it a lot of the time, by manually getting focus closer to the target first. Still, while of course I wish it recognised out of focus subjects more consistently, I won’t complain that it only sometimes achieves apparent miracles.

Image quality

For a while when I was first reviewing my photos in Lightroom, I was a bit confused and put off by their appearance – very crunchy, for some reason. Since I generally wasn’t comparing side-by-side with another camera’s photos, I tried to convince myself I was just being weird. But eventually I realised that Lightroom is applying heavy-handed, ugly edits to every photo by default – e.g. +40 texture and +20 clarity.

There’s no clean way to fix that, apparently – you can only work around it by creating a “preset” that does nothing but set things to their normal, neutral defaults, and then apply that preset on import.
I’m not thrilled with the noise levels I’m seeing. However, I’ve heard vague mention that Lightroom’s support for Z9 raw files is preliminary and still not great, and along with more obvious problems (like the busted default settings noted above) this seems plausible. So, while this will hopefully be fixed soon, beware if you use Lightroom.

Without any actual measurements or side-by-side comparison, just subjectively, it feels like DX levels of noise, not FX. Still, many of my favourite photos of all time were taken with DX cameras – and much older ones, with even worse noise performance – so I’m surprisingly not all that bothered about it. I certainly hope it’s just Lightroom being Lightroom, but even if it’s not, I wouldn’t give up the overall package that is the Z9.

Plus, Lightroom’s raw rendering is about the worst you can get – really, if you actually care that much about image quality that you’re bothered by DX vs FX or Z7 vs Z9 or whatever, then you definitely shouldn’t be using Lightroom to begin with. For what it’s worth, Capture One was far better – the best – last time I checked (five years ago – Lightroom definitely hasn’t gotten better in that time, I know that much).

ISO 3,600. 100% view (shown here is just 8% of the image). Minimal processing – basically Lightroom’s defaults, with sharpening 60 / 1.5 / 25 / 0 and luminance noise reduction 5 / 75 / 0 (colour noise reduction entirely off). Note that the noise is slightly reduced by the JPEG processing.

The Z9 under-exposes things a lot – I often have to lift by two whole stops just to get a normal exposure. This is in matrix metering mode (it’d be more explicable in highlight-weighted mode, but as I commented in my second impressions I immediately noticed even worse under-exposure so I switched to matrix).

I think this might be contributing to the perception that the noise performance is poor – I keep looking at a photo and thinking “what?!? ISO 360 and it’s this noisy?!” then I remember I’ve actually bumped it by at least two stops, so it’s more like ISO 1,600.

Note also that Lightroom by default applies +1 EV to Z9 photos, which I found odd. I wonder if that’s a hacky workaround for a bug in Lightroom’s rendering of Z9 raws? However, even if we presume that’s the case, that Lightroom is rendering 1 EV darker than it’s supposed to due to some bug, then there’s still at least another stop of under-exposure to account for.
I’ve not side-by-side compared the dynamic range vs e.g. the Z7, but I have had a few scenes & photos were I at least feel that the dynamic range is noticeably less. Sometimes highlights just don’t recover like they would with the Z7. But, given the exposure problems I noted in the previous point, it’s hard to say if there’s a distinct problem here or just the same one regarding metering – or just Lightroom’s current Z9 raw support being flawed.
I still see evidence of rolling shutter in some photos of still subjects, but it’s of course dramatically less-so than with e.g. the Z7.

Specifically where I notice it is in bursts with slow shutter speeds (e.g. ¼ second) – when moving between images in Lightroom there’s visible changes in scene geometry between frames; that tell-tale “jelly” effect. It’s very small, to be clear – nothing you’d ever actually care about in the finished images. Still, it’s technically perceptible.

Odd that it’s not something I ever recall seeing with DSLRs like the D500 – one would expect almost identical behaviour since the nominal shutter speed of ~1/270 is about the same as most DSLRs. It might be related to the image stabilisation systems too (or instead). I’m not sure how I might distinguish that via test.

Ergonomics

The FTZ adapter – the first version, with the tripod mount – isn’t actually a significant problem for portrait use. Yes, it does make it slightly trickier to get your fingers on and off the grip, but at least for me my fingers do fit well enough between the adapter and the camera body, and there’s no discomfort.

I presumed I was going to eventually get the FTZ II adapter, but now I see no need to.

I like that the FTZ I adapter has a tripod socket – when the lens itself doesn’t have a tripod mount, I prefer to attach my camera harness to the adapter rather than the camera body. That way there’s less stress on each of the mounts – and it tends to be better balanced that way, too. However, there isn’t enough room to actually connect anything much to it when the FTZ is on the Z9. So there’s definitely no point getting the FTZ I instead of the FTZ II, unless you expect to also use it with non-portrait-grip-equipped cameras.
As large as the camera is, it turns out my palm rests on the portrait mode controls when I’m using it in landscape mode. So it’s a good thing there’s a locking mechanism for those, to reject spurious input. Though I sometimes forget to lock it after use, and end up taking photos accidentally. And conversely having to unlock it every time is not yet an ingrained habit, so sometimes I miss photos.

I’m not sure what Nikon could realistically do about this; I think it’s just something I’m going to have to adjust to. I developed the habit of instinctively flipping the power on when going for the shutter on the Z7, so I assume I’ll eventually do the same on the Z9’s portrait controls.
Possibly also related to the portrait grip controls – since I never saw this on any other cameras, none of which had portrait grips built in – I get a lot of random shutter actuations. Typically when the camera is hanging from a harness on my hip. One or other of the shutter buttons is apparently really easy to hit, and since the camera is completely silent you don’t know about it until you get home and have to delete fifty photos of the ground, or your arse.
The top panel display flickers. I find that it’s not noticeable most of the time – mainly just on certain angles in bright light. It doesn’t impact its usability, though it doesn’t look great.
As expected, I’m now (a month or so later) completely used to the weight and it’s a non-issue. I still pick up my Z7 occasionally, and even side-by-side at this point I don’t perceive any meaningful difference. I can tell they’re different weights, it just doesn’t matter in practice.
I’m mostly used to the overall size. It’s mostly size- or shape-related side-effects that I’m still coming to grips with, like the Z9’s propensity for rolling / falling over quite easily, or how it suits some carriers less…
It doesn’t work great with a Cotton Carrier, because the addition of the portrait grip forces the camera and lens out away from the carrier. With an e.g. Z7 the camera and lens basically rest neatly against the carrier, which helps secure them and prevents any significant movement perpendicular to your torso. The Z9 sticks out and is wobblier and more awkward.

The only exception is if you have a lens with a suitable tripod foot that you can use as the mount point instead – but most tripod feet stick out a lot anyway, so it’s usually a similar problem.

Nikon 24-120 Z first impressions

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 20:08:38 +0000

I’ve only used it a few times thus far, over the course of a week or so. It’s a fairly “boring” lens by nature, so there’s not a whole lot to say. So far I’m happy with it.

I’ve only used it on the Z9 so far, but I’m thinking it could be a great option on a Z7 as well for backpacking and other such activities that benefit from travelling light.

In no particular order:

Autofocus is solid. It seems pretty accurate – much more so than F-mount lenses, as is the emerging norm for Z-mount lenses. I really like that if it can focus, and the focus point is in the right place, then you can be very confident it’s nailed it.

It struggles in low light, much like the 24-70/4 or indeed most lenses on the Z9. “low light” is a vague term, I realise. Perhaps the best way to put it is that it simply performs about how I’d expect based on other f/4 lenses. It’s not a great option in low light, but it’s certainly no worse than you’d expect for an f/4.
Minimum focus distance is nice and short. I’ve been repeatedly surprised by how closely I can focus – I don’t know why, but I guess just based on all the other comparable Nikon lenses I’ve used (over the course of a decade), this focuses noticeably closer. About the only lenses that beat it are actual 1:1 macro lenses. The only other non-macro lens that matches it [that I’ve used] is the 100-400 Z (though the 24-70/4 isn’t far off, at least on paper – but the extra telephoto reach really increases the perception of in-your-face closeness).
It suits the Z9, ergonomically. The 24-70/4 is a good size for an e.g. Z7, but a little diminutive on the Z9. It’s noticeably bigger than the 24-70/4 in ‘stowed’ position, but in use they’re actually almost identical in size – the 24-120/4 is longer by about the depth of the lens cap (within the 24-70 range – obviously past 70 it gets longer still).
I really like that the camera works immediately when you turn the camera on, unlike with the 24-70/4 – no need for that irritating modal error message about the lens not being extended.
There’s no meaningful difference in weight vs the 24-70/4.
Image stabilisation seems to be very good. Similar to the 24-70/4, which is one of the most impressive lenses I’ve ever used for image stabilisation. I haven’t really pushed it much yet, but e.g. hand-held down to 1/4 second – even at 120mm – yields decent results the majority of the time (your mileage may vary, of course – for me this is an above-average result).
It has a function button, but like pretty much all the other Z lenses with such buttons, I still can’t figure out any real use for them. Likewise the control ring (I tried it as the aperture control, but it’s more awkward to use than the camera body dials and it gets bumped by accident all the time).

I guess I’m a lens ‘millennial’ in the sense that I got into real cameras only a decade ago, after physical aperture controls on lenses had largely faded away. So I never ‘grew up’ with that. I’ve owned a few lenses over the years that have aperture rings, but they’ve never grown on me.
It doesn’t have an OLED display – or any equivalent for focus distance display etc. But I don’t care much – other than for novelty value, I never use the OLED displays (having to push a button to turn them on is apparently enough of an annoyance to discourage their use). And on my older F-mount lenses that have a focus distance scale, to be honest I basically only use it to remind myself which way the focus ring turns (sigh… Sigma vs Nikon). With Sigma not making lenses for Z-mount, and Nikon making (generally) excellent Z lenses, it might be that I eventually eliminate all the Sigmas and no longer have that oblique issue.

All in all, a good result so far. No complaints (other than the long delay in actually getting one). But I haven’t really scrutinised the photos from the 24-120 yet. My impression from quick review is that they’re good, like most Z lenses. But I haven’t yet compared against the 24-70/4, side-by-side.

Sidenote: I ordered the 100-400, 24-120, and Z9 in the same order, about twenty minutes after they were launched way back in November. The 100-400 shipped in December, the Z9 in January, and the 24-120 in late February. It strikes me as interesting that the Z9 is apparently easier to get than the 24-120. Perhaps there’s huge pent up demand for a longer 24-70/4. Sad that the 100-400 is apparently not popular, but then given the price and its disappointing acuity, perhaps that makes sense.

Z9 burst shooting buffer depth

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 03:16:55 +0000

Just some basic tests with the few cards I have.

	Lexar 2933x 128 GiB	ProGrade Gold 256 GiB	Pergear 512 GiB	Angelbird AV PRO 1 TiB
Type	XQD	CFExpress	CFExpress	CFExpress
20 FPS (lossless)	26 (11 – 37)	40 (34 – 43)	36 (36 – 37)	37 (37 – 37)
20 FPS (HE*)	60 (57 – 61)	60 (49 – 77)	60 (59 – 61)	62 (60 – 64)
20 FPS (HE)	75 (34 – 95)	85 (45 – 101)	100 (98 – 103)	104 (98 – 112)
30 FPS	196 (187 – 198)	183 (52 – 198)	192 (137 – 258)	192 (142 – 198)
120 FPS	706 (667 – 736)	706 (558 – 739)	737 (734 – 739)	736 (734 – 739)
Cost per GiB (Feb 2022)	$2.54	$1.13	$0.62	$0.57
Purchase options	Amazon	Amazon	Amazon	Amazon

Values shown are the average over all trials with worst & best individual results shown in parenthesis.

Commentary

Surprisingly little performance difference

None of the cards tested are among the “known fastest” CFExpress cards, like the Delkin Blacks or ProGrade Cobalts. Nonetheless, I’m surprised at how minor the performance difference is between all of them, especially given there’s an XQD card in the mix.

CFExpress cards are not necessarily fast.

Angelbird AV PROs do not meet their promised performance

The Angelbird card claims a 1,000 MB/s minimum, sustained write speed. The XQD format is incapable of speeds above 500 MB/s. Yet the Angelbird is at best just 40% faster than the XQD Lexar. This suggests either the camera is the limiting factor – unlikely given that others have demonstrated much deeper bursts with other, apparently faster cards – or that the Angelbird doesn’t live up to its claims.

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test with a Pergear USB-C reader indicates the Angelbird almost hits 1,000 MB/s at the start of a sequential read or write, but within a second or two falls down to a sustained speed of only about 700 MB/s. And there’s that 40% difference again, vs XQD.

Average performance correlates with consistent performance

e.g. the Pergear 512 GiB is nominally about the same performance on average as the ProGrade 256 GiB, but the Pergear was much more consistent. The Angelbird was a tad faster & more consistent again.

This also highlights why many trials are important, in order to determine the variance. I’d rather have an on-average slower card that’s very consistent than a “bursty” card that might crap out in a critical moment and cause me to miss the moment completely.

30 & 120 FPS modes are camera limited

There was practically no difference in performance between the cards in 30 FPS & 120 FPS modes.

The bandwidth demonstrated is well below the demonstrated capabilities of all these cards, at just a few hundred MB/s.

All this seems quite conclusive that in these extra-fast burst modes the Z9 is the bottleneck, not the memory card.

Sidenote: The ProGrade card showed occasional glitches (three in total across twenty trials) – where the Z9 would suddenly stop shooting mid-burst, where a split second prior it had still shown a significant amount left in the “buffer” (the rXXX counter). I’m not sure what to make of that – perhaps the Z9 relies on some basic level of performance and the ProGrade can’t consistently meet it, or perhaps something is glitching between the Z9 & the ProGrade card that causes the Z9 to error out and stop working.

Methodology

1/250, 24-70/4 @ f4, ISO 5000.

Z9 firmware 1.11.

I enabled the shutter sound at maximum volume, and held down the shutter until I heard a stutter.

For 20 FPS mode:

I counted any extra frames after the stutter and subtracted those from the numbers.
I also tested 1/2500 and saw no meaningful difference in results, and ISO 64 & 25,600 which improved and decreased (respectively) buffer depth by about 10% each (very likely corresponding to the file size differences, though I didn’t check).
Five trials, each testing each format in turn: lossless, HE*, HE.

For 30 & 120 FPS modes:

I never heard an extra frame after the first stutter – I don’t know if that means the camera ground to a complete halt or merely that it doesn’t reliably play the fake shutter sound in these modes. The consistency of the results in those modes leads me to believe it’s the former.
Ten trials, sequentially.

Cards were formatted in camera and empty at the start of each class of testing (20, 30, 120). Images were not erased between trials (empty cards are not representative of real-world conditions).

Autofocus was not engaged during shooting. I haven’t tested it comprehensively, but so far I’ve seen no impact on burst performance from using autofocus (including subject recognition).

Z9 second impressions

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 22:56:25 +0000

Ergonomics

You cannot use the camera at all – can’t even bring up the menus – if you have a “stowed” lens attached, like the 24-70/4 in compact form. This is not a big deal, of course, but it’s annoying that you can’t do anything with the camera and it doesn’t give any indication why – unlike the Z7, the Z9 doesn’t turn on the LCD in this situation, only the EVF, so it’s very easy to miss the dialog it’s trying to show that’s complaining about the lens.
It took a little experimentation to figure out how to manipulate the LCD screen easily. If you just grab the side and try to pivot it up or down, for example, it’s almost impossible to do so without fear of breaking something. This seems to be a consequence of its complicated multi-levered design. Fortunately Nikon have included little grabbers on the top & bottom as well, and if you use those appropriately the screen is easy enough to position.
With the Sigma 150-600 Contemporary attached, I’m finding the Z9 isn’t significantly different in weight from the Z7 (or D500). I also don’t see any meaningful difference in “balance” or any such thing that apparently lots of other people do.
One thing I hadn’t really considered is that the Z9 is a rounded square, whereas the Z7 was a less rounded rectangle. Consequently the Z9 likes to roll about, such as in a car going around corners, which is annoying – on a recent windy-road drive I had to hold the Z9 the entire time, in my lap, to prevent it attempting to commit suicide against the doors and dashboard.
Some camera harnesses are problematic with the Z9, unless you have a tripod foot on the lens that you can attach to instead.

e.g. my preferred camera harness is a Cotton Carrier, but the Z9’s big butt forces the camera and lens to stick out way more, which puts a lot more torque on the harness – I worry it’ll eventually snap from the stress (I’ve had one harness break in this way before) – and is just less comfortable all round.

Performance

Autofocus

It hasn’t completely kicked the Nikon Z habit of obsessive-compulsive behaviour regarding backgrounds. Sometimes with a clear subject front-and-centre, right there in the middle of the frame, it’ll buck all artistic conventions and seek novel compositions in the background.

This is rare, to be clear. The Z7 did this [figuratively] all the time. I think the Z9’s only really done it once, maybe twice so far. So I wouldn’t call this a big deal, even though it’s such an obvious fail when it happens. Still, it’s a bit sad that Nikon still can’t seem to figure this out.

California Condors have a wing span of nearly three metres. This makes them very hard to spot, clearly.

As others have occasionally commented in reviews, eye autofocus is easily foiled if the eye is obstructed at all, e.g. by hairs, feathers, or similar. In most cases (that I’ve seen so far) it will vacillate randomly between the eye and the obstruction.

As such, it is possible to still get the eye in focus, but you need to take a lot of pictures and hope for the best.

This is not unique to subject-detecting AF modes – the problem occurs in single-point AF as well, for example.

This behaviour in single-point mode is justifiable – in abstract there’s no way for the camera to tell which of the possibilities you actually want – but I would think that when it explicitly detects an eye it would understand how to avoid common obstructions like hairs & feathers, and similarly nearby elements like eyelashes. e.g. focus specifically on circular or oval features, or simply always prefer the furthest detected feature. Alas it does not.

For reference, Nikon, this is what an eye looks like.

This, on the other hand, is a feather. Notice the subtle distinction in how they look nothing alike.

Eye detection is sometimes wrong about what is an eye – e.g. nostrils on birds. I don’t have much data on this yet, but I get the initial impression that it’s basically just looking for a roundish feature that is darker than its surroundings, and nostrils are often darker than eyes (since eyes often have reflections and/or colour irises), or the eyes might be partially obscured. The behaviour is dependent on the bird – e.g. for California Condors it was a real bugger sometimes in trying to get it to recognise the actual eye, but for many other bird species it had no issues.

All AF modes using subjection detection – e.g. auto-area, 3D tracking – were very insistent about picking the nostril as an “eye”, ignoring the actual eye that is clearly visible. I had to switch to single-point AF to get usable focus.

For some animals – e.g. this California Condor which is apparently the Z9 AF system’s nemesis – it doesn’t recognise the actual face at all, but frequently thinks it sees a face elsewhere on the animal. In poses like the one above it mistook the nostril for an eye and prioritised that, but in the photo below it didn’t detect any eyes and instead thought it saw a face in the middle of those neck feathers.

Once again I had to switch to single-point AF in order to get usable focus, as otherwise it would stubbornly focus only on the neck feathers.

Similarly in some cases it doesn’t recognise an obvious animal at all, but thinks it sees something interesting in inanimate objects. This is compounded severely by the design flaw where 3D tracking mode will always focus on any detected subject no matter where you tell it to focus, and disabling subject detection (to work around this flaw) requires menu-diving.

Rumours of jaguars in this photo are greatly exaggerated, according to the Z9. Fortunately there’s a fascinating log that simply must be photographed.

Disclosure: I leaned into its silliness and framed this example photo deliberately, but to be clear it would not see the jaguar at all until I zoomed in significantly closer, and it consistently saw the log as a subject even when it was only just visible at the edge of the frame.

I’ve seen a small number of cases where the camera simply front-focuses for no apparent reason, in single-point AF. Sometimes it’s so severe that nothing in frame is in focus. This is with the 24-70/4 at least. When this happens it consistently misses focus across all photos in a burst (with AF-C active).

To be clear, usually the camera focuses consistently on at least something in the scene – especially with single-point AF it’s generally very reliable. Just not always.
I haven’t tested it properly yet, but I get the impression the Z9 suffers from the same flaw as the Z7 regarding autofocus performance vs exposure preview. i.e. if your subject is dim in the viewfinder – because you have accurate exposure preview enabled and you’re under-exposing (e.g. it’s an inherently dark subject, or you’re protecting highlights, etc) – the autofocus system performs worse. Simply raise the ISO, for example, and autofocus works much better (but now your actual exposure is wrong, and your photo might be unusable).

This is probably why Nikon have the “View mode (photo Lv)” setting (Custom Settings > Shooting/display > d9), so that you can choose which of these trade-offs you wish to prioritise. But with accurate preview turned off it’s all too easy to screw up the exposure, especially in non-trivial lighting situations where the rudimentary exposure meters just can’t convey what’s going on.

DSLRs didn’t have this issue per se because they had no exposure preview mode – and because the AF system was separate from the image sensor, the AF system could always operate with whatever settings it found optimal.

The crux of my frustration is that it feels like a false dichotomy. I don’t understand why it can’t use whatever ISO is best for AF, but simply adjust the image in the viewfinder to compensate. e.g. if it needs a few extra stops of gain for good AF, then just reduce the EVF / LCD preview by the same amount. Sure, it might clip highlights in the EVF preview, but I think I’d prefer that – the highlights would still be fine in the actual photos taken, and in any case if the subject isn’t in focus blown highlights are irrelevant.

Image stabilisation

I’m seeing particularly poor image stabilisation performance with the Sigma 150-600 Contemporary. This lens has always had poor image stabilisation, on the Z7 and the D500. But I feel like it’s worse on the Z9.

If I want the majority of hand-held images to be usably sharp at 600mm, it seems like I have to use a shutter speed of at least 1/500. I haven’t really established a baseline by turning image stabilisation off, but I can’t see how 1/500 equates to more than a stop or two of effective stabilisation, at best.

Most of my favourite wildlife photos are taken in the range of 1/10 to 1/100, so this is a big problem for me.

I’m also seeing more (vs the D500, Z7, etc) of the behaviour where the vast majority of photos are unusably blurry and then just occasionally one is actually sharp. There’s not a lot of middle ground. I mention this because with e.g. Nikon’s own 80-400 or the 100-400 you tend to get a much smoother continuum of blurry to not blurry.

It’s the only non-Nikon lens I use with its own image stabilisation, so I can’t draw any conclusions as to whether this is first- vs third-party lens compatibility or anything like that.

Metering

Ever since it was introduced (D500 era, I think?) I’ve used highlight-weighted metering almost exclusively in stills photography, because noisy midtones can be mitigated but blown highlights can be ruinous. But with the Z9 I found very quickly that it would massively under-expose sometimes in highlight-weighted mode. I switched to matrix metering and have almost exclusively used that so far. It works well most of the time, but of course it does sometimes blow the highlights.
If “Starlight view (photo Lv)” is enabled (Custom Settings > Shooting/display > d9), the EVF / LCD do not show exposure accurately, irrespective of the setting of “View mode (photo Lv)”. This is extremely surprising and caused me to massively over-expose a bunch of images.

It makes me suspect that “Starlight” mode – which is nominally about autofocus working better in low-light – is nothing more than forcing the sensor into ISO settings that are most amenable to the autofocus system rather than representative of the intended exposure (see earlier point about AF effectiveness vs exposure preview).

Addendum: why use “Starlight” mode in broad daylight? In this case, because I’d had it on the night before and forgot to turn it off. Though in any case I’m still curious as to exactly when it’s supposed to help – e.g. does it only work in extremely low light, or does it boost AF performance in any situation? Nikon’s product material, and 3rd party reviews, say very little in this regard.

This full-body portrait of a naked meerkat is apparently too saucy for the Z9, and must be censored.

Battery life

The battery lasts about six hours in my use. That’s with the camera on the whole time, GPS enabled (with standby turned off), and sporadic use in 20 FPS mode.

Battery life seems to be mostly affected by how long the camera is switched on and especially how long the EVF or LCD are active. How many photos you take doesn’t seem to be a significant factor. Though video might (I haven’t done a lot of video yet).

I assume the GPS is a significant power suck. Previously, on my Z7, I used a Solmeta GMAX hotshoe GPS because (a) it has a big internal battery that avoids draining the camera’s battery, (b) it was far more reliable than any other GPS unit I ever tried, and (c) having its own battery meant it could keep active irrespective of what the camera was doing or whether the camera was even on. I could use that on the Z9 too, but the combination would be too big for my tastes. If you’re not going to use the built-in GPS you’ll probably see a significant increase in battery life.

I could also turn the camera off between use, which might save a significant amount too – but I’m afraid to do that because I’m not convinced the GPS will work as reliably (the Z9’s manual claims the GPS will continue tracking even if the camera’s off, but frankly I’m sceptical based on past experience with earlier cameras & GPS units).

On the Z7 I’d usually get at best four hours per battery, and that’s even though I’d turn the camera completely off when not actively using it. So it’s clear the Z9 gets significantly better battery life – as you’d expect given it has 157% more capacity.

For a long day of use, or if recording significantly amounts of video, you’d definitely need at least two batteries for the Z9 (or rely heavily on USB tethering).
Battery charging in-camera officially takes 3h 40m from 0% to 100%, and I haven’t tried to precisely measure that but it seems about right for what I see in practice.

Using a USB battery brick to charge the camera seems to add about 2% every five minutes or so. If you’re out for the day and take a half hour lunch break, for example, you can only add ~12% more juice to the battery. Not all that useful. I find having a USB cable sticking out the side of the camera to be dangerous to the camera’s health (cable yanks, water ingress, etc) so power / charging while it’s in use doesn’t seem practical to me.

I haven’t tested it yet, but in theory you can use any old USB power source to charge a second battery, which will be super helpful (compared to having to use mains power as with previous Nikon battery chargers).

I’d really like to see future Nikon cameras & batteries support faster charging, like most portable electronics do. e.g. USB-PD 60W should be enough to goose the battery from 20% to 80% in just twenty minutes. That’d make it real easy to have a single battery and just top it up every time you take a bathroom break or whatever.

Reliability

Crashes

It locks up occasionally in playback mode, when reviewing images. It’ll suddenly just stop responding to all controls, and after fifteen seconds it reboots itself. It forgets everything it was doing when it reboots (e.g. the playback image position resets to the most recently recorded image).

[Addendum: some folks suggested it might be the memory card causing this. While it’s hard to definitively rule that out, this happens with at least two different cards from different manufacturers (Pergear & Angelbird).]

GPS

The GPS seems to work quite well so far, though I’ve basically just been moving to a location, preparing, then taking photos, then moving on – a more challenging test will be if I’m moving while taking photos, such as on a boat, or taken photos suddenly after moving. Those are situations in which a lot of GPS units / Nikon cameras will make mistakes, like recording wildly stale location data.

I’ve taken a bit over a thousand photos so far, with GPS enabled.

Once it’s acquired its position it seems to update it every second, as you’d expect.
It does actually work indoors (all the time so far for me, but I haven’t been indoors much). This is a pleasant surprise. Some prior GPS units I’ve used have basically not worked at all indoors.
It seems to be much more capable of actually acquiring an accurate position – when faced with obstructions etc – than most prior GPS hotshoe units I’ve tried, though I’d be [very pleasantly] surprised if it matches the Solmeta GMAX in that regard.
It’s never failed to record the location so far.
It’s never gotten the location completely wrong, so far.

It’s not super accurate, though – I see longitude and latitude inaccuracies of up to ~ten metres in some cases. It’s good to just a couple of metres most of the time, though. The Solmeta GMAX is more consistently accurate, but for my purposes ~ten metres of error – occasionally – isn’t a big deal.

Altitude isn’t accurate – its regularly off by tens of metres. e.g. at the beach yesterday it consistently thought I was 12 to 19 metres below sea level.
Even with all the standby stuff disabled and the camera left on at all times, it does lose its position if you’re not actively using the camera (according to the position read-out in the menus). That concerns me, as this mimics the behaviour of most prior [hotshoe] GPS units with Nikon cameras, and my experience with them is that they fail to correctly tag photos a lot. But, as noted above, so far it’s actually worked well despite this.

I have not yet tried enabling GPS logging – presumably that forces the camera to maintain an accurate GPS location at all times. So that might be a workaround, if there are any issues.
It doesn’t record heading like the Solmeta GMAX, but then to be honest magnetic compasses tend to be uselessly inaccurate anyway so I’m not really missing that (though if it had it, and it worked reliably, that would be nice).
There’s no way to tell at a glance if the camera actually has a GPS location fix. There’s a satellite icon that shows up in various places in the GUI, but all it seems to mean is that GPS is enabled, not that it actually has a location lock.

You can dig into the menus to find out, but that’s a bit slow.

Nominally it tells you when it doesn’t yet know its location, by blinking the satellite icon. Indeed I do see that happening when the camera is first turned on and acquiring its location initially. But, even when it stops flashing the camera doesn’t always know its position (according to its read-out in the menus).

I miss the built-in LCD of the Solmeta GMAX where I could see at a glance if it had an accurate position fix (and gauge roughly how accurate via the number of satellites acquired). Maybe Nikon could issue a firmware update that adds a little satellite count badge to the satellite icon, like most GPS units display.

Software support

Just a minor oddity, but Lightroom’s Import dialog seems to have problems with High Efficiency NEF files – it won’t reliably show thumbnails for them. You can “jostle” it by mousing over the blank spaces to get it to load the thumbnails, most of the time, but this isn’t something that’s required for Nikon NEF files from earlier cameras.

Z9 first impressions

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 02:24:14 +0000

For context, I’m coming most recently from a Z7, but before that I used a D500 for several years (occasionally with the battery grip). I’ve also had experience with the D800, D850, and a number of smaller DX bodies – D7100, D5500, D5200, D3200, etc.

My Z9 has firmware version 1.11.

Note also that I’ve read & watched practically everything out there so far on the Z9, and have no desire to repeat what’s already been covered to death. I’m only noting here things that surprised me or otherwise weren’t well-covered elsewhere. That tends to mean oddities or negative things – but to be clear, my overall impression is very positive; there’s a lot to like about this camera, it’s just that most of that’s been heavily documented already.

Ergonomics

It’s heavy. Dense. I thought I’d be fine with the weight and was actually only worried about the volume, but in practice it’s the opposite.

The size is fine – not great; smaller would be nice of course, but the Z7 plus a reliable GPS unit in the hotshoe has basically the same bounding box as the Z9, so the Z9 is effectively no larger for my purposes.

The difference is of course most pronounced with baby lenses like the 24-70/4. With the Sigma 105/1.4 on it, it’s not that different to with the Z7. Similarly if you stick a telephoto on it, e.g. a 150-600, the perceived difference vs the Z7 is pretty minor. Still, for casual ‘walkabout’ use, with a small lens like a 24-70 or 24-120, I’m a bit concerned.

I’d assumed it was the bigger battery that contributed a lot of that extra weight, but actually the battery is pretty light. Also much smaller than I’d assumed.

165 grams according to my kitchen scales. Only 12% of the overall package.

The grips are a bit big. I’m a guy with fairly large hands, too. It’s similar to the large DSLRs (e.g D500). I know when I went from those to the Z7 I thought the Z7 grip was too small at first, but I very quickly got used to it. I do think the Z7 grip is a tad smaller than ideal – and certainly too short vertically, as my pinky finger inevitably ends up below the Z7 rather than holding it – but overall it’s closer to ideal than the Z9.

Holding the Z7 feels like you’re holding something precise, albeit a bit diminutive, whereas holding the Z9 is like holding a literal brick.

That said, I’m expecting I’ll get used to it.
The dpad feels kinda stiff. It’s a tad difficult to actually press (and yet feels quite mushy). Not great.
The control wheels are much nicer than the Z7 ones. The Z7 ones feel nice, at first, but they’re metal and relatively sharp and I know from uncomfortable experience that they can cause blisters on your fingers. The Z9 brings back the rubberised DSLR-style control wheels, which don’t feel as fancy but are much better for heavy use.

Z7 control wheel

Z9 control wheel

I’d read some complaints that the memory card door is difficult to open, especially one-handed, but it’s completely trivial – push the slider down, then push it left, then just let go and the spring-loaded door opens itself. It takes literally just one finger. Can you finger-paint an L? Then you can open the memory card door.

It’s much easier to open & close than a GoPro case, for example. Possibly too easy, if the goal is to prevent accidental openings.

I’ve almost always used pure electronic shutter mode on the Z7, for the peace & quiet, but even so it’s still noticeably harder to tell that you’re taking photos with the Z9. I assume because of the complete lack of blackout [most of the time]. Even with the flashing indicators enabled.

[Follow-up: case in point, I went to the zoo a few days ago and unintentionally took 8,000 photos! That’s about 10x what I would have taken with e.g. the Z7, or even the D500. It’s so easy to suddenly have thousands of photos without really noticing. Granted I only kept ~1,500 after culling blurry & duplicate ones, but the culling process alone took a few hours. The Z9 needs to come with little minions to help manage the output. 😜]
The camera gets warm when recording video (8k/30 and 4k/30 at least) or bursting at 20+ FPS, in a cold room. Not hot, but it does make me a little concerned about over-heating in hot environments. We’ll have to see.
The EVF is visibly low resolution, just like the Z7 – by which I mean you can see the individual pixels. But honestly I’ve never really felt this was a practical problem – how sharp the EVF is has no bearing on how sharp & correctly focused the actual photo is.

A sharper EVF (and LCD) would certainly be nice, no mistake – I certainly prefer “Retina” displays over their pixellated forebearers – but it’s not a big deal despite what so many others claim.

The EVF still looks better than the cheap, shitty LCD displays most of the world use on their computers.

One purported problem with the low resolution of the EVF is in judging focus accuracy. I think the impact is small if not completely insignificant. There are much better ways to check focus accuracy – e.g. digitally magnifying the view (I assign one of the function buttons to jump to 200%). These are much more effective and indeed necessary if you actually care – with 45 MP no human eye can check critical focus without zooming in a lot.

Performance

This section is particularly preliminary since it’s based on just a couple of hours of use, and this aspect is inherently hard to judge.

Burst shooting

As others have recently noted, if you use shutter speeds below 1/250 you don’t actually get 20 FPS. It drops first to 15 FPS and then about 10 FPS at 1/30, etc. That’s disappointing – most of the time I’m using less than 1/250, so it appears I’m rarely going to see the claimed 20 FPS.

It’s also weird that in 30 FPS JPEG mode it’s not limited until 1/50 or below.
The buffer depth is better than I expected based on other people’s tests, possibly because most tests to date were done with 1.00 firmware – Matt Granger’s results show a huge improvement with 1.11 and his numbers match mine for the one card we have in common, the ProGrade 256GB. Or maybe folks were using the HDMI output simultaneously, which Matt Granger also documented as having a significant negative effect on buffer depth.

I get at least 50 HE* photos at 20 FPS before any slowdown, even with a Pergear 512GB CFExpress card which is probably one of the slowest available (it’s optimised for $/GB, not performance).

I was anticipating “having to” buy a performance CFExpress card, but after these initial tests I’m not sure it’s necessary at all. It looks like I can easily take 900+ photos a minute if I want, which is already way more than I should be encouraged to, given I have to sort through them later.

The buffer depth increases to 80-110 when dropping to 15 FPS. At 10 FPS it is effectively infinite, even with my slowest cards. That’s nice – it essentially matches the D500 in this respect, at least – and the D500 could only achieve an infinite buffer with (for its time) high-end CFExpress cards.

Autofocus

Autofocus in low light is definitely better than with the Z7, but it still has plenty of room for improvement (which is not to say any other camera is better – I’m pretty sure no camera has what I’d consider truly good low-light AF, yet).

e.g. it still basically can’t focus at all in my TV room [with the 24-70/4], which is a somewhat dim room but not dark by any means – I could sit there and read a printed book just fine, for example. Most of the time it just hunts endlessly. Subject recognition doesn’t work at all.

The Z7 fails even harder – it often doesn’t even try hunting, it just outright refuses to engage the focus motor.

The D500 can focus in similar light in the same room – the D500 is impressive in low-light AF ability, though it tends to over-estimate itself even so; it’ll show a green “got it!” focus indicator but the actual photos will quite often show that it missed. Still, it would at least get some in-focus photos, where the Z9 cannot.

It’s worth noting that my iPhone 11 can autofocus decently in these same conditions – faster & more reliably than any of these “real” cameras. Admittedly it has a wider field of view with much deeper depth of field, so it doesn’t have to be as accurate. But still.

In brighter (but still interior) lighting, the Z9 suddenly starts working and works really quite well, at least for stationary or slow-moving subjects. The transition from basically not working to working well is surprisingly sharp.
I haven’t really tested it yet, but AF accuracy with a subject moving at non-trivial speed – i.e. my cat trotting towards the camera – isn’t great at first blush. The majority of photos have focus completely missing the head, let-alone the eyes. Oddly focus bounces in & out between every frame, like it’s hunting. The D500 would tend to hit or miss in longer batches. The Z9 is clearly superior here, since having every other photo in focus is way better for capturing a decent moment than missing ten in a row.

The 24-70/4 might be a factor in this, of course. Though it seems to have pretty snappy AF, in my experience.

The Z7 wouldn’t have managed any photos in focus, except maybe by dumb coincident luck, so it’s a very clear improvement over that at least.
Subject recognition doesn’t work for close subjects, e.g. when the face fills the frame. At least for cats. It stops recognising that it’s even a face, let-alone picking out the eyes. It then tends to focus on merely whatever’s nearest, e.g. the tip of the nose.

No faces or eyes to see here – move along. Note: taken using single-point AF manually placed on the right eye – auto-area AF focused only on the nose, and I deleted all those dud photos before thinking I should save one for demonstration purposes.

Eye AF consistently front-focuses, because it favours the eyelashes or eyebrows (particularly for animals) over the iris. When depth of field isn’t able to cover this up – e.g. close distances or wide apertures – it’s really obvious, because the Z9 is so consistent with focusing on the wrong thing. A more “manual” focus mode has to be used instead, like single-point AF.

The AF system continues to not be able to distinguish stuffed toys from real animals. It was a bit stubborn about focusing on a stuffed lion’s face rather than my actual cat, for example. Not a real-world concern for me, of course, but kind of amusing.
Auto-area AF looks much more promising, at this early stage, than the Z7 (or any DSLRs). So far it’s been pretty reliable about finding the subject (usually my cat, thus far). Not perfect, for sure, but good enough that I’m not frustrated.

For years I almost exclusively used single-point AF on the Z7 because frankly it was the only AF area mode that was usable (with 1.00 firmware). Recently I tried experimenting again, and was quite pleasantly surprised that its other AF modes have been made actually somewhat usable by its firmware updates. I’ve even been dabbling with auto-area AF, in certain easy situations. But it’s immediately obvious that the Z9 is much better.
Subject detection sometimes finds “subjects” in bizarre places, like random patches of couch fabric or shadows on a bean bag chair.

This would be insignificant if it weren’t for the fact that 3D tracking will always try to track the nearest detected subject – anywhere in the frame, irrespective of where you place the tracking box. So if it detects a non-existent subject – or in any case if you just want to have it track something specific – you have to dive into the menus to disable subject detection entirely. Slow and annoying.

If I place the tracking box over a detected subject and press AF-ON, sure, it should use its subject tracking smarts. Otherwise, it should just do what it’s told and stop trying to be “helpful”.
So far, 3D tracking doesn’t seem dramatically better than the D500, but I haven’t tested it much in real-world conditions. It’s nice to have it back, and I will be testing it further in various conditions, but I’ve already seen the hallmark flakiness in some cases – e.g. where it just immediately loses the subject and focuses randomly on something else.

I think Nikon’s subject tracking, as on e.g. the D500, has always been rather over-rated. But it does work well sometimes and is super nice when it works.
I’ve noticed that the Z9 tries very hard to be “sticky”, even with “Blocked Shot AF Response” set to 1 (Quick). But if you release AF-ON and press it again, it instantly refocuses on whatever’s under the AF box. This makes some sense, I guess, but I’m going to have to train myself to feather the AF-ON button. I wish when you set it to ‘Quick’ it would just always focus on whatever is under the AF box.

In auto-area AF and similar modes (as opposed to single-point) it consequently still exhibits some of that annoying behaviour where it loses the subject, focuses on the background, and is then too slow to refocus on the subject.

Still, that you can re-press the AF-ON button and have it do what you want is a big improvement from the Z7, which would often stubbornly refuse to refocus on the subject until you manually adjusted focus to be on the right subject (and even then it would sometimes obstinately refocus immediately on the background again).

Image stabilisation

Image stabilisation doesn’t seem any different from the Z7 – which is to say it’s good, but could be better. e.g. ¼s exposures hand-held at 70mm still have a low success rate. I might be seeing more interesting (positive) results with the 105/2.8, that supports the enhanced “Synchro VR”, but it’s a bit early to tell.

Responsiveness

There’s a noticeable delay – half a second or so – for the Z9 to turn on and be ready to use. It’s faster than the Z7, but far from the instantaneous that many reviewers have been claiming.

That’s with all the ‘slowdowns’ disabled, like the sensor shield and restoring AF position. Enabling those doesn’t actually make much difference, as far as I could tell.
It’s occasionally a little slow when doing certain things in video mode, e.g. immediately after you stop recording it can take a moment or two to start responding to the controls again.

The Z7 is similar. The DSLRs might have been better – I don’t remember, but in any case it’s largely irrelevant given how bad they were at video (e.g. unusable AF, no viewfinder support, etc).

One thing the Z7 was infuriating about was taking up to ten seconds after burst shooting before it’d let you switch into video mode, seemingly because it refuses to switch modes until its buffer is empty. I don’t yet know if the Z9 suffers from this too, but because the Z9 buffer clears quite quickly, it’ll hopefully prove far less annoying even if it does.
The GUI feels snappier than the Z7, but I haven’t compared them side-by-side yet. I mainly feel like image review is significantly swifter – zooming in on a photo is instantaneous, whereas the Z7 usually takes a moment. Skipping rapidly back and forth between photos is also instantaneous, whereas the Z7 had just a bit of delay. Overall it’s subtle but the effect is to make the Z9 feel significantly more powerful.
It’s subtle if present, but it feels like the scene view (on LCD and EVF) has less latency than the Z7. The AF indicators do lag the subject / camera movement, but it’s only significant if you have very fast movement, and I don’t yet know if it actually impacts focus accuracy.

It’s subtle enough that if I didn’t already know Nikon are claiming improvements in EVF latency, I wonder if I’d have noticed anything at all.
The EVF & LCD lag significantly in some situations, involving slow shutter speeds (e.g. 1/10) and/or low light. Similar to the Z7 (and my iPhone, for that matter). To be clear, this is when not taking any photos, just looking at the screens. I think most cameras do this – I guess they figure it’s better to lower the refresh rate than have [more] noise in the image preview.
The 60 Hz “limit” of the EVF & LCD doesn’t seem problematic to me. I have various devices with 120 Hz displays (e.g. my iPad) but frankly I’ve never seen any meaningful difference. But I haven’t used an EVF with a refresh rate higher than 120 Hz, so I guess I can’t be sure.

Video quality

The oversampled 4k (30 FPS or lower in FX mode) is very nice, at least in H.265 10-bit HLG (I haven’t played as much with other video formats).

There’s no mistaking that it has been processed – it’s definitely a little crunchy if you look closely, and especially if you compare vs the 8k down-sampled in playback. The 8k does contain more genuine detail – though not 4x as much, by any stretch – and looks much more natural with no evidence of artificial sharpening.

It reminds me a bit of the results from recent iPhones in their “Deep Fusion” mode, though not as strong (thankfully).

The processing settings – including several aspects of sharpening – are configurable in strength, but I haven’t played with that yet. I’m pretty comfortable with the defaults (I intend to use the over-sampled 4k mode, as opposed to 8k mode, when I want quick results that don’t require post-processing).

Reliability

As hoped, the Z9 has yet to fail to take a photo when told to (other than in contrived, pathological cases like after filling the buffer with an 800-photo burst). It’s clearly better than the Z7. Which is a low bar, of course. The Z7 is a very unreliable camera for actually taking photos, thanks to its anaemic buffer and slow image processing. I’m hoping that continues to hold true in more demanding testing – I’ve missed the D500, which was the first and (’til now) only camera I ever used where you could trust that it would work when you pressed the shutter button.

Connectivity

Pairing with Snapbridge on my iPhone went fine. The process is a bit inelegant, but no different than with any other Nikon cameras, and worked first time.
Snapbridge is very snappy for camera remote control. I’m not sure how it compares with the Z7 as honestly I’ve virtually never used the Snapbridge app, but I was impressed with how low-latency it is (and laughed that you can use it to control the camera’s LCD in playback mode – I’m not sure what the point of that is but it’s amusing).
Image download over wifi to an iPhone is pretty slow. About ten to fifteen seconds per ~50MB image. I don’t recall if that’s different from the Z7 – but I remember when image download was only supported over Bluetooth, and that was excruciating… something like up to a minute per 2MB image. So progress, I guess, though still inexplicably slow.
It refuses to charge at all over USB from some chargers – including chargers that work just fine with the Z7. I’m guessing it requires some minimum wattage that exceeds what basic USB power bricks can provide. Not a big deal, but a tad disappointing (I’d be fine with it charging slowly, as long as it still charged).

Factory settings

GPS is off by default and the UI is surprisingly unintuitive about it – it took me an hour and several attempts before I finally confirmed that it was off and figured out how to enable it.

I guess I can understand why it might be off by default, given its potential for significant battery drain, but then standby power saving mode is disabled by default, and that has a much bigger negative impact.
Standby power saving mode is disabled by default. This makes the camera consume a noticeable amount of power when switched on but not being used.

This makes some sense as a default, I suppose – standby mode presumably incurs some delay when you snap the camera out of it, which the nominal audience for this camera might hate. But I was surprised to see 10% of the battery disappear just because I left the camera sitting on a desk for an hour without formally switching it off. This was never a problem on the Z7 or any of the DSLRs – though admittedly the Z7 has a noticeable, annoying delay to wake up from standby.
The video format settings are just stupid by default – 4k/30 H.265 8-bit (SDR), if I remember correctly. They should be 8k/30 H.265 10-bit with HLG or N-log enabled (or ProRes – not my preference but I could at least respect that choice).
With HLG in use the video display is flat by default. And the preference for fixing that is really obtusely named – “View Assist” – and buried in Custom Settings > Video > g8. For someone that wants to use HDR simply to get better dynamic range, I see no point in making the live preview ugly as a side-effect.
AF is set to single point by default. Not a big deal, but kinda weird for this camera in particular – a major point of the Z9 was its new “handle anything” auto-area AF, so I’d expect that to be selected by default.
Video AF is set to AF-F by default… I do actually use that occasionally, but I’d be surprised if so-called video professionals use it much at all – unless you’re a Youtuber you know that shifting focus during a scene is to be done carefully and rarely. AF-C makes much more sense to me.

Nikon Z 100-400 centre vs Nikon 80-400G & Sigma 150-600 C

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 07:54:36 +0000

This is the second post in a series of evaluations of the Nikkor Z 100-400. Please refer to the first post for details about the test equipment & methodology.

In this post, I’m going to compare performance in the image centre between these three telephoto lenses at 400mm:

Nikkor Z 100-400 (e.g. from Amazon).
AF-S Nikkor 80-400G (e.g. from Amazon).
Sigma 150-600 Contemporary (e.g. from Amazon).

Unlike in the first post, where the focus was solely on the 100-400, I won’t provide exhaustive sample images of all apertures for all lenses – that would just be overwhelming. Instead, I’ll just provide the noteworthy cases.

30ft @ 400

The 150-600 is basically the same from wide open (f/6) through to f/8. It might be a tiny bit sharper at f/6 than narrower apertures.

The perceived sharpness of the 80-400 increases slightly when stopping down from wide open, and starts to soften again at f/7.1 and narrower. Its optimal aperture is f/6.3, vs f/5.6 for the 100-400.

Note that in practice I’ve tended to favour f/7.1 on the 80-400, including on 24 MP DX cameras which have higher pixel densities than the Z7 (and therefore should be more sensitive to diffraction, not less). That’s based on a large amount of real-world experience. There’s several possible explanations for the discrepancy, but my guess is that the increased depth of field, of f/7.1 over f/6.3, helps in practice because it:

Increases the depth of field (sometimes important at close distances or with deep subjects).
Provides a little more tolerance for focus errors.

Nikkor Z 100-400 30ft @ 400 f/6.3

Nikkor AF-S 80-400G 30ft @ 400 f/6.3

Sigma 150-600 Contemporary 30ft @ 400 f/6.3

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The 150-600 is clearly the sharpest, followed by the 80-400. The 100-400 is much softer than even the 80-400. The 80-400 is sharper at any aperture than the 100-400 is at any aperture (and the 150-600 exceeds both, similarly).

This was such a surprise that I went back and took many more photos with the 100-400, in a variety of modes (various autofocus modes, manual focus, VR on & off, silent shutter on & off), but the results were consistent – the 100-400 is much softer at 400 than its eight year old predecessor, let-alone the 150-600.

Note: the difference in sharpness is partially obscured by the JPEG compression used for the images in this post, even though I used the maximum possible JPEG quality. All my written statements throughout these tests are based on comparing the NEFs in Lightroom.

12ft @ 400

The 150-600 behaves the same as at 30ft – basically the same from f/6 (wide open) through f/8. Maybe a tiny bit sharper wide open.

The 80-400 gives its best performance at f/6.3 again. As at 30ft, the difference with f/5.6 (wide open) or f/7.1 is slight. f/8 is very slightly softer again, as diffraction more clearly kicks in.

Nikkor Z 100-400 12ft @ 400 f/6.3

Nikkor AF-S 80-400G 12ft @ 400 f/6.3

Sigma 150-600 Contemporary 12ft @ 400 f/6.3

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Unfortunately the comparison between the three is complicated by the fact that the 80-400 back-focused slightly while the 100-400 looks like it again front-focused a tad. After accounting for that it’s clear that the 80-400 is sharper than the 100-400. But the 150-600 is much sharper than either of them.

6ft @ 400

The 150-600 is out for this particular subject distance because it can’t focus this close.

The 80-400 is slightly sharper at f/7.1 than other apertures. Similar to the 100-400 (which still saw tiny improvement up to f/8, over f/7.1).

Nikkor Z 100-400 6ft @ 400 f/6.3

Nikkor AF-S 80-400G 6ft @ 400 f/6.3

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At this point the comparison is getting tricky, because:

The 80-400 back-focused again.
The 100-400 is maintaining its nominal focal length much better than the 80-400. This change in focal length over different focus distances is typical behaviour for lenses – the stated focal length is usually only achieved at infinity; as you focus closer, their effective focal length drops.

It’s pretty close, between the two. There seems to be similar resolution on the image sensor, so the difference in subject detail is solely because of the difference in effective focal length. If you allow for that, then there’s a notable advantage to the 100-400.

MFD @ 400

Note here that the 100-400 can get down to about 3ft, while the 80-400 is not much shorter than the 6ft looked at above, and the 150-600 is way out at 10ft or so.

So unsurprisingly the 80-400 behaves the same as at 6ft – sharpest at f/7.1. Just like the 100-400. And the 150-600 is very similar from wide open (f/6) to f/8, with maybe a very slight improvement from stopping down just a tad, to f/6.3.

Note that I’ve also included the 150-600 at 600, in case you’re interested in comparing the maximum possible magnification across the three lenses.

Note: I don’t know why there’s such significant discrepancies in exposure, particularly with the 80-400. This was reproducible. The same exposure settings were used for all lenses. Possibly the differing fields of view impacted the camera’s metering?

Nikkor Z 100-400 MFD @ 400 f/7.1

Nikkor AF-S 80-400G MFD @ 400 f/7.1

Sigma 150-600 Contemporary MFD @ 400 f/7.1

Sigma 150-600 Contemporary MFD @ 600 f/7.1

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Here there’s no contest – the 100-400 is sharpest on the sensor (albeit by only a small margin over the 80-400), but also offers much higher magnification – almost twice what either of the other lenses are capable of. This matches the spec sheets – a maximum reproduction ratio of 0.38x for the 100-400 vs 0.2 for the 80-400 & 150-600.

The 150-600 is the worst by far, for sharpness on the sensor as well as magnification – not only do you have to zoom in to “600” to get similar magnification as the 80-400 does at “400”, but both are basically at something more like 200 if not less.

In fact to my eyes it appears that there’s nothing but empty magnification in going from 400 to 600 on the 150-600.

Sidenote: Real-world benefits of closer focusing distances

In real-world use I’ve only occasionally felt the 80-400’s ~6ft MFD was a problem. Sure, sometimes my subject would be too close and/or small, but there’s practical challenges with getting physically closer to a lot of subjects (e.g. skittish wildlife), and for really small subjects I’d be inclined to switch to a macro lens anyway.

Plus, the 80-400 compares very favourably to many other zoom telephotos – e.g. the Sigma 150-600 C can only focus down to about 3 metres (~10ft). In theory it offers the same reproduction ratio of 0.2, but in practice I’ve often had problems with my subject being too close for the 150-600. Plus, as you see (above) it sacrifices a lot of image quality to do even that, such that the 80-400 is clearly the superior of the two when maximum magnification is required. Of course, the new 100-400 is way better than either of them.

All of which is to say: I’m impressed and intrigued by what the 100-400 can do in this regard. Almost halving the MFD while giving me 2x more effective magnification is tremendous. I still haven’t had a chance to use it in the real world, but I’m really looking forward to the possibilities – especially for small wildlife like lizards, or flora like flowers, the 100-400 looks like it’s going to be by far the superior option.

Conclusion

😧A surprise upset! I had assumed the 100-400 would be at least as sharp as the 80-400, and of course hoped it’d be even sharper. The 80-400 has always had good sharpness at 400 in my experience, so there wasn’t a lot of room for it to be surpassed. Still, that the 100-400 is much softer (at all but the very closest subject distances) is very disappointing.

The only thing the 100-400 has going for it (so far) is with very close subjects – there, the 100-400 is vastly superior, in large part because it can simply focus much closer while simultaneously retaining more of its nominal 400mm focal length. If you expect your subjects to always be less than ~10ft away, the 100-400 is clearly the better lens.

The 150-600 results surprised me, and may be tending unrepresentative, as they don’t match my real-world experience. I do think the 150-600 is a good lens – and excellent value at a quarter the price of either of the other two – but I’ve found it just doesn’t deliver results quite as good – nor as reliably – as the 80-400, except when you utilise its 50% extra reach. I strongly suspect this is mostly due to differences in image stabilisation – the 80-400 has the best image stabilisation of any lens I’ve ever used, while the 150-600’s image stabilisation is average at best.

Granted, this is only in the centre of the frame. Maybe the 100-400 has redeeming image qualities elsewhere in the frame? A subject for a subsequent post, perhaps.

Nikon Z 100-400 centre performance

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 02:19:28 +0000

Last week my Nikkor Z 100-400 arrived. I’m in principle upgrading from the AF-S 80-400G, which has been my all-time favourite lens (both sentimentally and in terms of the yielding the greatest proportion of my favourite photos).

Of course, it’d be nice to see how those two lenses actually compare – I suppose I could keep using the 80-400 and return the 100-400, if the older lens turns out to be better.

Unfortunately California has decided this “weather” thing it’s never had before is the new hotness, and it’s basically rained non-stop for weeks now. So I haven’t been able to use of the 100-400 for real yet. Luckily, I was able to conscript a wild Stitch to help me do some rudimentary tests, in the interim. That’ll be the subject of this and a couple of subsequent posts.

Meet my model, Stitch. He’s a sexy beast, and he doesn’t mind holding a pose for hours at a time.

The most important thing I want to know about any new lens is how it performs in the centre across various apertures and subject distances. That way I know what it’s capable of in the best case (the centre) and which aperture(s) to favour. So that’s what this first post is about.

Equipment

Nikkor Z 100-400 (e.g. from Amazon).
Nikon Z 7 (e.g. from Amazon).
Neewer 660-LED constant light panels (e.g. from Amazon).
Induro AT-313 (discontinued).
Movo GH800 gimbal tripod head (e.g. from Amazon).
Stitch (from outer space, via Hawaii).

Methodology

I tested five different subject distances:

MFD (minimum focus distance) at 100
MFD at 400
6ft at 400
12ft at 400
30ft at 400

I didn’t measure the actual MFD – all distances above are only approximate anyway, give or take a few inches – but it was something in the vicinity of 3ft, like the specs say. MFD is a bit closer at 100 than 400.

400 is basically the focal length that counts – that’s where this lens will spend the vast majority of its time – thus the inclusion of only one subject distance for 100, nor any intermediary focal lengths.

Stitch was lit (as shown in the photo above) by two Neewer 660-LED panels, set to maximum brightness & running off mains power. Diffusers were not used.

I chose to focus on Stitch’s nose because it has a nice fine-detailed fabric texture, that looked better as a test subject than the low-contrast threading of e.g. his eyes. I also deliberately focused only about a third down on his nose – not in the very centre – so that the centre of the nose, being the closest part to the camera, would be slightly out of focus. That way I could visually confirm that the plane of focus was where I expected and not short of the subject (in the cases where depth of field was so narrow as to matter).

I focused wide open using AF-C single-point (centred). I used a five second delayed shutter release, with pure electronic shutter (“Silent” mode). I did have to touch the camera between exposures, in order to adjust the aperture and press the shutter button, and this is why in some cases images are misaligned by a few pixels.

I used a fixed ISO of 64 in aperture-priority mode, letting the camera maintain constant exposure by varying the shutter speed (which ranged from 1/25 – 1/100). I did not normalise exposure in post – any variation you see in the images could be due to:

Differences in metering based on differing fields of view.
Error / inaccuracy in exposure by the camera.

Image stabilisation was disabled.

All the images you see embedded in this post are JPEGs with the quality set to 100%, as rendered from the raws by Lightroom Classic.

The crops are all from the exact centre, and are 1024 square.

All images were recorded as 14-bit lossless NEFs, and imported into Lightroom Classic with no modifications other than:

Reducing the exposure by 0.75 stops. I exposed-to-the-right to maximise image quality.
Setting the white balance to 4,500 with no tint. I left the camera on auto white-balance; I could have specified it as some fixed value in-camera, but I knew I could standardise it in post.

This also means that any built-in lens corrections, whether by the camera or Lightroom Classic, were performed. I left all those at factory settings, and I see no purpose in mucking with them since I – like most people – don’t muck with them in real-world use.

Lightroom Classic nominally applied some sharpening & noise reduction, per its defaults, but the settings were the same for all images (40/1.0/25/0 sharpening, 0/-/-/25/50/50 noise reduction).

Finally, I’ve provided the images for every aperture in a carousel, but also an A | B comparison of wide open vs what I feel is the most interesting juxtaposition (usually the sharpest aperture, though not always).

30ft @ 400

f/5.6

f/6.3

f/7.1

f/8

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Almost no change across the apertures. This is either an excellent result or a terrible result, depending on whether it means it’s sharp from wide open or never gets sharp. That’s best judged by comparing it to other lenses – a task for a subsequent post.

There’s a very slight softening starting at f/7.1 (vs f/6.3 or wider), that’s slightly more pronounced – but still very minor – at f/8. This is most likely diffraction softening and as such is expected. On the 46 MP Z7 diffraction becomes the limiting factor in acuity beyond about f/6.3 (in theory).

12ft @ 400

f/5.6

f/6.3

f/7.1

f/8

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It’s very slightly softer wide open, at f/5.6, than at f/6.3 or narrower. It’s less clear if diffraction has kicked in (as the limiting factor) by f/8 – to my eyes there’s very little difference between f/6.3, f/7.1, and f/8.

6ft @ 400

f/5.6

f/6.3

f/7.1

f/8

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Perceived sharpness increases significantly from f/5.6 to f/6.3, and then only very slightly more up to f/8.

However, I don’t see any change in actual resolution – it’s entirely just about contrast. Careful post-processing re. micro-contrast might significantly reduce if not eliminate the difference in perceived sharpness.

MFD @ 400

f/5.6

f/6.3

f/7.1

f/8

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Perceived sharpness improves significantly, steadily, all the way up to f/8 (which is as far as I tested).

As at 6ft, I don’t see any change in actual resolution – it’s entirely just about contrast.

MFD @ 100

f/4.5

f/5

f/5.6

f/6.3

f/7.1

f/8

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Perceived sharpness increases significantly between f/4.5 (wide open) and about f/6.3. After that there’s no meaningful change.

Interestingly, unlike at 400 some portion of the perceived sharpness difference appears to be due to actual resolution differences, not just contrast. So this is the only case in any of the tests I’ve done here where stopping down might be strictly necessary for maximum possible sharpness.

Conclusion

I can’t really compare across focal lengths, because the subject changed size (in the frame). It seems to me that the achievable acuity is pretty good, and pretty similar, at all focal lengths.

There was a clear trend w.r.t. subject distance and wide-open performance, i.e. as the distance gets shorter, wide open becomes softer in comparison to narrower apertures. Thus the optimal aperture is (in my opinion):

MFD:
- 100: f/6.3 (-1 stop)
- 400: f/7.1 (-⅔ stop)
6ft: f/6.3 (-⅓ stop)
12ft: f/5.6 (wide open)
30ft: f/5.6 (wide open)

In some cases you do technically get slight improvements in perceived sharpness by stopping down further, but if you have to do so by raising ISO then it is definitely not worth it – the additional noise will outweigh the benefits.

Keep in mind, also, that at 400mm even when there was a difference in perceived sharpness, it was basically only due to changes in contrast. As such, in theory it can be fully compensated for in post-processing with e.g. micro-contrast adjustments. So I definitely wouldn’t stress if I forgot to stop down when my subject came super close.

It’d be great if wide open wasn’t slightly softer-looking at close distances, but as just noted the difference is largely correctable in post. More importantly, at most distances wide open is basically as sharp as any narrower aperture.

In a nutshell, this is an excellent result overall. At most subject distances, at 400, the only reason to stop down is if you actually want increased depth of field.

That all said, the real test is how the 100-400 compares against some of its competitors…

Truly deleting ‘removed’ files from Lightroom

Sun, 10 Mar 2019 17:29:06 +0000

When you tell Lightroom to deleted rejected photos, it pops up a dangerous dialog box:

Though it does explain itself well – i.e. if you want to actually delete the photos, you need to click “Delete from Disk” – the default option is that misleading “Remove” button, which doesn’t really remove the files at all – it merely makes Lightroom lose track of them. They’ll still be there on disk, wasting space forever.

And, you can’t directly undo this operation, so if you hit return a little too quickly, or misread the dialog at any point, you’re seemingly pretty screwed (if you have a Lightroom catalog of any significant size).

Luckily, there is a way to find these undead files – that doesn’t require you walking through every single file on disk one by one & comparing against Lightroom’s view of the world.

1In the left-side panel, under the “Folders” section, select all the folders and right-click on them (if you have multiple volumes listed under “Folders”, you’ll have to do this one volume at a time as Lightroom won’t let you select folders across multiple volumes simultaneously). You’ll get a contextual menu:

2Click “Synchronize Folder…”. A dialog will appear:

You probably want to uncheck “Remove missing photos from catalog” (if it’s not already disabled) and “Scan for metadata updates”, as those are unrelated to the purpose here and have their own ramifications. Instead, just select “Import new photos” and “Show import dialog before importing”. Then, click “Synchronize”.

3Lightroom’s standard import dialog will now appear, and will slowly sort through all the files in the folder(s) you selected, filtering them down to just those that exist on disk yet are not tracked in Lightroom – e.g. all those rejects you accidentally “Removed” but didn’t really remove previously. You can now review those and see what you’ve got – it’s possible you’ll find in there media you didn’t intend to delete, but rather were somehow misplaced by Lightroom at some point.

You might want to, in the import dialog, change your preview generation setting to ‘Minimal’ in order to minimise import time & wasted preview generation. You could also choose to add some keywords to the imports, e.g. “to be deleted” or “recovered” or “undead”, if you’re not going to just immediately delete them anyway.

In any case, you can now import some or all the undead files. Importing them might seem counter-productive, since the goal here is to delete them – but it’s necessary for the final step…

4Once they’re imported, you can now immediately mark them as rejects and delete all rejects again – this time correctly choosing “Removing from Disk”.

So while it’s a bit roundabout, it does get the job done pretty quickly and easily. Now if only Lightroom would fix that stupid dialog to make the default option the one that actually does what you told Lightroom to do to begin with. 🙄

Sigma lens compatibility with the Nikon Z7

Sat, 27 Oct 2018 02:27:31 +0000

Sigma just released an updated Z7 compatibility study, which thankfully is mostly just “everything works as it should”, though there four exceptions, and one which is pertinent to me:

50mm F1.4 DG HSM | Art: When starting to shoot with the subject completely out of focus, the response to the AF operation is intermittent. It is necessary to release several times or to turn the focus ring once to release. It is planned to be resolved by a firmware update.

I have seen what might be that issue, but I’ve also seen the same symptoms with the kit 24-70/4, and Nikon’s own F-mount lenses, so, I’m curious what the distinction is between the Nikon Z7’s general autofocus issue of this nature, and this specific issue that’s supposedly only applicable to the Sigma 50/1.4 Art.

Nikon Z7 second impressions

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 06:00:53 +0000

I’ve had much more time, since my first impressions posts, to use the Z7. I’ve used it for studio portraiture, wildlife (albeit at zoos mostly), hiking, around the house (kittens for teh win!), and more. A pretty wide range of scenarios. The scenarios I haven’t yet explored with it, but really want to soon, are timelapse & astrophotography (the latter requiring lenses I don’t currently have).

So without further ado, here are my findings thus far, and current opinion of the Z7:

Autofocus is just plain bad

Even in good light it’s unreliable. The nature of the unreliability is different to Nikon’s DSLRs, where the main problems are those intrinsic to DSLR designs with an off-sensor autofocus system, e.g. systematic back- or front-focus, inconsistent accuracy across the frame, etc. On the Z7, none of those appear to be issues, but instead they’re replaced with:

Atrocious performance relative to light levels, as I’ve covered previously. This isn’t just about “low”-light use – even in broad daylight, in direct sunlight, it can still struggle on low-contrast or backlit subjects, even with very high quality f/1.4 lenses.
Poor reliability, in that some photos will be wildly out of focus for absolutely no apparent reason, despite most others in a series being relatively fine. This really screwed me on a (well-lit) portrait shoot recently, when I later discovered that quite a number of photos were utterly out of focus and were effectively lost. In most such cases, absolutely nothing in the frame was in focus – typically the camera had front-focused wildly, well in front of anything visible in the frame. In other scenarios, I’ve seen it similarly back-focus to infinity for no apparent reason.
Inability to tell, through the EVF, if a photo is even vaguely correctly focused or not. The EVF gives a false impression of sharpness by its nature, so a lot of the time what appears to be in sharp focus through it is in fact unusably out of focus in reality (especially with the fairly demanding resolution of the Z7, wide apertures, and/or close subjects – such as in portraits).
The overly large AF regions (especially in video mode) often encompass more than just the subject of interest, and the Z7 seems to frequently favour the furthest object within the AF region, not the closest as is typical in every other camera I’ve ever used (and makes much more sense in almost all scenarios).

Beyond issues of correctness, there’s the numerous usability issues that have been raised by myself & others, such as the inability to map different AF modes to different buttons, the awkwardness involved in using subject tracking, etc. I’m still holding onto hope that Nikon will at least fix those flaws in a firmware update.

Viewfinder zoom is sluggish & not available in video mode

It took me a while to put my finger on what felt so awkward about the zoom-in mode that EVFs allow for, and almost all implement – Z7 included. It wasn’t until I happened upon someone else pointing out the obvious that I saw it clearly too – there’s huge lag in the viewfinder image when zoom is engaged. It makes it very difficult to keep up with a moving subject, or even just the movement of the camera itself (most pronounced with macro work). It also makes it a little bit more difficult to manually focus, or at least to do so quickly, since the feedback cycle is so long.

Unfortunately, zoom isn’t available at all in video mode, which is a shame.

Hard lock-ups

The camera itself is surprisingly buggy. It frequently locks up, sometimes with an error message like that shown above, but sometimes just in whatever state it happened to be at the time. Sometimes using the on/off switch actually works, but sometimes that switch does absolutely nothing and you have to pull the battery to hard reset the camera.

This is frustrating, as you’d imagine, and I can say from first hand experience is very uncomfortable & embarrassing when you’re stuck furtively trying to get your camera to work at all in front of a group of expectant portrait subjects in a professional setting.

Note: Nikon did just today release 1.0.1 firmware which fixes one lock-up problem, but the patch note’s description of the symptoms don’t match mine, or at least are only a subset of the scenarios in which I’ve seen this issue. I’ll of course apply that update, and we’ll see if the problem persists.

Charging problems?

I do enjoy being able to just plug the camera into a USB-C charger and not bother with removing the battery and finding the power plug charger etc. It also makes it much less likely I’ll find myself on site with a camera containing no battery, such as if I grab the camera in a rush out the door.

However, one time (thus far) when I had left the camera charging overnight, I grabbed it the next day to find it had only 23% battery left. It apparently didn’t charge at all. I have no idea why – it was correctly plugged in. There is a tiny LED charging light on the side of the camera, above the USB-C socket, which evidently must be scrutinised frequently to ensure charging is actually occurring – but I don’t know if it never started charging, or did but then stopped, or what.

XQD availability is a real issue

I got to drive an extra 90 minutes back home & back out last weekend, because I forgot the one XQD card I own was in the card reader attached to my computer – doh! – something that could have been likely avoided had Nikon U.S.A. included an XQD card in the box, as was done everywhere else on the planet. 😒

The reason this is practically unique to the Z7 is because it only supports XQD cards, not also SD, which is a big problem because:

XQD cards are insanely expensive (and getting more expensive over time), and therefore most people (myself included) cannot afford to have lots of them. In contrast, I have about 30 SD cards, which cost me very little all-told, and which practically-speaking means I have them everywhere, so even if I forget one in a card reader, I can invariably find numerous others wherever I am. In ~six years of DSLR photography I don’t recall ever being without a usable SD card (though I certainly recall leaving some at home by accident many times).
XQD cards are sold almost nowhere – it’s almost always impossible to buy them on the fly, currently. If I got on a plane without my one XQD card, I’d probably be screwed for the whole trip, depending on where I go – at best I could hope that Amazon or B&H or Adorama can deliver to wherever I’m travelling, but that might take days if not a week. Not that I like the insane prices tourist traps charge for ancient 8 GiB SD cards, but at least they’re there in a real pinch.

VR problems?

The electronic shutter occasionally interacts very badly with the 70-200 VR II (if not other lenses – I’ve only used a couple heavily on the Z7 thus far, and only sometimes in scenarios where this problem would manifest clearly).

It’s very weird – there will be one or more horizontal bands of significant motion-blur across the image, which looks to me like the VR system failing (or otherwise misbehaving) for only parts of the exposure (a hypothesis supported by the fact that often you can see the characteristic “double exposure” of an abrupt VR movement).

I’m guessing this happens predominately, if not exclusively, when using electronic shutters, given the relatively slow sensor scanning rate & that I’ve only seen it thus far in that shutter mode.

It’s quite frustrating not just because of what it is, but because there’s no way to tell it’s happening at the time (short of rigorous chimping) and it seems to persist for a significant stretch of time when it occurs, ruining long sequences of photos at a time.

Alas I don’t have any example photos yet that I’m at liberty to share, but I’ll try to remember to do so when the opportunity presents itself.

It could also be a fault with my 70-200 VR II. It was acquired second-hand, and there’s hints it was “well loved” previously. Nonetheless, I’ve never seen this phenomenon with that lens on a D500.

Battery life is solid

I was never really worried about battery life, given CIPA ratings are famously non-representative of any real world usage. In practice I’ve found it to not be an issue – I can easily get at least a thousand photos out of it per battery, even with heavy EVF use. Granted that’s not the 4,000 – 5,000 the D500 would manage, but it’s still enough for me most of the time. Only once did I have to swap batteries during the day (though I do feel compelled to typically carry a spare anyway, so I guess it’s not completely trustworthy in that respect).

Auto-transmission to a Mac is nice

It’s finicky to get set up, and to re-connect each time you want to use it for a session, and it never auto-reconnects such as after you’ve walked out of the room for a moment… but nonetheless I’ve found the feature to be pretty interesting and nice to have. I guess it’s been available on many Nikon DSLR’s previously, but I believe only with the ludicrously expensive Nikon wireless transmitter dongle.

Transfer speeds are obnoxiously slow – it takes several seconds for a JPEG even, let-alone the ~30 seconds for a single NEF – but in my limited use so far it does seem to at least plod along reliably. If you’re photographing rapidly, it can’t possibly keep up, but for relatively slow-paced use (e.g. studio work) it’s mostly fine.

Given the slow transfer speeds, I wouldn’t try to use it for on-the-spot image review – cabled tethering is still necessary for that. What it is perfectly suited to is periodic review during a photo session, during breaks or whatever intervals you can sneak in.

Overall it’s much faster & more reliable than SnapBridge, too, which ostensibly could do the same thing – albeit only with hand-held devices rather than real computers – but in practice has always proven unreliable (and is even harder to get working at all to begin with).

Image quality is impressive

I know on paper the Z7 isn’t the king of low-light photography vs its peers, like the Sony a7R II or III. But I know that I’ve used the a7R II, and while it also has impressively low noise, the Z7 seems even better.

With the D500, I’d typically try very hard to keep it as ISO 100, or otherwise as low as possible – even if that means having to take literally 50 photos just to get one without serious motion blur. Even at ISO 100, the D500 has very visible noise and requires substantial post-processing if you want to get a silky-smooth look.

The Z7 doesn’t. ISO 64 looks amazing w.r.t. noise, and even climbing up through the ISO hundreds I rarely feel the need to do any noise reduction. It’s not until you get into the ISO thousands, or (especially) tens of thousands, that noise reduction really becomes necessary.

In short the image quality overall, particularly w.r.t. noise, is way better vs Nikon’s DX DSLRs than it should be. Many stops better. I don’t understand how, but I’ve long noticed that photos from FX sensors seemed unusually sharp, at the pixel level, vs DX (and smaller) sensors. I’d most often presumed it was just some careful post-processing. Now, I wonder if the Z7 – perhaps intrinsic to its high-end FX nature and thus shared with the D850 & predecessors – is fundamentally substantially sharper at the pixel level, irrespective of resolution differences, than DX sensors, even those with very similarly sized pixels (e.g. the D500, at 4.22µm, vs the D850 / Z7 at 4.35µm).

Enabling flash support can be surprisingly tricky

There’s quite a few settings on the Z7, vs Nikon’s DSLRs or at least the D500 and predecessors, that preclude using flash. e.g. using fully electronic shutters, or H+ release mode, etc. There’s always been a couple of settings, on Nikon’s DSLRs, that would prevent the use of flash, but the Z7 exacerbates the problem – which is mostly just confusion. I expect in time I’ll get more familiar with this and better at relatively quickly going through the menus & switching all the things that need switching in order to permit use of flash – or if I were smart I’d just program one of the User modes for this purpose – but I felt it’s worth noting. When I attached a flash the other day, having not used one with the Z7 for a couple of weeks, it (embarrassingly) took me nearly twenty minutes to find all the settings I had to change in order to get flash to work. In fact I thought my flashes were broken, at first.

Mostly this is just reality, and not a bug or design flaw per se, but there is one failure on Nikon’s part in this – they provide absolutely no information on why flash is disabled. If I could at least tap on the greyed-out flash button and have it explain why flash was unavailable, I’d be able to very quickly rectify the situation. Instead, I have to maintain a mental checklist of all the settings I need to check, to ensure they’re set to something flash-compatible.

It’s very easy to take too many photos

I keep getting surprised when I import my photos at the end of the day, and discover I took a lot more than I thought. Despite coming from a D500 with a faster continuous shooting rate.

I’m not sure why this is, but I suspect it’s because of the completely silent operation of the camera – the loud thuds & snaps of a D500 mirror & shutters makes it very clear, including to everyone around you, that you’re taking photos. The Z7’s silence, I think, leads to a false sense of calm and inaction. 😆

I’m very much enjoying the silent operation – after some initial teething pains with artificial lighting and banding, which I’m happy to say is fairly easily & fairly effectively rectified by sticking to roughly integer multiples of the illumination frequency (typically 60Hz in the U.S., which is convenient because 1/60 & 1/125 are good shutter speeds for event photography, which is usually where both lighting is artificial and silence is golden).

Lightroom really struggles with Z7 NEFs

Lightroom’s never been mistaken for a fast application by any means, but with the Z7’s NEF files (compared to ≤24 MP ones of various Nikon DSLRs) it’s particularly slow. Just moving between adjacent images in single-image view takes almost exactly six seconds to load every image, every time. From an SSD.

Worse, it seems to not support Z7 NEFs properly. It’s hard to put my finger on what’s going on precisely, but lots of things are just weird:

Various Develop module settings are arbitrarily (and somewhat randomly) set to non-zero values by default, which I’ve never seen with any other camera’s photos before, and can’t find any way to prevent happening (nor any obvious rhyme or reason as to which settings are set & to what values, for any given photo).
The camera & lens profile support seems broken, or something… e.g. it seems to be unable to identify what lens profile to use, for lens corrections. You can still specify the profile to use manually, and lens corrections seem to work still, but it’s laborious to have to dig through the pop-up menus for every photo. Plus, Lightroom claims, for every single photo irrespective of camera settings, that the “built-in” lens profile has been applied. I don’t know what that means, but distortion & vignetting are definitely not being corrected by default, with any lenses.
White balance is interpreted incorrectly. What Lightroom calls “As shot” isn’t, not even close. e.g. when set to “Flash” in-camera, which should be something around 5200K and neutral in green/magenta, it’s interpreted by Lightroom as 6000K and 22 towards green. The result is the wrong – and a rather peculiar looking – white-balance under flash. Manually correcting it to 5200K & 0 green results in a white balance much closer to correct and the in-camera JPEGs.

FTZ adaptor hates tripods, straps, and harnesses

Sun, 21 Oct 2018 02:13:14 +0000

The FTZ adaptor has a surprising and very frustrating design flaw – it’s impossible to mount it to the camera body when you have almost any kind of mounting plate, strap, or harness (e.g. Cotton Carrier) mount point attached to the camera body. This is because the FTZ has a big fat foot, as can be seen in the above photo, which sticks down well below the bottom of the camera body. Furthermore, the camera body’s tripod socket is very close to the front edge of the body – and thus the FTZ’s foot. Anything you attach to the camera body’s tripod socket tends to stick out from the front of the camera’s body – a lot. The FTZ’s fat foot collides with that, and makes it impossible to use both at the same time.

I suppose nominally you’re never supposed to use the camera body’s tripod mount when you have the FTZ attached, but that’s naive – if you’re going back and forth between native to adapted lenses, you’re not going to be constantly removing & reattaching things to tripod sockets. At most you’d want to have the same widget in both the camera body’s and the FTZ’s tripod sockets, so that you always have one available irrespective of what lens you have attached.

I miss companies that gave some thought to having all their products work well together (this is just the latest example I’ve noticed in an increasing trend).

Nikon Z7 second first impressions

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:05:12 +0000

Having spent a week or so using the Z7 – though still not as much as I’d like, given the continued need to work for a living – I have some further thoughts, beyond / expanding upon my very first impressions.

Autofocus

Photo mode

Autofocus is a problem.

It is very clear that the Z7’s AF system is not in the same league as the Advanced Multi-CAM 20K system in the D500, D5, & D850. I’m increasingly concerned that it doesn’t even match up to the much older 51-AF-point systems used in much older DSLRs going way back to the 11-year-old D300.

As I immediately noticed from the moment I turned the camera on, it has big problems in anything approaching low light, especially with the slow (f/4) kit lens. Not just night photography low light, but indoor lighting low light. e.g. under 250W-equivalent LED ceiling lights, in a small room, shooting at ISO ~800, it struggles to focus accurately even on high-contrast, stationary subjects.

In fact for a while during my testing it back-focused to infinity, vs my subject 2 metres in front of me, and consistently kept focus there for a dozen photos, despite having AF-C engaged continuously, in single-point AF mode, with that point on my subject.

[Edit: DPReview also saw the exact same behaviour, in all respects.]

In bright light – e.g. direct sun – it seems to do fine, but then so does any camera from the last fifty years.

Another very concerning and frankly infuriating behaviour is that it simply won’t even try to focus if the subject is significantly out of focus to begin with. Every other camera I’ve ever used in my life would at least resort to racking the focus plane back and forth, but the Z7 simply will not do anything. You have to use manual focus override to bring the subject closer to being in focus, before the Z7’s autofocus system will even bother engaging. This is mind-bogglingly stupid – and a real problem if you remapped the ‘function ring’ on your lens to a function other than focus (e.g. aperture control).

Thus far in my initial experiments using the FTZ mount adapter and the Sigma 50/1.4 Art – where you’d think the huge increase in maximum aperture might alleviate some of the AF sensitivity problems – I’ve been disappointed. The much wider aperture seems to help a little bit, but not enough to make the AF system feel up to the Nikon name – nor the price tag for the Z7. (and yes, this is photographing wide-open – I’m well aware that the Z7 will stop the lens down to the shooting aperture during autofocus (down to a limit of f/5.6), unlike Nikon’s DSLR)

Next to consider are the AF modes, and AF tracking. For background, frankly I never found 3D Tracking in Nikon’s DSLRs to be very good – it’s very easily confused and will usually fail to track even the most clearly distinguished subjects. I have & do use it occasionally, but about the only scenario where I’ve found it consistently usable is birds in flight against a flat sky – at which point it doesn’t actually perform any better than Auto mode, really, since it’s merely focusing on the only thing in the frame that it can.

Put simply, the Z7 has some dumb – baffling – user interface flaws around its AF modes, the most egregious being that:

You cannot configure different physical buttons to engage different AF modes. My D500, for example, has the AF joystick configured so that pressing it engages single-point AF, while the dedicated AF-ON button engages a different mode (e.g. 3D Tracking, one of the dXX modes, or Group mode). You cannot do anything like this on the Z7, which is a bizarre regression and a serious problem not just for its own sake, but also because it compounds many of the Z7’s other flaws, below.
Face detection only works in Auto mode, and Auto mode continues (as with all prior Nikon cameras, and digital cameras in general) to be useless in most situations because it is utterly incompetent about determining your intended subject. It’s also incredibly sticky once it’s focused on something – face or otherwise. You actually have to move whatever it’s stuck on out of the frame entirely, re-engage AF, and hope it picks something better. I really wanted to use face detection, but repeatedly I find myself rushing to switch to single-point AF mode in order to get the shot that Auto mode is blocking. So while face detection itself is useful, and I’d like to use it more, the problem is that it’s rarely the only AF mode I need in any given situation, and Auto is basically never a useful AF mode. Given the inexplicable inability to configure different buttons to engage different AF modes, you’re stuck with this awkward choice of being able to conveniently focus on faces – but only faces, and only when it works, which is only sometimes – or do it all ‘manually’ with single-point AF mode. Or try to frantically switch back and forth between the two modes constantly, which I found to be impractically slow (and dangerously reminiscent of entry-level consumer DSLRs where basic functionality is buried in menus).
Face detection struggles in the presence of multiple faces. It makes strange choices about which face to default to, and switching between faces is basically a losing game of whack-a-mole – first you have to wait for it to recognise the face you want at all, then select it before it loses it again, all the while doing your best to guess which ‘direction’ the face you want is from the current one – you can only use the left & right buttons of the d-pad, even if the faces are arranged vertically, and the movement direction isn’t even consistent. e.g. several times I hit left and it jumped to a face to the right of the previously selected one.
The ‘tracking’ AF mode is a sub-mode of Auto mode, and frankly I find it a bit confusing to use as a result since you have to remember which of three states you’re in (normal Auto, tracking point placement, or tracking active) and use a variety of buttons to move between these states. It’s not quite as slow to engage as I feared from reading early reviews, and thus far it seems markedly superior to 3D Tracking in terms of actually tracking the subject, but the bad user interface really discourages its use.

The baffling thing in all this is why Nikon just didn’t do the incredibly obvious thing that they’ve basically already established with their pro DSLRs, i.e. have a dedicated AF mode – ideally the default – where you place the AF point wherever you like, position it over your subject, and hit AF-ON to start tracking, and continue tracking until you release AF-ON. Nothing could be simpler, and Nikon’s DSLRs have done this for over a decade. The lack of a sensible AF interface is an inscrutable, unforced error, which makes me genuinely question who designed the Z7, and whether they’d ever used a camera before.

Video mode

One of the main attractions to me of the Z7 over all Nikon’s DSLRs is the expected improvement in video capability. By all rights the Z7 should be dramatically superior to any DSLR, for video, even if only because it can finally do phase-detection autofocus in video mode.

Instead it’s a mixed bag.

The ability to do full-sensor-width UHD, rather than the severely cropped UHD of the D500, is very nice, and while I haven’t yet had occasion to do very wide angle video, I know when I do I’ll be very happy to actually be able to do it (even a 10mm lens on the D500 doesn’t give you an ultra-wide UHD video frame, because of the severe cropping).

Being able to use the viewfinder while recording video is a big improvement for general usability, and also stability – having that third point of contact, and your arms in closer to your body’s centre, make for a much more stable camera hold. It’s also correspondingly easier to record for long periods, since it’s an overall much more comfortable position.

Unfortunately, all of that is really undermined by the AF problems. Just as with photo mode, of course, AF in video mode struggles in anything even vaguely reminiscent of low light. And in video recording you just can’t have certain behaviours, like racking focus back & forth searching for correct focus. Alas, the Z7 does that constantly. Its video AF performance seems very similar to the purely contrast-detection based implementations in Nikon’s DSLRs. It’s basically unusable, in my experience so far… maybe in bright daylight it’ll prove more reliable – I have not yet had the opportunity to test it in such circumstances.

So for now video mode remains predominately manual focus, which is a huge disappointment.

Manual focus

Thankfully the manual focus story is much better than the auto one. The ability to digitally ‘zoom’ in the viewfinder, at the press of a button (configurable, of course), is extremely helpful for manual focusing (and verifying accurate autofocus). It’s the single most important focus feature in the camera, by far.

Focus peaking should be very helpful, but in practice I’ve found it to be inexplicably difficult to engage to begin with, and even then it doesn’t work well in many situations – e.g. it doesn’t work at all at high ISOs. While I did ultimately discover that if you switch the lens into manual focus mode, focus peaking enables persistently, it’s frustrating to basically be coerced out of AF entirely – given that when you’re not in complete manual-focus mode, getting focus peaking to show up requires holding down AF-ON (or similar), and moving the focus ring far enough to trigger peaking. It doesn’t sound like much, and maybe it’ll become more natural with practice, but right now it’s an awkward combination of actions. It’s baffling to me that focus peaking, when enabled, isn’t simply enabled – it shouldn’t require holding down extra buttons and jumping through hoops.

The 24-70/4 ‘function ring’ is definitely different for manual focus. It’s noticeably sloppy compared with the auto-clutched AF rings typical of Nikon’s DSLR lenses – meaning, primarily, that you have to turn it a noticeable amount before it engages at all (though this pick-up ‘slop’ has always varied between lenses, and the 24-70/4 isn’t necessarily worse than all prior ones). I’m also finding it difficult, so far, to get it to move the focus plane consistent amounts – presumably attributable to the ‘acceleration’ behaviour it has, whereby the speed at which you move the ring apparently affects the magnitude of focus plane movement. I do expect that I’ll get used to that in time, just as I did when acceleration was introduced to computer mice many years ago. For now though it makes manual focus adjustment a tad more difficult than I’m used to. It also remains to be seen how consistent the implementation is – if you’ve ever used a cheap computer mouse vs a high quality one, you’ll know the subtle difference in accuracy & precision.

Ergonomics

Size, weight, & balance

With a small lens (e.g. the 24-70/4 kit lens) it’s overall not too bad, though the small size – particularly of the grip – makes it noticeably less comfortable to use than a D500, D850, or D5. With a larger lens – e.g. a 70-200/2.8, it’s actually less of a problem, since the whole setup is much more front-heavy, putting the majority of the weight on your lens hand, so the smaller, dainty grip is less of a concern. Nonetheless the controls – shutter, ISO button, exposure compensation, etc – do feel very cramped, though this is odd as they don’t appear, visually, to be packed any more densely than on the D500.

Control placement

The placement of the exposure compensation button is different to Nikon’s DSLRs, and is in a pretty awkward spot – it’s now much too close to the right edge of the camera. I frequently hit the ISO button by mistake as my pointer finger searches in vain for the exposure compensation button, starting with where it used to be on all prior Nikon DSLRs. Presumably I’ll get used to this in time, but it’s a strange and seemingly unnecessary change that simply makes the exposure compensation button harder to reach.

Similarly the placement of the d-pad on the back of the camera is very awkward – it’s basically impossible to use comfortably or quickly with a normal hand-hold, requiring you to move your hand off of the grip somewhat in order to be able to reach the d-pad with your thumb, and move your face away (if you use your left eye to the viewfinder) to make room. This is a bit of a hinderance to an otherwise exciting new possibility, given the EVF, of being able to adjust lots of settings quickly without taking your eye from the viewfinder. In practice I find it quicker and safer (for the camera’s sake) to just use the rear LCD as before, as that gets my face out of the way and allows me to move my hand more freely.

Speed

One surprising thing I’ve noticed is that some of the camera’s controls are noticeably laggy. Rotating the control dial, for example, to change aperture, has a very noticeable delay before the aperture actually changes, and the display(s) update. Only a fraction of a second, to be clear. Nonetheless, on Nikon’s DSLRs going back as far as I can remember, there has always been zero perceptible delay for such basic actions as changing the aperture. While it’s not strictly speaking a significant problem, it is a constant reminder in use that the Z7 is sluggish.

In fact, one very noticeable manifestation of that “but I am le tired” feeling the camera conveys is when you put your eye to the viewfinder – if the camera has been idle for long enough (tens of seconds, I think), it takes a couple of seconds for the viewfinder to turn on. I’ve already had several awkward moments where I’ve had people posed in front of me, brought the camera up to my eye, and then had to pause for an uncomfortably long time while I wait for the viewfinder to turn on. It’s not just me that notices this – my subjects notice the delay too, and find it a bit unsettling – like I’m staring at them motionless for an uncomfortable amount of time. I’m presuming this is some overly-aggressive power saving feature, which I wish I could just turn off. (FYI I have the camera configured to viewfinder priority mode, since that’s the only one that makes any sense to me, but I haven’t explored if other modes alleviate this problem).

Info & Display buttons

I basically never used these two buttons any other Nikon DSLR – maybe occasionally in video mode to toggle the display of various things, but otherwise I just had no apparent need, or had better ways to get at the same functionality.

The Display button doesn’t really change from Nikon’s DSLRs – as before it toggles through various display ‘HUD’ modes. As always, I wish I could more precisely configure what’s shown – certain information is only shown in certain modes that otherwise contain heaps of crap I couldn’t care less about, so being able to cherry-pick the exact ‘widgets’ I want to show would be ideal, and eliminate the need for a mode-switching button entirely.

The Info button and associated functionality is something I find myself naturally using on the Z7. It’s unfortunately awkward to use via the touchscreen, as inexplicably you must double-tap everything to get settings to actually apply, which I consistently forget because it’s so unintuitive. Using the d-pad & ok button is much safer, and so I do that, which is fine most of the time.

Being able to configure the contents of the Info panel is of course what makes it much more useful than before. And though the number of items you can place there simultaneously is fixed, and seemingly not many – twelve – I actually find myself searching for useful things to fill the last couple of spots. So thus far I’m pretty happy with it – I don’t mind using it as opposed to dedicated physical buttons, for the most part, though for now I did still find myself occasionally reaching for the AF mode and bracketing physical buttons, that no longer exist.

I also am having a surprisingly hard time remembering that there’s still a release mode physical button, albeit in an awkward location now – I keep going through the Info panel instead, which isn’t really a problem but makes me feel a little silly sometimes.

Image stabilisation

It’s still early for me on image quality – I have a lot of photos taken with the Z7 I haven’t even gone through yet – so I’m not certain how good or bad the in-body image stabilisation is. My impression from chimping is that it’s not all that great, based on significant numbers of camera-motion-blurred photos, but I’m also quite self-aware that I’m coming from (primarily) a 21 MP D500, to this 46 MP Z7, so it’s an intrinsically much more demanding sensor re. motion blur. And the lightness of the Z7 probably isn’t doing it any favours here, either.

Certainly I think it’s fair to say it helps with previously unstabilised lenses, like the Sigma 50/1.4 Art. More testing is needed, though, especially to estimate the degree to which it helps.

One of my pet peeves about the D500 is that it has huge mirror shock. Certain shutter speed ranges – typically ~1/50 to 1/160 – with some lenses are utterly unusable on the D500. I’m optimistic that the Z7 will not suffer from such issues, given its ability to utilise a purely electronic (i.e. no moving parts) mode. I’ve not yet put it through its paces in those specific scenarios, though (e.g. macro photography with the Sigma 105/2.8 is the worst such case with the D500, that I’ve encountered). I know from past experience with mirrorless cameras (e.g. a7r II, GH4) that these shutter speeds don’t have to be verboten.

Image stabilisation in video mode does seem noticeably better than on the D500 (with a VR lens). I haven’t explored it much yet, though.

Image review

One thing I noticed very quickly upon picking up the Z7 is that it has an ugly flickering problem when panning photos in review mode. It’s at its worst when using the d-pad for panning, but also shows up a little bit when using the touch screen to pan too. It’s very distracting, and I don’t understand why it would be doing that, nor how this is considered acceptable by Nikon. I’m hoping it’s some very stupid but fixable bug that can be addressed in a firmware update. No other Nikon camera I’ve ever used had this issue, or anything like it.

Otherwise though it’s just as on any prior Nikon DSLR – scrolling between images is plenty fast, zooming is instantaneous, the touch screen works nicely including pinch-to-zoom & double-tap-to-zoom, etc. It’s a genuine compliment to say that image review continues to work – flickering notwithstanding – as on Nikon’s prior cameras.

Silent mode

I’m a big fan of silent mode. It unfortunately doesn’t always work – under some artificial lights – certainly fluorescents – it’s useless as it results in pronounced, ugly banding. But under better lighting (e.g. LED), or natural light, it has no such issues. The ability to take photos silently is really handy in a lot of situations, and I use silent mode by default even when silence isn’t strictly necessary (in part also motivated by a desire to eliminate sources of motion blur).

I do wish that the camera’s flicker detection feature could be enhanced to provide a warning to you when you’re in silent mode and it suspects banding will occur – a few times I started taking photos only to find out some time later, when I finally checked them on the LCD, that they were ruined by banding. Since it’s not always obvious when it will occur – nor does it necessarily occur consistently – it’s currently something you have to be careful about, currently.

Wifi

The Z7 claims to have a new ability to stream photos as they’re taken to a computer. That would be really handy sometimes. Unfortunately, the Wireless Transmitter Utility software that you need on your Mac, in order to do this, doesn’t work. The installer doesn’t work, more specifically. After clicking through the first few screens, it abruptly says it’s installed, but it isn’t – nothing has been installed.

My guess is that it’s incompatible with the current version of macOS, Mojave. Officially they don’t claim WTU is Mojave-compatible. Mojave has been out in various forms, including public let-alone developer betas – for most of this year already, so there’s zero excuse for Nikon’s software being incompatible at this point – if indeed that is the issue.

Memory card

I do like the XQD format in general – the cards are fast, robust, & reliable. Unfortunately right now they’re also the most expensive they’ve basically ever been, despite greater market demand than ever, more manufacturers than ever, the lowest commodity NAND prices in years, and broadening adoption across multiple camera brands. And since Nikon didn’t see fit to include an XQD card with U.S. orders – unlike their actions everywhere else on the planet – I find myself with just one XQD card for now, purchased way back when they weren’t so insanely expensive. And that’s a problem for a camera that can operation at 8 FPS with ~60 MB files. For the first time in pretty much ever, for me, this week I found myself abruptly unable to take any photos because I had no space left on any available memory card (nor any way to get the photos off wirelessly, thanks to SnapBridge’s refusal to transfer raws, and WTU’s inoperability as commented on above).

So that’s unpleasant. It appears for the foreseeable future I’m going to have to live with this problem, and do my best to mitigate it – at least until XQD card prices come down dramatically, to something more sensible. While I don’t really care about the lack of a second slot, the lack of an SD slot is a big problem given where the XQD market is right now.

Also, for the Sony fans that think the a7r III is superior specifically because it has two memory card slots – no, it doesn’t. Only one of those slots supports UHS-II. The other slot is basically useless, given how slow UHS-I is. I have absolutely no use cases where I could reasonably make use of a UHS-I slot, in a 46 MP camera. The Z7’s XQD slot is capable of much higher speeds than UHS-II. Alas only for a king’s ransom, currently.

24-70/4

Nikon (and many reviewers) made kind of a big deal about how small they believe this lens is. It’s a fairly small lens I suppose, though not remotely as tiny as the 18-55s you get with Nikon’s DX DSLRs, despite having a similar focal length & aperture range. It’s not that much smaller, volume-wise, than the 16-80/2.8-4, despite the latter’s much wider focal length range and wider aperture (albeit without full-frame coverage, of course). Maybe that’s an unfair comparison – certainly I’m more familiar with DX lenses in this focal range, than FX ones. I don’t know how it compares with 24-105/4 or 24-120/4 kit lenses of yesteryear.

Regardless, I’m not impressed by its size at all. Not that I think it’s too big – I’d actually much prefer it be bigger and have a better focal length range (e.g. 24-120), or a bigger aperture (e.g. f/2.8). I’m interested to see the Z-mount 24-70/2.8 next year.

I can’t comment on its optical quality yet – I haven’t reviewed enough photos. Certainly it’s a big net win over my D500 with pretty much any lens, in terms of sharpness, though the massive sensor resolution difference is presumably the biggest factor in that.

Its weather sealing seems pretty poor – I seem to recall Nikon asserting that it has pretty good weather sealing, yet within seconds of its first use, cat hair was getting inside it through the telescoping barrel. I definitely would not use this lens in a wet, dusty, or hairy environment if I could avoid it.

One small but odd note – the lens hood is surprisingly difficult to attach, whether in use or in inverted stowage mode. The last bit of rotation – to get it to ‘click’ on securely – requires a surprising amount of force, so much so that I’m really worried I’m going to wrench the lens in half. I’ve had a few lenses in the past where this operation required a bit more force than I’d like, but none nearly so bad as this one. It makes me wonder if I’ve got a dud copy of the lens hood, or somesuch.

(it also made me, upon first attempt, spin the hood around about five times look for the latch release button that it must surely have had, given the resistance – kind of like rotating a USB type A plug six times to permute it through the four-dimensional space it exists in, in order to get it to plug in successfully in our three-dimensional space)

Overall opinion so far

I’m not returning the Z7 yet. I actually don’t expect that I will – despite its many shortcomings, I think it’ll still work well for some of my intended uses. I’m definitely not selling my D500 any time soon, though.

I guess the simplest expression of my feelings is to say that: I’m not angry with you Nikon – I’m just disappointed.

The Z7 should have been a tour de force entrance into mirrorless for Nikon, leveraging their class-leading DSLRs to launch an unbeatable mirrorless camera. They seemed to have all the advantages & resources they needed. That they’ve fallen short of that, and produced merely a decent mirrorless camera, is hugely disappointing.

I didn’t even cover some the features that are missing entirely – e.g. sensor shift image stacking.

I’d like to hold onto hope that Nikon will fix a lot of these issues, and add the more glaring missing features, in a future firmware update. They technically could, at least in some cases. However, that would be a dramatic departure from their modus operandi to date. A hugely positive one, for sure – but just as they seem to have not quite known what they were doing in designing the Z7, I fear they also don’t really know what they’re doing with their firmware strategy.

FWIW, here’s my bug fix / feature enhancement list, roughly in descending order of importance:

Fix the AF system so it actually works.
Fix the AF interface to not be so hard to use.
Fix video focus so that it works well, and doesn’t imitate a mediocre contrast-based system.
Fix the unusually long delay in the viewfinder turning on.
Fix focus peaking so that it’s actually enabled when it’s enabled.
Support clipping warnings (zebra stripes) in photo mode.
Fix the flickering in picture review during panning.
Warn about banding in silent mode shooting under flickering lights.
Reconsider control placement, and the general size of the grip re. its current diminutive stature.
Fix the control lag.
Fix SnapBridge to support NEFs.
Make the Wireless Transmitter Utility actually work.
Customisable Display modes.

These are of course just limited to basically fixing the obvious shortcomings & bugs the Z7 currently has – it’s a much longer list if we incorporate ‘wishlist’ items like leading-edge video capabilities (8-bit H.264 video, in 2018? Come on…).

Nikon Z7 very first impressions

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 16:32:33 +0000

This is in the context of coming from a D500 (and a number of DX DSLRs prior to that), and is based only on the first hour or so of using it.

No XQD card included in the U.S.A. This is disappointing, since it appears that every other country on the planet is getting XQD cards included in theirs, to a value of ~$150USD, so it feels a little mean that the U.S.A. is getting screwed. Especially since by all accounts U.S. shipments of the Z7 were delayed by nearly a week compared to most of the rest of the world. It also seems like simply a bad idea on Nikon’s behalf – very few people will have an XQD card already (luckily I have one and only one, from my D500), so Nikon’s running a real risk that a lot of people will open their new shiny only to realise that there’s no memory card they can use in it, and acquiring one is going to be hard (local retailers don’t seem to stock them consistently) and very expensive (XQD cards are currently selling at all-time high prices, despite there being more brands selling them than ever, and more demand than ever, and commodity NAND flash being at its lowest price in a long time… grrr).
Autofocus really struggles in “low light” (e.g. a well-lit restaurant at night), where the D500 would have no problems at all, using the kit 24-70/4 lens. In fact at first I thought the camera was faulty, because I could not for the life of me get it to take a photo, of anything. Eventually I realised it was defaulting, out of the factory, to Focus-priority, and once I switched to Release-priority it started working. But focus was missed most of the time, usually significantly (e.g. headshots had no part of the head in focus most of the time; at best the ears). This was true irrespective of focus mode. In fairness, the D500 is over-confident in its autofocusing abilities – in similar conditions it would also miss focus in many shots, despite claiming it had quickly acquired focus. Note also that “Low Light AF” makes no apparent difference, neither in autofocus speed, ability, nor accuracy.
It’s a very small camera. It has some density to it, so it doesn’t necessarily feel cheap or plastic, but ergonomically it’s not great. The D500 is a much better camera ergonomically (as is the D850, being a very similar design). The Z7 in principle has an interesting advantage which is the ability to do everything through the viewfinder, but the camera is so small and squished that having your face up against it, to look through the viewfinder, makes it very difficult to use any of the buttons or the D-pad. It’s doable, but it’s awkward and I won’t be making a habit of it. The D500 / D850 / etc are actually much more usable when your eye is at the viewfinder, control-wise.
Button placement is a bit weird. The D500 / D850 / etc have a superior layout – and more buttons. My thumb rests over the ‘Disp’ button by default, not the AF-ON where it should, because the camera is so squished that the ‘Disp’ button – relative to the hand grip & other buttons – is basically where AF-ON is on the D500 / D850 / etc. I hope I’ll get used to it, but it is definitely more awkward to hold the Z7 with your hand on its AF-ON button, because your entire hand and fingers are all relatively far to the right edge of the camera, putting a lot more torque on your grip in order to hold the camera flat.
The function buttons on the lens are actually an improvement over the equivalents on Nikon’s DSLRs – they naturally rest under two of my fingers, more or less, making them easier to use.
The mount diameter is way bigger than the old F-mount. Not that it’s intellectually a surprise, but upon first seeing it in person I was irrationally gleeful.
Image quality vs the D500 in low light appears mixed… even by the most optimistic objective measures the D850 (and by extension Z7) are only about 2/3rds of a stop better than the D500 at ISOs 100 and above (the ISO 64 base does push the advantage to one full stop in principle, vs the D500 at ISO 100). However, given the recent, disappointing revelations from DPReview on the nasty banding exhibited by the Z7, my fear is that the D500 will actually turn out to have better image quality in many situations (i.e. anything with significant dynamic range). This is obviously very disappointing for a very expensive, top-of-the-line, brand new camera with an FX vs DX sensor size advantage.
Contrary to some reporting, and some of Nikon’s own misleading product material, 100fps & 120fps 1080p video is only available from a ~DX crop region.
Focus peaking is very difficult to actually get to work. It took me nearly an hour to figure out how – it only appears if (a) you have AF-ON held down, (b) you move the manual focus ring on the lens a significant distance in order to engage MF override, and (c) you have a lot of light and contrast in the scene. In low light, or scenes with low contrast, it simply doesn’t show any peaking, even on the most sensitive setting, and provides no indication why. This is all very unfortunate, as competing focus peaking systems in every other mirrorless camera I’ve ever used all perform much more reliably, easily, and consistently than the Z7’s system does. e.g. the Sony a7R II’s focus peaking was excellent in practice for ensuring correct focus, whereas my tests so far with the Z7, when it bothers to work at all, have shown that it’s not accurate nor clean enough for me to actually get correct focus most of the time. It’s much faster & more reliable to just engage image zoom and focus without peaking. Also, peaking doesn’t work when zoomed in.
The focus ring on the 24-70/4 is awkwardly placed – it’s way too close to the camera body, which is very thin to begin with, so it feels like you’re picking your nose when you operate it. Even with a light lens like the 24-70/4, holding the lens by the focus ring makes the entire thing very front-heavy. The focus ring is also very thin, making it a bit difficult to find and get a good hold on.
Being able to zoom in, in the viewfinder, is awesome. I’ve used this previously on other mirrorless systems and know from that experience that it’ll be immensely valuable in getting focus correct. It also works pretty intuitively – e.g. it zooms in on the selected focus point, naturally – and can be assigned to most (but bizarrely not all) the configurable buttons for easy toggling.
I miss the Nikon rubber eye-cup add-on I applied to my D500. The Z7’s naked viewfinder, while slightly rubbery, is very hard in comparison, and – being – rectangular & flat – doesn’t fit any human face I’ve ever encountered. No different from most cameras, of course – I just hope Nikon release an equivalent eye-cup for the Z7 soon (though I worry, from looking at the viewfinder assembly, that there’s no apparent way to pull it apart, attach anything to it, etc).
On first use the battery jammed in the battery slot, requiring some shaking and application of fingernails to force it out. Very weird – I’ve never encountered this in many years & many Nikon cameras. It hasn’t done it since… yet.
The box it comes in is surprisingly large given it’s a small camera & lens. Much bigger than the equivalent box for the D500, or any of Nikon’s consumer DSLRs.
The fully electronic (“silent”) shutter is very nice. The D500 is a 5 AM garbage truck in comparison – it has always bothered me using the D500 in any even remotely quiet environment.
Viewfinder blackout is so-so. While I’d seen videos on YouTube demonstrating it in various modes etc, in practice I find it’s much more difficult than I expected to track moving subjects when shooting at anything approaching the maximum frame rate (8 FPS). The D500, despite having significant black-out itself vs the D5, is notably superior than the Z7.
SnapBridge is stupidly hard to get to work – mainly in the initial pairing. It took me multiple tries and about an hour overall to get it to finally pair to my iPhone. It requires an extremely precise, pedantic, and rather long sequence of steps in order to get it to pair, and some of those steps are not documented by Nikon. I vaguely recall it being similarly bad with the D500 when I first got it – thankfully it’s a process that only needs doing once per camera body, in principle.

ProPhoto RGB vs JPEGs

Sat, 27 Jan 2018 19:31:36 +0000

Most common photo editors – e.g. Lightroom – let you choose the colour gamut to use for exported photos. In Lightroom (at time of writing in January 2018) you have a fairly short list, of today’s common options – sRGB, Display P3, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB. Since we’re all obsessive nerds, that we’re given an option dictates that we must make an explicit choice. More pragmatically, the default in Lightroom – and many other photo editors – is sRGB, which is the one option that’s definitively wrong, so in this case you really do have to change it to something else, if you care about image quality at all.

So, what should you choose? Well, obviously you want your exported photos to maintain as much of the colour gamut they contain as possible, and as accurately as possible – as part of the general principle that you want it to be the highest quality and as close to what you see on your screen as possible. Modern digital cameras are capable of capturing far more than the sRGB space, and modern displays are also capable of larger gamuts too (typically Adobe RGB or Display P3, at time of writing, if not the union of both). Thus why sRGB is unequivocally the wrong option (and any purported counter-arguments about colour calibration issues in web browsers and so forth are moot, because all decent web browsers handle colour management correctly & intuitively, and anyone not using one of those browsers clearly doesn’t care about a lot of things, least of all colour accuracy).

So then it’s just a question of which colour space is bigger, right? That’s easy – ProPhoto RGB is huge. A complete superset of all the others. It actually encompasses colours that don’t even exist as far as the average human is concerned, because they’re outside our visual range. So just use that, right?

Yes. Maybe. It depends.

The thing is, if you increase the colour gamut you encode your image in, you reduce the precision of your colours, all other things being equal. Because you’re taking e.g. 8 bits, so 256 possible values, and spreading them out over a wider spectrum. Thus each “bucket” – digitally quantised colour – is going to be bigger, coarser, and have a wider margin of error. What this can mean in practice is visible banding in images which “should” be higher quality, because they have a much bigger colour gamut!

Larger colour gamuts really need correspondingly larger bit depths, in order to avoid sacrificing colour accuracy (or in plain terms, to avoid visible banding or posterisation).

Thus, if you’re exporting as ye ol’ JPEGs (an image format that’s just not very good, though it’s had a good run at over twenty-five years old at this point) where you’re stuck with 8 bits per pixel, it’s probably a bad idea to use ProPhoto RGB. It’s too likely that in practice you’ll see nasty banding. Instead, you’re probably better off striking a compromise and choosing either Display P3 or Adobe RGB, which aren’t so much bigger than sRGB that banding is often more visible, but are fully representable on many contemporary displays. In theory as displays get better – i.e. wider gamuts – you’d want to upgrade, but in reality JPEG should be long dead before we get the next significant jump in real-world display gamuts, and their successor format(s) will undoubtably support much higher bit depths, eliminating this trade-off.

On the other hand, if you’re already exporting in modern formats – e.g. HEIF – where 10-bit (or better) bit depths are supported, you can consider extra large gamuts like ProPhoto RGB (just make sure you then use greater bit depths, as HEIF also supports 8-bit channels, and some software will still default to that). It becomes more of a question of your target audience, your expectations for the longevity of that particular rendering of the photo, etc.

And if you’re using 16-bit colour depths, such as are options for TIFFs or other typical intermediary formats (e.g. when going from Lightroom to Photoshop, or vice-versa), then ProPhoto RGB is the best option, because there are no practical downsides. Today ProPhoto RGB probably far exceeds the colour gamut your camera(s) can actually capture, but that’s okay – your camera(s) can probably capture more than just Adobe RGB or Display P3 too, and with 16 bits per pixel you’ve got plenty of colour resolution, so why sacrifice your camera’s capabilities?

Addendum

This still leaves the choice of Display P3 vs Adobe RGB, for your typical web (etc) exports. I’ve been using Adobe RGB myself for a long time, since that was basically the next step up in displays for the longest time. However, since Apple has delivered Display P3 to the world, Display P3 almost overnight became far more commonly supported in the real world. Remember that any modern iPhone, iPad, or iMac supports Display P3, and most quality standalone PC monitors do also. There’s also an argument to be made that it is a more practical expansion on sRGB, since it increases not just your greens but also your reds:

sRGB vs AdobeRGB vs DCI-P3
(image courtesy of Smeterlink on Stackexchange)

Handbrake’s H.265 ‘Preset’ setting affects ‘constant’ quality

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 00:11:40 +0000

I always consternate over what the ‘Preset’ setting should be when doing H.264 encodes with Handbrake. It’s always tempting to slide right on over to ‘placebo’ to, in theory, ensure you’ve got the best possible encoding. And in my experience that at least roughly works – file size decreases (marginally) as you use more time-consuming encoding Presets, for equivalent quality.

Now that I’m transitioning to H.265 instead, I thought I’d do a ‘quick’ experiment to see how it behaves in comparison, encoding from a ProRes 422 4000×3000 timelapse at constant quality 22. A 270° rotation was performed in the process. No audio.

The result is baffling.

Preset	File size (MiB)	Encode time (Hours)
Placebo	329	16.65
Veryslow	218	3.70
Slower	219	2.75
Slow	183	0.93
Medium	185	0.53
Fast	156	0.36
Faster	155	0.31
Veryfast	155	0.31
Superfast	129	0.23
Ultrafast	83	0.22

The outputs should all be visually essentially identical, by virtue of constant-quality encoding with the same quality factor. However, they are not – there’s a small but quite visible difference in quality, with the slower-encoded versions having progressively more detail retained, while at the other end, the faster encodings, it looks like a strong noise reduction pass has been applied (which isn’t literally what’s happened, I assume, but rather the consequence of a lower-quality encoding).

Regardless of the specifics, this shouldn’t be happening. ‘Constant quality’ seems quite self-explanatory.

Note also how the encoding times go up exponentially – ‘placebo’ was really gruelling, as the equivalent H.264 encode would have been an order of magnitude shorter, and that’s what I’d budgeted my time from.

So I guess the moral of the story is… leave ‘Preset’ on its default value for now, until it stops misbehaving? Choose it based primarily on your encode time constraints, or file size concerns – whichever is highest priority? Frustrating.

Note: I used the Handbrake Nightly build as of mid-November 2017 (version 20171113130119-17a4bb7-master), as the latest released version (1.0.7) produces H.265 files that macOS High Sierra refuses to play. Apparently it’s using a different codec tag – ‘hev1’ instead of ‘hvc1’ – from what Apple’s expecting (see for example this thread). I have no idea which is correct, or maybe both are in some contexts… either way it’s a concern for ongoing H.265 device compatibility.

Lightroom “Classic” doesn’t play well with others

Sat, 21 Oct 2017 16:16:57 +0000

So far the new “Classic” Lightroom looks & feels mostly identical to the prior version(s), which isn’t really a compliment, but could be worse. There’s no apparent performance improvements, that’s for sure, so as expected Adobe’s promises to suddenly learn how to write efficient & performant software, well… at least their marketing department gave it the college try.

One thing I have very quickly discovered, however, is that Lightroom “Classic” deliberately chooses not to perform some functions if it is le tired. Or it thinks your computer is le tired. By which I mean, if there is pretty much anything else running and consuming CPU time (and/or RAM?), it refuses to even attempt some operations. HDR merges is the first one I hit. I was a bit flummoxed by it just happily queuing up a number of HDR merge operations, and them just sitting there in its queue, with no indication of error – just never executing.

Only after I quit or disabled a bunch of other processes – any and all that were using any measurable CPU time – did it finally, about ten seconds later, decide that it was now willing to consider my ‘requests’.

#%@!ing fussy little turd.

It’s worth noting that it’s not the only popular app, on macOS, that does this same bullshit. Time Machine is another big one. At least in Time Machine’s case I can see a more plausible line of reasoning behind it, even if it is misguided – the user’s probably not explicitly waiting for a Time Machine backup to complete. As in, not all the time. Sometimes they are. And they certainly expect backups to happen at all, which on a consistently busy machine simply doesn’t happen. So Time Machine’s reluctance to function on a working machine is still stupid overall. But Lightroom refusing to complete a user initiated, user-interactive, and user-blocking operation, is just patently stupid by its very notion.

Update: Worse, now it doesn’t work at all. And a quick web search shows many other people having the same problem, and Adobe as usual doing nothing about it.

Incidentally, I tried to log in to Adobe’s forums in order to ‘Me too’ those issues, only it won’t let me log in anymore, falsely claiming my password is invalid. Good job, Adobe, good job.

Scoring my D400 wishlist

Thu, 12 Oct 2017 03:10:46 +0000

I just stumbled across my D400 wishlist. I’d clear forgotten I’d ever written that. Now that the “D400” – a la the D500 – has in fact been released, let’s see how many wishes came true:

≥ 50 image buffer. In 14-bit RAW.

😂 Nailed it. The D500 never misses a shutter actuation. It’s beautiful. I’m pretty sure it’s ruined all lesser cameras for me. I can’t stand anything that doesn’t take the photo when I press the shutter, nor anything which fails to keep taking photos until I decide to let go.
≥ 10 FPS. I’ll even accept complete viewfinder blackout if it means getting beyond 10 FPS. Sony actually have a new 28 MP sensor that is capable of 18 FPS read-out. I’ll take it.

🙂 10 FPS it is. Viewfinder blackout isn’t too bad, but isn’t great either. 18 FPS would have been awesome, and Sony have since demonstrated that you can get 24 FPS in a full frame sensor, so Nikon are still a bit behind, but admittedly 10 FPS does cover my needs most of the time.
UHS-II support. And if I can actually find a card that can really do 300 MB/s, I expect my camera to write at that speed. None of this half-arsed 60%ish crap that all the UHS-I Nikons have.

😁 XQD and UHS-II support. With good cards write speeds are indeed very fast. I can’t complain here.
Lower noise. Across the range, not just at high ISO. ISO 100 isn’t as clean as I’d like, and I’d really love to be able to use ISO 3200 or above in typical use. Bonus points for pushing the native ISO lower (50’d be nice, at least).

😕 Not so much. ISO 100 definitely isn’t cleaner than any other recent Nikon DX camera – even the D5x00 line, let-alone the D7x00. And high ISOs to my eyes simply aren’t any better – in noise, dynamic range, or colour – either.
More, smaller autofocus points, that fill the frame. Just give me a few hundred in an even grid. All cross-type, all f/2-optimised at least, and all good down to f8 and -4EV at least. And better autofocus generally.

🙂 There are indeed a lot more points, with slightly wider coverage, and AF performance is marginally better overall on all those points. Plus f/8 to -4EV support on quite a few. So mostly positive. However, they’re no better at wide apertures than the predecessors, sadly. Continue to expect frequent focus failures at f/2 or wider apertures. Possibly this just can’t be fixed in an SLR (as opposed to a mirrorless design).
On-sensor phase detection autofocus. I’d actually be rather interested in a mirrorless DX F-mount body, but even with a traditional DSLR, I want usable autofocus when shooting video. I’ll make it easier for you, though – I don’t need hundreds, or the high light sensitivity of the ‘viewfinder’ PDAF points. Just give me some, at least.

😩 Nada. Zilch. Zip. Fail.
Let me adjust shooting settings in video mode (aperture, for example). While recording, too.

😐 Sort of. I still somehow, sometimes, end up in scenarios where it won’t do what it’s told in video mode. Plus it still insists on changing settings somewhat arbitrarily when I switch between video & stills mode, which is a frequent and frustrating source of exposure errors and lost moments.
≥ 4K video @ 60 FPS. At serious bitrates – at least 200 Mbps. Preferably with a H.265 encoder option.

😕 4K yes, but only up to 30 FPS, and not at particularly high bitrates. And still no H.265. It’s hard to be too critical, because overall video quality is massively better than the 1080p on all its predecessors, but it’s still no match for notable video-oriented cameras (e.g. Panasonic’s GH4 & GH5, or many recent Sonys).
And/or, full-sensor read-out video. I’d accept being stuck with 1080p60 if it were at least from the full sensor. But it still has to have higher bitrates than today’s mediocre offerings.

🙁 Nope – pretty severe crop in 4K mode. This has been challenging in some of the video productions I’ve filmed, where it’s simply impossible to get rectilinear wide-angle video out of the D500. Even using an 8mm diagonal fish-eye lens, and its distortions aside, doesn’t really give you the ultra-wide experience.
Put the top-plate LCD back the way it was, on the D7100. What the hell, D7200? What the hell?

🙃 I forget what my complaint was with the D7200 top plate LCD… but the D500’s top plate LCD works nicely, and I have no complaints about it. So success, either way.
Quieter shutter. Something more like the D810, or better, preferably.

😔 Nope. Still a loud clickity-clack. On the upside, it comes across slightly moreso ‘impressive’ than merely annoying, at 10 FPS.
GPS.

😡 WTF Nikon. WTF.

No, SnapBridge doesn’t count. It’s #%!@ing useless. It records the wrong coordinates almost all the time. It’s ridiculously laggy – associating GPS locations from hours prior with some photos. Absolutely a disaster.
Deeper, wider hand grip. My fingers are in fact more than an inch long. How ’bout that.

🙂 Yep, the grip is improved, along the same trendline as all Nikon’s more recent DSLR. Though it’s not actually wider – narrower, if anything – it is significantly deeper, and that works too.
Moar pixels! But honestly, only if it’s amazingly more (≥ 40 MP) or otherwise at no noticeable cost w.r.t. image quality, or performance.

🙁 Alas no. 21 MP isn’t too bad, but it is very slightly noticeably less real-world resolution than the myriad 24 MP Nikon DX DSLRs that preceded it. And it really pales in comparison to the new D850, which has shown you can have quite a bit more of your cake & eat it too.
Real weather-sealing. Pentax are kicking your arse here. I should not have to bat an eyelid at rain. I should be able to test Sigma’s 150-600 S and have it fail from moisture or dust damage before the camera body.

🤔 Maybe. I guess I’m not willing to experiment too rigorously with this. It’s certainly claimed to be significantly more weather-resistant.
Lighter. Always lighter.

😒 Sadly no. For the most part the extra weight doesn’t bother me, but it does add up, and it does hamper the user experience a little bit.
Wider, more recessed viewfinder cup. I shouldn’t have to force my face through the camera in order to see the whole frame, nor buy third-party cups to actually block out glare.

😐 Somewhat. The viewfinder is indeed very nice & big by contemporary standards – even full-frame contemporaries – and that does make a big difference, which must be given due appreciation. But, the eye-cup itself is still basically non-existent, so glare and light leakage remain ever as problematic as before, and really demand not-entirely-cheap accessories to fix.
High-speed video options (> 60 FPS). But only if it’s at usable resolutions – none of this “400 FPS but only at a tiny resolution” crap like the Nikon Vn series. Even little tiny GoPros can do this. Seriously, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

😞 Apparently high frame rates in general – even just 60 FPS, let-alone anything you’d really consider “high” – weren’t in their design goals. Not a big deal compared to most of the wishlist items here, but still a bit disappointing not to have.
Magnify the viewfinder image in 1.3x mode. I really want to like and use 1.3x mode, but it feels so pointless today.

🙁 Still nothing here. And the extra 1.3x crop doesn’t even boost FPS like it did on the D7x00 line, and buffer sizes are so gloriously large that you needn’t shrink your files on their account, so there’s very little point to it. If you’re worried about SD / XQD card space, or disk space, I wonder if the D500 is the right tier for you anyway (you can get a lot of hard drive space – like, 50+ TB, for the price of the D500 body alone).
Dedicated AF-ON button. Sometimes I actually want to use the AE-L button for its labelled purpose. Just give me two damn buttons already.

🤣 Not just this, but they actually made a whole dedicated AF joystick. Above & beyond on this one. The joystick is a tad fiddly w.r.t. pushing it for autofocus engagement vs swiping it for point movement, but still, I like it.

And, they let you map different autofocus modes to different buttons, so you can have something like four AF-ON buttons, essentially, each one operating completely different autofocus modes. I never conceived of it, and might not have even though it that interesting if you’d merely described it to me, but after using it, it’s awesome.
Longer body. I have actual human hands, not baby monkey ones. I want a camera that actually fits in them, without my bottom two fingers falling off the bottom. (without spending $7,000 on a D4s)

☺️ Yep. I have no issues with my pinky falling off the bottom, even without a portrait grip attached – which is perfect, because the Dx line’s integrated portrait grip adds too much hand grip length, and heft.
Wifi. But only if you actually provide a remote control app that’s full-featured. Don’t even bother including your current wifi system. I already had to buy a CamRanger because of your half-arsedness.

😤 Unsurprisingly continued disappointment here. Nikon appear bizarrely incapable of implementing connectivity intelligently, let-alone well.
Provide an AC adapter for what it actually costs – i.e. $5. $120?! Are you insane? Here’s an idea: just integrate USB 3 as a USB-C connector (or better yet, Thunderbolt 3). Single-port AC power, clean video output, and tethering. And in that case, give me at least two such ports, so I can tether and AC power simultaneously.

😠 Still no convergence on a superior power & connectivity solution. Yes, there’s USB 3, but that’s really not very impressive nor useful to begin with in its current incarnation. Still no sensibly priced power tethering option. Sigh.
Touch-screen. Surprised to see it so far down the list? Meh. All I really want is double-tap to zoom and touch-to-focus.

😃 I’m going to give Nikon extra due on this one, because while yes they did a touch screen, and the implementation is decent (though the inability to use touch to change settings etc is a dumb omission, and stark in contrast to their much cheaper DSLRs which do support that now).

But what really pleases me is actually the resolution & image quality generally of the screen. I evidently didn’t appreciate how much this matters – given I left it off my wishlist entirely – but in hindsight I really do like the upgraded rear LCD. Kudos, Nikon!

And in hindsight there’s a few items that should have been on my wishlist, but weren’t:

Less mirror slap. The D500 has a pretty hefty thwack that you can easily feel shocking into your hand, and it produces serious sensor-motion blur at even moderate, let-alone genuinely low, shutter speeds. It’s actually a far greater disabler in low-light or narrow-aperture photography than the image quality off the sensor itself.
Electronic front & rear shutters. Like the D850 now has. Ideally this wouldn’t compromise shooting otherwise – as sadly it does with the D850 – but even with the D850’s implementation, it’d still be exceedingly useful in things like time lapses, for combating the pretty horrendous mirror slap the D500 has.
More accurate and consistent autofocus. I talked about autofocus points, and some of the specs that imply accuracy & consistency, but I should have just said: give me an autofocus system that actually bloody works reliably. The D500 continues the Nikon (and in fairness, DSLR-generally) tradition of troublesome autofocus. From systematic focus errors in bodies and body+lens combinations, to limited abilities to even manually correct for that in the camera (really, a single adjustment setting for the entire lens?!). The new “autotune” feature for autofocus adjustment is a nice notion, and it’s certainly better than nothing, but in practice it isn’t that reliable itself, and it only really scratches the surface of the autofocus issues.

EXIF metadata stores random gibberish for dates & times

Sun, 08 Jan 2017 19:06:19 +0000

I hadn’t ’til yesterday realised that EXIF metadata doesn’t actually store dates & times correctly. Whoever came up with the spec all those decades ago clearly didn’t know how to work with dates & times correctly. This is immensely frustrating since now we have countless images taken with timestamps that are collectively gibberish.

The problem is that the standard doesn’t specify time zones in almost all cases (the sole exception being for GPS timestamps, which are in UTC). Which means if you see the date & time “2016-02-03T10:36:33.40” in your photo, that could be any actual time give or take ~25 hours to either side of that.

I realise now, in hindsight, that programs like Aperture & Lightroom manage this by implicitly associating a time zone with photos as they’re imported (and both have controls of varying degrees for ‘correcting’ the time of the photos, in cases where the camera’s clock is set wrong – including being set to the wrong time zone). They leave it to the user to ensure the time zone that’s set for import matches what was on the camera at the time the photos were recorded.

However, if you’re processing images at scale and don’t have that explicit information from the user(s), you’re SOL.

Additionally, I don’t know anyone with a DSLR who hasn’t at least occasionally forgotten to change the date & time on their camera to account for changes in daylight savings time, or movement to a new time zone. If the time zone were recorded, this wouldn’t really matter since you could reliable change it later. But since it’s not, it’s impossible to tell programatically when and where the time zone changes, in a given series of photos.

Now, you might think that since the GPS timestamp is actually recorded as a real, definitive time, that you could just use that to determine the time zone of other dates & times in the metadata (by simply looking at the difference between them). Unfortunately, in this case, the GPS timestamp is defined as the time at which the GPS data was recorded, not when the photo was created (or edited, or any of the other types of timestamps recorded in EXIF metadata). Which means that in practice the GPS timestamp can be an unspecified & unpredictable amount of time older than the other timestamps¹.

If it were just a matter of a few minutes difference then this wouldn’t be an issue, since the vast majority of the world only acknowledges half hour increments in time zone steps² and thus you could just round and get things right most of the time. Unfortunately, at least some notable GPS implementations in popular cameras have potentially huge deltas (hours or more) – e.g. all of Nikon’s SnapBridge cameras, including the D500, D5600, & D3400.

And that’s assuming the camera’s clock isn’t set wrong anyway – it’s possible to include GPS data in your photos but not sync the camera’s clock, in at least some popular cameras like Nikon’s. ↩︎
Wikipedia reports that there are a couple of small regions of Australia & New Zealand which use 15 minute offsets, and the entirety of Nepal does too, but those are the only exceptions. And only a small minority use half hour offsets, as opposed to hour offsets, to begin with. ↩︎