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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

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.

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).

As before, I’m using camera firmware 1.11.

As before, I’m trying to focus on things that aren’t already very well known / discussed about the Z9. And a lot of that is around finding the edge cases where things stop working properly. Please don’t misconstrue that as an overall negative judgement of the Z9 – I like the Z9. (I say this because an earlier revision of this post was reposted on Nikon Rumours, which was very flattering but led to quite some angst in the comments there due largely to this missing context)

All example photos are from High Efficiency* raws as rendered by Lightroom Classic without any edits, other than cropping where appropriate.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.