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- ALL NEW: Nikon Z8 Review & Sample Images.
- ALL NEW: Nikon Z8 Plain-English User’s Guide.
- TODO NUEVO: Análisis de la Nikon Z8 e imágenes de muestra.
- TODO NUEVO: Guía del usuario en inglés sencillo de la Nikon Z8.
Lamento comunicaros que nuestro californiano favorito ni siquiera con la Nikon Z8 ha conseguido sacar fotos que no sean radioactivas. Bueno, una si, la de blanco y sepia.
Venga, va, para que la cosa no quede tan escueta y y esta breve reseña quede un poco más vestida, aquí os pongo lo habitual en Ken:
New since Z9:
- The Z8 packs the Z9‘s sensor, meter, finder, AF system, LCD and overall performance in a smaller body for less money, making the Z8 one of the most popular Nikons ever, bravo!!!
- New in the Z8 over the Z9 is the ability to shoot at 60 FPS at full resolution, but only in DX crop mode — which is fantastic for birds and sports. I suspect the latest firmware lets the Z9 do this, too.
- TWO USB-C ports, up from one.
- USB-C now only charges from USB-C sources; no longer can we old-timers charge with USB-A to USB-C cords; you have to use a USB-C to UCB-C cord.
- No more built-in GPS.
- Burst length 30, 60 and 120 FPS now works to five or six seconds continously, up from four seconds in the Z9.
- Exposure compensation at 30, 60 and 120 FPS now works to ±5 stops maximum, up from ±3 stops in the Z9.
- HLG format still images (set at MENU > Shooting > Tone mode).
- Two front panel Fn buttons, down from three on the Z9‘s larger body. There’s also an Fn 3 button on the Z8’s top left rear while the Z9 has an Fn 4 button in the same spot.
- AF rated a half-stop more sensitive then the Z9, now LV -7 ~ +19 with f/1.2 lens and center AF point; LV -9 ~ +19 with «starlight view.» These are about three stops darker than a landscape lit by nothing but moonlight! In fact, The Milky Way is LV -8 and thus within the rated range of these. How cool is this?
- Second slot now takes an SD card while the first takes your choice of CFexpress type B or an XQD card.
- Greatly improved card door that no longer needs an interlock.
- Precapture modes save images from before the shutter was fully pressed.
- It was a subtle defect and maybe it’s still here, but it seems Nikon has finally fixed a defect where there would be banding in clear blue skies while playing back images without zooming. This was a limitation in how Nikon stored thumbnails in image files, and went away when zoomed in. We saw it in the finders and on the rear LCDs of older cameras like the Z9, but it was never in the actual photos and thankfully now seems completely fixed in the Z8.
- 8.3K/60 and 4K/120.
- 5,392 × 3,032 and 4,128 × 2,322 raw video.
- 12-bit N-RAW, ProRes RAW HQ and 10-bit ProRes 422HQ and H.265 in-camera recording.
- Skin Softening.
- MB-N12 vertical battery grip.
Good:
- Automatic subject detection autofocus. Most other brands require you change a menu setting for People or Animals or Vehicles etc, and while you can set these manually in the Z8, the default option is AUTO where the Z8 figures it out on its own. It’s about time; if you have to set this, it’s not really auto focus, is it? (Set this at MENU > Camera Shooting > AF subject detection options.)
- Brilliantly bright finder for use in daylight.
- In-camera sensor-shift stabilization.
- Smart enough to shoot DX crops at 20 MP if you have the full-frame image size set down to 25 MP.
- The ultra-bright finder doesn’t make images appear over-exposed in daylight as the Canon EOS R3 can do.
- Depending on the light level, the finder really is live, with no visible delay or strobing.
- Second slot now takes an SD card while the first takes your choice of either a CFexpress type B or an XQD card.
- Playback images rotate as the camera is rotated just like on an iPhone, and so do all the data and histograms!
- One-button voice note recorder if you program it; I set Fn3 to this at MENU > Custom > f3 Custom controls (playback).
- Displays rotate during vertical shooting, but menus don’t.
- MENU and [▶] PLAY buttons both on the right side for one-handed shooting!
- No mechanical shutter, but there is a selectable blind to protect the sensor from dirt and your fingers:
- Nikon Z8 Shutter Blind. bigger.
- Optional MB-N12 Battery Grip.
- Selected AF box turns from red to green when in-focus in manual focus (or manual-focus override), even if the lens is untouched and the camera or subject moves.
- Brilliant new smart shutter sound. It changes with shutter speed, and at slow speeds it makes two soft click as it opens and as it closes, just like a leaf shutter. We musical folks we can confirm our shutter speeds by ear, and set to SOFT it’s just right so we can hear it, but no one else does.
- No obvious rolling shutter distortion. I can’t see any significant bending in rapid pans.
- No vertical interline transfer smear; shoot at f/2 looking right at the sun and there’s no vertical smear from an overloaded sensor as in many older cameras.
- Great power control; I leave it ON all day and it sleeps and wakes magically without running down the battery, if I set MENU > SETUP > Energy saving (photo mode) > ON.
Bad:
- Nikon’s mirrorless autofocus has always been a distant third behind Sony and Canon, and the Z8 still doesn’t focus well – if at all – in the dark. Good news is that Auto AF-Area selection works better than in earlier models. Good luck!
- The Z8 usually can’t autofocus on clouds in the sky either, something Canon (even their DSLRs) have always done well.
- Oddly requires positive or other exposure compensation more often than I’d like.
- Scrolling around inside magnified playback images too often get stuck, requiring me to stop, remove my finger from the rear controller and try again to click over to the part of the image I need to see magnified.
- Many critical controls like WB, advance mode, BKT, delete and exposure mode are located on the top left of the Z8, demanding a second hand to set them. Good news is some of these functions can be programmed to buttons you can reach with your shooting hand.
- No modern way to select focus areas or scroll around zoomed images intelligently while we sight through the finder. The Z8 still forces us to fumble with endless clicks on an eight-way controller like a 1977 computer keyboard before the mouse was invented. Seriously? You can’t set the Z8 to let you slide your finger on the rear LCD to move AF points or scroll around magnified images, and there are no magic optical thumbprint-reading encoders as on the Canon EOS R3 and 1DX III. Once you’ve used modern methods that react directly and immediately to however you move your finger, these idiotic clickers just don’t cut it. (You can scroll around playback images on the rear LCD using your fingers, but you can’t do that while looking through the finder — you’re back to clicking the controller!)
- File numbers have three programmable letters (good), but then an underscore and only 4 digits, so it only can make 10,000 shots before file names repeat. At 120 FPS it’s trivially easy to make more than 10,000 shots in just a half hour of shooting sports, and now you have to keep all those images in separate folders because you can’t put two files with the same name in the same folder. Nikon needs to replace the underscore with a digit so we have at least five digits in our file numbers. Even LEICA’s pokey LEICA M9 of 2009 uses seven digits in their file names to prevent duplicates, and that camera barely worked at 1 FPS.
- Worse, the Z8 packs not more than 5,000 shots in a folder, not 10,000. You won’t see it while shooting, but it creates a new folder after images 4,999 and 9,999. While you can combine two of these folders with images 0001 to 9,999 in the same folder on your computer, you can’t combine all of them if you shot more than 10,000 images. Boo!
- I set my Z8 to shoot to both cards for backup (MENU > 📷 PHOTO SHOOTING MENU (camera icon) > Secondary slot function > Backup). The problem is that when either card fills, the camera stops dead. The last thing we want to happen is anything that locks-up our camera. Previous Nikons didn’t seem to have this problem although the Z9 also has this flaw. When one card fills or has an error, it should continue to write to the good card, the whole point of backup.
- Still no universal preset U1, U2 and U3 memory modes to recall entire sets of camera settings in one click. Instead the Z8 has the same idiotic different sets of two non-lockable «Shooting Menu Banks» and «Custom Settings Banks» that have limited many of Nikon’s better cameras for two decades. The problem is to recall different modes you need numerous clicks to select both a Custom Setting Bank and select a Shooting Menu Bank, and by the time you do that, you’ve missed your shot — and even both of these banks together only recall about 2/3 of the camera’s settings, forgetting autofocus, sounds, brightness, advance modes and other settings that I want all recalled at once as I change assignments. Even if these «banks» worked, there’s no way to lock them from being changed accidentally. Boo!
- No 4:5 crop mode, which has been in every recent genuinely pro camera since Nikon’s first FX camera, the D3 of 2007. (The Z9 lacks this, too. Boo!)
- Immensely complex flipping LCD mechanism, but doesn’t move very much.
- Only bush-league 1/200 flash sync.
- Like the Z9, the orientation sensor is easily fooled when pointed straight down.
- The Amber CHARGE LED is usually hidden behind the strap on the top left side of the Z8; it’s not on the back where we could see it easily.
- Production dumped to Thailand, not made domestically in Japan:
Missing:
- No U1, U2 or U3 programmable presets so you have to use two different idiotic Settings Banks instead to try to save and recall camera states. It doesn’t work well and takes a lot of fiddling to get the camera ready for any kind of shooting from another.
- No 4:3 or 4:5 «ideal format» crops, just 1:1, 16:9 and DX.
- No fast way to delete burst groups or ranges of images. You can delete whole days or select frames one by one and then delete them in a complicated part of the [▶] PLAYBACK menu, but that’s it. Better cameras like most newer Canons like the EOS R3 gives you a simple «delete Burst» option just by pressing the trash button, but there’s nothing similar in the Z8. There is a very complex option if first you set MENU > [▶] PLAYBACK > Series playback > List series as single thumbnails > ON, and then and only then if you zoom-out to thumbnails in playback you will have the option to delete all the images in each series — but have no single-shot delete option unless you zoom back out back to single-frame playback!
- No mechanical shutter (except for a dust shield), so no noise and no problem!
- 30, 60 and 120 FPS modes work great, however many options and settings are fixed at standard values.
- No battery percentage displayed in viewfinder; only a 5-segment icon.
- The new smart shutter sound is brilliant, however 60 and 120 FPS sounds the same as 30 FPS.
- No automatic brightness control for the rear LCD. This works great in my iPhones and Canon 5DS/R, but not the Z8. Boo!
- No way to add the Auto ISO Slowest Shutter Speed menu to My Menu.
- The excellent synthetic shutter sound isn’t smart enough to vary its loudness with ambient noise. (Invention disclosure: detect the ambient sound level with the existing microphone(s), and then use one of many possible algorithms to vary the sound of the shutter to suit the ambient noise. Ditto for audio and notes playback.)
- No built-in flash.
- Not threaded to use standard threaded cable releases.
- No lock the power switch. It’s easy for the power switch to get knocked to OFF and disable the camera, which has lost me shots. Genuinely professional Nikons like the F4 and F5 have lock buttons so these rings never get turned OFF accidently. In pro shooting we never turn off our cameras so we’re always ready to fire without warning. Canon does this much better by putting its power switches where they won’t be knocked accidently, and they require more force to move.
- No color histograms while shooting (only on playback).
- Menus don’t rotate when held vertically (shooting displays do rotate).
- Rear multi-controller doesn’t rotate as an additional control.
- No way to program the OK button to enter play mode and zoom in one click; you have to hit play and then tap (a preprogrammed) OK to zoom. Many better Nikons used to be able to do this (and the Canon EOS R3 still can), which was a big time saver.
- No FIND option in the menu system.
- DX crop (only) with DX lens; can’t force full-frame usage. (It’s easy to use full-frame lenses in DX mode, but the FX mode is locked out with a DX lens).
- No dedicated ISO dial.
- No dedicated shutter speed dial.
- No swept panoramas (an iPhone does this better anyway).
