GEAR
NIKONZ 9
It’s not lacking in advanced AF tech, but we used the Sony A1 side by side, as well as the Canon EOS R3, with similar subjects a week before, and the Nikon didn’t feel like it had an edge over its rivals. Counting the number of stills of fast-moving dirt bikes that were pin-sharp, the Nikon had marginally fewer than its counterparts. But not by much. And image quality was excellent when shooting Raw, with great detail and pleasing natural colours. The high resolution allows for cropping, too. That great AF also works in video recording, but the auto-detection feature meant it would sometimes switch between subjects. After one too many misses, we changed back to single-point AF and it worked very well. It feels like it’s one firmware away from truly great AF. The touchscreen does let you ‘touch to focus’, which offers decent performance, and the AF was sticky enough not to jitter around, hunting for focus. Made for movies It’s in the current and forthcoming video spec that the camera is special. Headline 8K at 30p is detailed, as expected. But few people really need all that resolution right now,
mechanical shutter at all – although a mechanical ‘gate’ covers the sensor when changing lenses. E-shutters may lead to bendy vertical lines when the dreaded rolling shutter effect rears its head, especially in fast pans. The Z 9 largely gets rid of all this, and is as good as anything else we’ve tested. You can get skewed verticals, if you insist on whip pans, then slow the footage down in post. But why you would want to do that is another matter! In stills mode, it actually records 120fps in short bursts from the full sensor, but these are reduced in size to 11 megapixels. More realistic is 30fps for full-size files, restricted to JPEG only. For Raw files, it’s 20fps max, which is still insanely high. Combined with blackout-free shooting and the redesigned autofocus system, the Z 9 is a great tool for fast shooting. The system is powered by deep learning AF. It recognises numerous kinds of simultaneous subject: human eyes, faces, heads and upper bodies; animal eyes, heads and bodies; plus cars, planes, trains and motorcycles. We put it to the test on several of those specific subjects –motorcycles in action, people and animals – and it certainly performed.
SPEC SURPRISE A four-axis tilting screen and 10-bit ProRes 422 codec are welcome new features
especially with the huge file sizes it creates. But it didn’t overheat, although the maximum recording limit of just over two hours helps. Resized at 4K – oversampled from the full 8K readout – the true quality shines through. You can record this in 4:2:2 10-bit internally in N-Log for maximum dynamic range, and quality is stunning, despite rolling shutter. In that case, normal 4K shot internally is almost as good, reducing the issue hugely. Colours are organic, with great skin tones and good high-ISO performance. Though native ISO in N-Log is 800, requiring some
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