Camera test 25
Photography News | Issue 62 | photographynews.co.uk
lovely, big image with great contrast, fine detail and no lag. There’s plenty of potential to personalise the Z 6 to your preferred way of working and the touch monitor is responsive and works well. Push the i button and you get a 12-window quick menu, and in each you get to choose from 31 features including off. Dig a little deeper and you find more potential under the Custom control assignment menu item. Here you have eight controls you can reassignalthough the actual number and variety of options depends. For instance, the Fn1 button, next to the lens mount, has 22 features available and 17 more when used with the command dial, while the AF-ON button has nine and the sub selector lever a total of 21 features on offer. By contrast, the Lens control ring has four features.
A faster top continuous shooting speed of 12fps is something that will appeal to action shooters. Using a G Series, 400GB/s XQD card, I tried the Z6 inRawand JPEG* modes. I set a 1/1000sec mechanical shutter speed and fixed focus. In JPEG*, in the Continuous Hi (extended) setting, I got 40 frames at a rate of just under 13fps and at the Continuous Hi setting, got over 100 shots at 7fps. With Raw, I tried full size 12-bit and 14-bit Raws with lossless compression. With 12-bit Raw I got 100 frames at the Hi setting at 6fps, while in Hi extended I got 28 frames at just over 12fps. That slowed to 7fps after 28 frames and kept on going. With 14-bit Raw, the shooting rate slowed down a little, and I got 32 Raws at 10fps (Nikon claims 9fps) before slowing down to 6fps. It is worth bearing in mind that these
There’s plenty of potential to personalise the Z 6 to your preferred way of working
Above The Z 6’s 24.3-megapixel sensor produces images with great crispness – this is a JPEG original.
Performance: exposure latitude
We tested out the exposure tolerance of Z 6 Raws by shooting a nine-frame bracket at 1EV steps. The camera was set to give full-size 14-bit Raws saved with lossless compression. The files were exposure corrected in Lightroom.
The Raws corrected very nicely and while -4EV and -3EV shots gained some digital noise, the results were perfectly acceptable. The less severely abused Raws were corrected very nicely and underexposed
looked the same as the correctly exposed shot. Extreme overexposure gave poor results. Overexposing by +3EV was recoverable except in very bright light while +2EV and +1EV exposures looked fine.
-3EV
-4EV
Original image
-2EV
-1EV
0
+1EV
+2EV
+3EV
+4EV
Above Raws from the Z 6 recovered well from deliberate exposure abuse, with underexposed shots doing very well with only a minor gain in digital noise.
Powered by FlippingBook