GEAR
NIKON Z 8
DIRTY SECRET The Nikon Z 8 excels when shooting fast action due to its impressive AF and stacked sensor
offer a choice of waveforms in two different sizes. Its five-axis image stabilisation system works well, the electronic viewfinder is big, bright and clear and the stacked sensor means there is no stutter when shooting stills at a high frame rate. Like the Z 9, Nikon claims that the stacked sensor has the fastest readout of any mirrorless camera – it’s so speedy that neither model houses a mechanical shutter at all, although a mechanical cover does protect the sensor when swapping out optics. The shutter is fast, and does a stellar job of eliminating the jelly effect of rolling shutter, although very fast pans can still show a little bit of skewing. Having no mechanical shutter does hinder the flash-sync speed for stills, though. It’s 1/200sec, while the rival Sony A1 has a mechanical shutter which goes up to 1/400sec. That’s a big difference when trying to use off-camera flash and balance exposure with ambient light. But for speed in stills mode, the Z 8 can actually record 120fps in short bursts from the full sensor, though these are reduced in size to 11 megapixels. It achieves 30fps for full-size files, but this is JPEG only. For Raws, it’s a 20fps max, which is still very high. And of course, these are 46-megapixel images which are very high resolution and still manage to avoid excessive noise.
“Deep-learning AF recognises humans, animals, cars, planes and motorcycles”
With blackout-free shooting and the autofocus system of the flagship Z 9, the Z 8 is fantastic for quick-fire shooting. Autofocus is powered by deep-learning AF and can recognise human eyes, faces, heads and upper bodies; animals’ eyes, heads and bodies; plus cars, planes, trains and motorcycles. The AF also works in video, although we found more success using single-point focus than subject recognition. The touchscreen allows you to ‘touch to focus’, which offers decent performance. One new feature of the Z 8 is 2x high-resolution zoom when shooting 4K. Essentially, it shoots 8K footage then crops it in. This is OK, but the AF doesn’t seem to work quite as well. The codecs are the USPs, of course, and make the Z 8 (and Z 9) stand out above all other mirrorless offerings. The headline figures are that the Z 8 shoots in full-frame 10-bit H.265 in up to 8K/30p and 4K/120p recorded to the internal, single CFexpress Type B card. It also records ProRes 422 HQ in 4K/60p, which is perhaps the standout choice as a robust, edit-ready codec. This is an industry-standard option, but the files are pretty sizeable.
4K footage can be recorded in oversampled or line-skipped versions. Oversampled is the best quality but takes up more space, while line-skipped is faster to edit. Then there’s the incredible 12-bit Nikon Raw in 8.2K/60p and 4.1K/120p. That’s the full readout from the sensor, available in two compressions to save a bit of space if you need. And you will. That’s because shooting 8K/60p in high-quality mode filled a 512GB CFexpress card in just 12 minutes.
SET FOR SUCCESS A quick menu shows the most-used settings (right, top). AF enables various subject settings (right, bottom)
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