Camera test 52
Photography News | Issue 61 | photographynews.co.uk
on the cool side a menu option lets you adjust the colour balance to suit your taste. The AF shot/touch feature can be turned on or off on the screen so no need to dig into the menu. Put your eye up to the camera and the monitor image swaps to the EVF. Nikon makes much of the image provided by the EVF and there’s no doubt that it’s impressive. There’s no smearing as you pan and even the finest detail is projected very nicely. By definition, a EVF image is going to be different from an optical image and the interaction will be different, but the Z 7’s image is bright, contrasty and generally excellent. Pushing the DISP again scrolls through viewing options. At least here, if you want camera setting info, all this is placed on a black background, above and below the image, but not on it. The Z 7 has just one card slot and that is an XQD slot. The XQD format offers very fast write times in excess of 500MB/s and potentially huge capacity, beyond 2TB. XQD cards are also more physically robust so significantly stronger than an SD card, and electronically more stable too, so the risk of data loss is said to be lower than other cards. The Z 7 will also support CFast Express
cards for £30 and the same size XQD will be £190-230 depending on its specification.Mseries are slower and therefore cheaper compared with G series XQD cards. As a guide a 64GB XQD card in the Z 7 gives 650 uncompressed 14-bit Raws which are around 90MB each – capacity increases with lossless compression with files around 60MB each. Full size JPEG*s take up to 30MB of memory. The Z 7 does offer Raws of different sizes so you have the option of Raw L at 8256x5504 pixels, Medium at 6192x4128 pixels and Small at 4128x2752 pixels. Size- wise medium Raws are around 25.5-megapixelsresolutionandsmall around 11.3 megapixels. It is a handy space-saving option when you need the flexibility of Raw but don’t want to burn up your memory. You can also enjoy different image areas with the Z 7 and you have FX format at 36x24mm, DX at 24x16mm, 5:4 at 30x24mm, 1:1 at 24x24mm and 16x9 at 36x20mm. You can mix the two options, so shoot Raw S and enjoy the 1:1 format. Working in tandem with an XQD carddoesmean theZ7canhandle the huge amount of data coming fromthe 45.7-megapixel sensor pretty well. The camera offers up 9fps in 12-
Above Low light and low contrast did not pose any problems for the Z 7’s autofocus system.
belts and braces of dual card slots, and the Z 7 having both XQD and SD slots (as the D850 does) would have been nice. If there is a downside of XQD it’s
current cost. XQD cards are made by few companies and they are not mass market in the same way SD cards are, hence prices are high. You can buy 128GB SD/micro SD
with even faster write times with a firmware update in the future. The pros of XQD cards are many but never the less photographers (me included) have gotten used to the
Performance: exposure latitude
I shot lossless compressed 14-bit Raws with the Z 7. I did manual brackets as well as using the camera’s AEB system. The correct exposure of the scene here was 1/125sec at f/11 and ISO 100. Raws were exposure-corrected in Lightroom. Get it wrong by 4EV and there is little you can do with the Raw to recover it. You stand a much better chance with 3EV over. In strongly lit
scenes thehighlights are still flat and bleached out but in lower contrast scenes the image is recoverable. The picture, literally, is much better at 2EV over. And tonally the recovered image looks fine – although skies pick up a slight cyan cast which needs to be resolved. The corrected +1EV shot looked identical to the correctly exposed shot. As usual Raws dealt with underexposure more effectively so
no problems with veiled highlights. There is noise though on the -3EV and -4EV shots. To be fair, it is very fine even on the -4EV shots so detail still looks impressive and the noise is neutral coloured so it can be processed out if needs be. There’s still noise on the -2EV shot but you have to be very critical to see it. All told, Z 7 Raw files have good exposure latitude tolerance specially with underexposure.
-3EV
-4EV
-2EV
-1EV
Original image
0
+1EV
+2EV
+3EV
Above We shot exposure brackets in a variety of lighting types, from interiors to brightly lit scenes such as this. Generally, the Z 7’s Raws showed good tolerance to exposure abuse and showed that highlights and shadows can be recovered well.
+4EV
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