NIKONZ 7 TEST
as I did get a bit of eye strain after extended shooting, but that’s to be expected. The only real problem I had with the EVF was in the speed it turns on. By default this is done as you move it up to your eye, but I found the best part of a second of lag broke up my shooting a bit. The placement of the sensor also means you can turn it on accidentally until you get more used to it. The battery usage is still not as good as some mirrorless or DSLR competitors, but it’s certainly not a problem. Equally, the single XQD card slot posed no problems day to day (though cost of XQDmedia is still a lot more than SD cards). For stills, the Z 7’s AF performance is a real eye-opener, tinkering in terms of the AF area size, and shooting in continuous AF, I found the Z 7 was nailing most shots, even of dogs running towards me. Otherwise, I found it highly accurate, even in very dim conditions, and there’s a low light AF mode you can switch to if it is struggling. The AF area is highly adaptable from very wide to a pinpoint across 493 areas and it covers 90% of the frame. The area was quick and easy to adjust using the Z 7’s rear control stick. There’s face detection, but no eye detection. Comparing stills image performance against the D850, screen, there are no buttons on the rear left or front left of the camera” though not without room for improvement. With a little “Due to the small body but large
The buttons themselves are large and nicely raised from the body, and nothing’s a stretch. Pretty soon I was using them ‘blind’, just like my regular body. But there are fewer of them, so controls need to be mapped to function buttons or added to the on-screen ‘i’ menu. For instance, rather than having the AF control on the front left of the body, it defaults to one of two paddle-like buttons on the right by the lens mount. These can be used alone or with the control dials and can be customised for up to 22 options, so there’s plenty of scope to map your most used functions. Six other body controls can be reassigned, and some upcoming lenses will have customisable buttons on them, too. The focusing ring on the new lenses can be customised to other functions as well – setting it to exposure compensation works really well, but you could set it to aperture control (the only downside being it has no feedback ‘bumps’). Turning to the EVF, it’s right up there with the best around. There’s no smearing even in low light, lots of detail, and the frame rate is sufficiently high to make you half think it’s optical. The spell does occasionally get broken, though,
ABOVE For both stills and video, the Z 7’s versatile AF is one of its strongest and most attractive features.
SPECIFICATIONS Price: £3399/$3397 body only Sensor: 45.7-megapixel BSI CMOS full-frame sensor Image stabiliser: Five-axis sensor shift ISO range: 64-25,600, expandable to 32-102,400 Shutter speeds: 30secs to 1/8000sec plus B LCD: 3.2in touchscreen, 100% frame coverage Viewfinder: 3.6mdot EVF Auto focus: 493 phase detect points in single AF covering 90%of the image area –usable in single- point, pinpoint, dynamic area, wide area, auto area Recording format: 4KUHD 3840x2190 30p/ 25p/ 24p. HD 1920x1080 120p/100p/ 60p/ 50p/ 30p/ 25p/ 24p Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI-C, USB-C Storage: 1x XQD slot Dimensions (WxHxD): 134x100.5x67.5mm/ 5.3x4.0x2.7in Weight: 585g/ 1.29lb body only
BELOW The layout will be familiar to Nikon users, but the smaller size might be an issue for some.
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WINTER 2018 PRO MOVIEMAKER
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