Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
I know some of you must have been on the edge of your seats for this little piece of news, but now we know. After much speculation, it’s been confirmed that the Nikon Z9‘s image sensor is manufactured by none other than Sony.
The SonyAlphaRumors website published the news today, saying “the Nikon Z9 sensor is not only manufactured by Sony but also part of Sony’s patent authorization.” Interesting!
High-end video camera brand RED is suing Nikon for illegally copying their video compression patent. Nikon introduced the system in their new firmware 2.0 update for the Z9 mirrorless camera. With the 2.0 update, the Z9 can capture 8.3K RAW video at up to 60 frames per second in Nikon’s new “N-RAW format” or up to 4.1K at 60 frames per second ProRes RAW HQ.
The lawsuit was filed in a southern California federal court and asserts that the Japanese camera manufacturer and its United States subsidiaries have illegally infringed on seven patents that deal with “a video camera that can be configured to highly compress video data in a visually lossless manner.”
Well, these are some pretty significant updates to the Nikon Z9. Nikon has today announced the new version 2.0 firmware for the Nikon Z9. It brings with it a host of interesting new features for both photographers and filmmakers including internal 12-Bit ProRes RAW recording at 4.1K up to 60fps and 12-Bit N-RAW recording for 8.3K. 4K footage can now be oversampled from 8K and you also get finer ISO control with 1/6th step increments.
On the photography side, There’s a new Pre-Release Capture feature that starts shooting up to a full second before you actually hit the shutter. Twenty different Custom Wide-Area AF patterns have been added for tricky sports and wildlife situations, along with better AF stability, tracking performance and low-light subject detection. There have also been some improvements made to its long exposure display mode.
Japan, the home of Nikon, is seeing some pretty massive delays on the Nikon Z9 right now. As spotted by the folks at Nikon Rumors, if you order a Nikon Z9 today from Yodobashi Camera in Japan, you won’t see it until at least January 2023. It may actually take longer if they pre-sell more of the shipment than the number of bodies they have coming in at that time.
In the rest of the world, B&H still lists the Nikon Z9 as “New Item – Coming Soon” – which it has done since at least December, with no estimated date when more will arrive in stock. Adorama, too, lists it as “On Backorder” and Amazon still doesn’t even have a listing for it yet. WEX Photo Video in the UK also lists it as a “Pre-Order”.
The Nikon Z9 has a bunch of features you may like and some that you may not. But in which of these two categories does the shutter sound fall?
Well, if you’re a cat person, then the sound of the Z9’s electronic shutter might be perfect for you. It’s a cat’s meow in the most literal sense of the expression. Yes, your Z9 can meow at you!
With the removal of ProRes RAW from the DJI Ronin 4D, forcing a price reduction in the 6K model, as well as its removal from Kinefinity cinema cameras, exactly what cameras might support ProRes RAW in the future has come into some doubt and whether other camera manufacturers would be following suit. Nikon, for example, launched the Z9 with the promise of ProRes RAW coming in an update in 2022. But will it?
Well, it turns out that it will still see ProRes RAW coming in a future update, at least according to Nikon. The company has confirmed this in correspondence with Y.M. Cinema, stating that a future firmware update will allow the Z9 to capture in 12-Bit RAW video in both ProRes RAW HQ as well as N-RAW, Nikon’s own original RAW video format.
Nikon has opened up to TechRadar about why they got rid of the mechanical shutter in the new Nikon Z9 and why it only features an electronic shutter. It seems like a strange move when Nikon has typically had the best and most reliable shutters over the years (with the fastest flash sync speeds), especially when Nikon’s not-a-flagship EOS R3 still utilises one. Essentially it boils down to new faster sensor technology.
Historically, electronic shutters on CMOS sensors have been plagued with one big issue; Rolling shutter. In a chat with TechRadar, Nikon said that an electronic shutter typically takes around 1/200th of a second for a full-frame sensor to read the entire scene. This is a long time in photographic terms. The Z9 sensor’s scan rate, they say, is 12x faster allowing for readouts faster than mechanical shutters.
In all my years in photography, I don’t think any camera has had as much buzz leading up to its release as the Nikon Z 9. There were many reasons for that, both good and bad, but now that the camera’s here, does it live up to the hype? After one week of using it, I think so. (Disclaimer: I taught Nikon School for Nikon – as a contractor – from 2002 to 2018, and was paid to moderate one of their Facebook groups for the past three years. At this time, however, I have no connection with them.)
I received my Z 9 the evening of Dec. 29, and spent that and the next night working my way through the camera’s 900+ page “Reference Guide” PDF, Thankfully, as a life-long Nikon user, most of the controls and menus were familiar to me. So what I was looking for were the new things, or improvements to current features. I found plenty of those, some of which I’ll be using right away, some occasionally, and of course, some never (because the camera’s not made just for me).
Nikon has released a new v1.10 firmware update for the Nikon Z9 mirrorless camera. An already-impressive camera, the new firmware extends the performance of the buffer allowing you to shoot 20fps stills at full resolution for continuously for a whopping 8 seconds (160 images) instead of the previous 3 seconds (60 images). For photojournalists, sports and wildlife shooters, this will be a big bonus.
Not much has changed besides that, save for a couple of bugs, but if you’re one of those lucky early adopters who’s managed to get their hands on their Z9 already, you’ll want to update to take advantage of the improved buffer.
The global silicon shortage has hit all industries hard, and the camera industry is now feeling it pretty hard. New cameras and lenses have often had delays, historically, but usually not more than a couple of weeks. Then the Pocket 4K came, which had a 3-6 month waiting list for the first 18 months of its release. It was the exception, though, and not the rule. Now with the silicone shortage, it’s the other way around.
And now Japanese camera retail giant Yodobashi says that the Nikon Z9 isn’t going to start shipping out again now until October 2022. Now, we all know Nikon’s struggling generally in the camera market, but this isn’t a problem for just Nikon. Both Canon and Sony have had to massively cut down on production with newly announced items seeing delays of unknown duration.
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