The Nikon Z9 is a fantastic camera,
but its size and price have proven
to be serious barriers for many shooters.
So now Nikon has this, the Z8,
which is basically a Z9 with the latest firmware,
but at 30% smaller and nearly 30% cheaper too.
What's not to like?
Let's get undone!
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody!?
I'm Gerald Undone and every second
that you aren't running,
I'm getting closer.
As usual, for disclosure,
Nikon lent me this camera to make this review,
I don't get to keep it,
no money changed hands,
and Nikon does not get any input
on this video's production
or get to preview it before it's posted.
This video does have an actual sponsor though
and that's iFootage.
Now I don't like to make videos
that I've already made
and since this is fundamentally a Z9,
I'd like to think I already made two videos
on this camera.
So if you wanna know about the regular stuff
that's mostly unchanged,
I suggest you watch my initial review.
And I also have a video about
the 2.0 firmware and the Nikon Raw.
So instead, today we're going
to be focusing on what's been improved
and talking a bit about the 3.0 firmware
that I never covered,
because this camera comes
with those latest features at launch.
So let's start with what's different about the body.
It's smaller, which means a smaller battery
and less heat dissipation than the Z9,
which we'll get to in a second.
Ergonomically though, it's a big win for me.
It's not nearly as heavy as the Z9
and feels more like DSLR body.
It's still large for a mirrorless,
but very comfortable if you're used
to something like a D850.
And it's very spacious and forgiving
if you've got big hands.
The LCD screen is great.
It doesn't flip out,
but it's 2.1 million dots and gives plenty
of mobility for tilting in both orientations.
The button layout is mostly the same
for better or worse and the experience
is extremely familiar.
The body isn't as weather sealed as the Z9,
but it's still highly resistant to inclement weather.
It still features 3.5 millimeter headphone and mic jacks,
a full size HDMI port,
and a USB-C port for power delivery,
but now they have a second USB-C port
just for communication, which is nice,
because lately I've been rigging out cameras
and running into issues where I can't use
the USB-C port for power if I want to use it
for anything else.
This isn't a problem here, which is cool.
The card slots are different than the Z9.
You now have one CFexpress slot,
which is backwards compatible with XQD,
and one SD card slot.
Normally I would complain that this limits
our ability to do backup recording
with higher bitrate codecs,
but Nikon still hasn't implemented redundant
recording in video anyway,
so the different card types isn't really
an issue for video shooters.
However, I did complain a lot about the card door
on the Z9 and I'm happy to report that this door
is much easier to open.
Although it does take some getting used
to because part of the grip opens with the door,
so you have to reposition your hand.
As I mentioned, the battery is the smaller EL15c,
the same form factor you'd find in many other Nikon cameras,
but it does mean we take a hit on record times.
Now as usual with any overheating tests,
it's important to keep ambient temperature in mind.
I can offer advice for shooting
in a climate-controlled environment or outdoors up
to about 24 Celsius or 75 Fahrenheit,
but beyond that,
your mileage may vary and very likely decrease.
Also, remember that Nikon now has a temperature
threshold setting in the menu.
They advised me that when it is set to STANDARD
you can expect about 60 minutes of 8K recording
and when set to HIGH,
you'll get closer to 90 minutes.
And I found those numbers to be reasonably
accurate in my environment.
When set to 8K24 with the H.265 codec,
I recorded for one hour and 35 minutes
before the camera overheated,
and after letting it cool and recording again,
I got another 19 minutes before the battery died.
So about one hour and 54 minutes
on the battery in that mode.
In 4K24, which is oversampled from the 8K,
I recorded for one hour and 58 minutes
without overheating before the battery died.
In both modes, I got a "Hot Card" warning
after about 20 to 30 minutes.
This is because I was using the CFexpress slot.
You likely wouldn't see this with the SD card recording.
Now it's interesting to note that you can extend
the battery life in 4K24 recording by plugging
in USB-C power delivery,
but this camera still possesses
the two hour and five minute recording limit.
I've asked Nikon why this exists multiple times
and I've still never gotten an answer.
In a way, you could say it works out nicely
that it will either overheat or the battery
will die before that two hour mark anyway,
and at that point you could just do a card and battery swap
every two hours,
which will also help cool the camera.
But it's just important to remember
that if you need to record long, uninterrupted clips,
you'll need to hook up an external recorder,
which should also reduce the overheating too.
Speaking of cooling off the camera, though,
let's talk about the hottest mode, 8K60 raw.
In this mode, I got a yellow temp warning at 11 minutes,
a hot card warning at 12,
then a red temp warning at 15 minutes,
and then a red warning with the word high at 23 minutes.
It's funny how much information Nikon tries
to give with the overheating.
You end up with a lot of stuff on your screen.
And then when it finally overheats it starts a countdown,
which is stressful, but helpful.
Anyway, I made it all the way to 24 and a half minutes,
but then my card was full.
This was using a 650 Gigabyte ProGrade CFexpress card
and I was using the more compressed raw.
If you use the high quality raw,
you get less than 15 minutes with 650 Gigabytes at 8K60
Anyway, I quickly formatted and started recording
again to keep the temperature up on the camera and the card,
and was I able to record for just over
another 23 minutes before it overheated.
So that's about 48 minutes total of 8K60 raw
with a quick format halfway through.
If I let it cool for one minute,
I could record another 10 minutes.
If I let it cool for five minutes,
I could fill the card again
with another 24 minutes of recording.
When recording in 4K60 on this camera
you have the option to enable extended oversampling,
which lets you oversample beyond the usual 4K24
and do it up to 4K60 as well.
In this mode, you can expect similar performance to 8K60,
since that's basically what the camera is reading at.
In my test, the oversampled 4K60 overheated at 56 minutes.
If, however, I recorded 4K60 in the binned
or line skipped mode with oversampling turned off,
then I didn't experience any overheating.
Lastly, let's say you record a more modest 8K24 Raw,
well first I only got an hour of card space on
that 650 Gigabyte card,
but I did manage to quickly format
it at that one hour mark
and record again immediately
and do that until the battery died,
which for me was one hour and 53 minutes total,
which logically is similar
to the 4K24 oversampled performance.
So what's the verdict?
Well, you're limited to two hours recording
either way unless you record externally,
and many of the modes can get you almost
two hours of battery life without overheating.
The modes that do overheat more quickly should
still get you close to an hour in a studio environment
and at least 50 minutes at 24C or below.
But it also cools down quickly,
so if you're just recording clips,
I don't see this camera being an issue for you,
but if you want really long takes,
you're gonna need to buy an external recorder,
and at that point, there's probably
better options for the money.
Now while we're talking about
all these different recording modes,
let's talk rolling shutter,
because I didn't have my strobe
when I reviewed the Z9,
so now I can give you some actual numbers
regarding the read speeds of this sensor.
So if you record using the full 8.3K sensor
whether that's for an 8K recording
or an oversampled 4K recording,
you can expect about 14.5 milliseconds,
which is slower than something like an a7S III,
but probably the fastest of these full frame
8K hybrid cameras.
If you shoot 4K120 or the line skipped 4K60,
the read speed drastically improves to 4.9 milliseconds,
which is extremely fast.
I really like how Nikon gives us the option
between a slower, but higher quality 4K60,
or a fast-reading, non-oversampled 4K60
for when we need that.
I wish more brands would do this.
If you switch to the DX crop,
which still does some oversampling,
but from a lower resolution starting point,
the 4K up to 60 frames per second reads at 9.6 milliseconds,
and 6.6 milliseconds if you shoot at 4K120.
This suggests that there'll be some minor quality loss
when comparing the 4K120 to the 4K60 in this mode,
as it can only read faster
if it isn't processing as much data.
But overall, this is a fast sensor.
Again, probably the best in its class.
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Now let's talk about dynamic range.
So you've got four different options for recording,
there's the H.265 codec that will get you
up to 8K30 or 4K120, there's ProRes 422 HQ,
which goes up to 4K60,
there's ProRes Raw which is 4.1K up to 60p,
but I don't personally mess with ProRes Raw much.
I'm not a big fan of it and I use DaVinci Resolve.
And then you've got N-RAW
which is the only way to get 8K60,
but can also do 4.1K up to 120 frames per second.
So let's start with ProRes 422 HQ 4K24
in N-Log to get a baseline sense of performance.
Using the Xyla 21 and Imatest,
we measured a total of 14 stops of dynamic range,
which is reflected here under Slope-based DR.
But we also like to determine how many clean
stops of dynamic range we have when factoring in noise,
which can be seen here next to medium,
which is with a signal to noise ratio of two,
and there we get 12.1 stops,
which is a respectable score for ProRes,
which tends to be less forgiving than H.265.
If we bump the ISO to 4000 from 800,
which is this camera's second native,
we can see that we maintain our 14 stops total
and 12 stops medium, which is great.
However, if we switch to H.265,
we get some very bizarre results.
The noise reduction is so intense that Imatest
is suggesting that all 14 stops are preserved
all the way down.
And if you look at the graphs,
the color channels have all bled together
to form a black line,
instead of separate channels as normal.
The same thing happens at both native ISOs,
and even when shooting 8K in H.265.
So I had a look at the shadows,
brightened them up in post,
and then compared them to the ProRes version
and sure enough we can see significant blocking
and artifacts when compared to ProRes,
which explains the weird results.
However, after further testing,
I noticed that the issue mostly resolves itself
after a few seconds of recording.
Now, there's still far too much noise reduction
in my opinion, especially when compared to ProRes,
but it's at least usable and measurable now.
And when doing that, we see 13.8 stops total,
but now with a medium score of 13.3,
which is how you know the noise reduction
is too aggressive.
You shouldn't be able to jump from 12.1 to 13.3
just by switching codecs.
The 8K version when sampled from later
in the clip isn't as offensive,
it measures 12.4 on the medium,
which is much more logical when you factor
in the oversampling that occurs by dropping an 8K clip
on a 4K timeline.
So my advice is that if you want to shoot H.265
on this camera, shoot in 8K,
but if you have to use 4K H.265,
make sure you aren't putting anything critical
in the first few seconds of the recording.
Give it a little buffer time to smooth out
those artifacts in the shadows.
But ProRes HQ is definitely the better option all around.
Now let's talk about N-RAW.
If you drop 8K raw on an 8K timeline,
our medium score drops to about 10 stops.
This should give you an idea of how noisy the raw is.
But to fairly compare it against the ProRes,
we need to put it on a 4K timeline
to account for oversampling and the 4K limit of ProRes.
When we do that,
the score jumps to 11.6,
which gives us our baseline before
any noise reduction is applied.
This is a very manageable starting point
and more detail is definitely preserved
in the raw when comparing it to ProRes 422 HQ.
So if you like to finetune the noise reduction in post,
this would be the way to go.
But again, we have to consider those absurd file sizes.
I can get nearly double the record time of ProRes
than I can of N-Raw in its most compressed state.
So I'd say the overall best codec on this camera
for balancing image quality and usability
would be the ProRes 422HQ.
You can still oversample all the way up to 4K60
from that 8K image, but with less hassle
than the alternatives,
while gaining a streamlined post-production experience.
But I should mention that the raw panel
for N-RAW in DaVinci Resolve has been improved.
While I still wish you could decode
to other well-known gammas,
the clips are now correctly displaying as 12-bit,
the exposure adjustment now works more logically
where one point of exposure equals one stop,
instead of the previous 0.5 system.
And the overall performance of N-RAW seems smoother to me.
However, the white balance adjustments
still aren't easy fixes like others I've used.
You can't just type in a white balance
and move on like you can with other raw types.
There are major color shifts that need to be caressed.
This is a disappointment and furthers my case
that ProRes 422 HQ is the best choice most of the time.
Another thing that's improved since the last time
I used the Z9 is the Nikon LUT.
There is now a version two of the LUT that fixes
the issue of having major jumps in the tonal range.
The new LUT transitions much smoother between stops.
And I've noticed that the LUT and view assist
for the Z8 is a close match to that v2 LUT for the Z9,
so that's good.
One thing to keep in mind though
is the v2 LUT raises your final exposure more
than the v1 LUT did,
so you might have to retrain how you expose
if you shot a lot with the v1 version.
But again, the view assist on the Z8 helps a lot with this.
The colors of the new LUT are slightly different too.
Not a major departure, but slight differences
in luma and tweaks to the hues.
I'd say the new LUT is slightly more color accurate,
but it's not a huge difference once you account
for the exposure change, but the gradations are nicer.
Now as I mentioned,
there are some other improvements
I haven't covered that came with the 3.0 firmware
for the Z9, which we'll find here in the Z8.
First off is the new Hi-Res Zoom feature for 4K video.
Basically, it uses the 8K resolution of the sensor,
but instead of oversampling,
you can use the extra resolution to zoom up
to two times smoothly into the frame.
It works well for what it is
and could definitely be handy for certain situations,
but it does have some caveats.
First, it only seems to work up to 30 frames per second,
and it also seems to disable subject detection when enabled.
Autofocus still works, just not as well.
What's cool though is that you can set it
to be activated by the control ring of your lens
so it feels like you're actually zooming.
And speaking of lens rings,
Nikon has dramatically expanded the lenses
that support the new linear manual focus throw
and distance customization.
Last time I had the Z9 this only worked on two lenses,
but now every lens I've tested works,
some just require firmware updates.
This is great and makes manual focusing
a much nicer experience.
They've also added integration
for wireless timecode using AirGlu
and the Atomos UltraSync BLUE.
There's also been improvements to the autofocus
for better reliability.
They've added more subjects like "airplanes"
and enhanced the tracking.
I can't give a comparison here
as I don't have the previous version,
but I'd say it does feel pretty confident
in most situations,
but still struggles with low light autofocus in video
and is still highly dependent on which lens you're using.
I'd give it a 7.5/10 if that's worth anything.
And yes, for the photographers watching,
it even takes pictures.
It actually takes them very quickly,
and firmware 3.0 brought some additional
high-speed capture modes.
And if you're in photo mode and you rotate
to vertical orientation,
the on-screen information restructures itself
to look better for vertical shooting.
It doesn't do this in video though as far as I can tell.
Well, that's pretty much it.
Like I said, this camera is fundamentally
a firmware-upgraded Z9 in a much smaller
and cheaper package.
And that's saying something,
because the Z9 is great!
So as long as you don't mind the worse battery
or thermal management,
this is nothing but upsides.
And those issues aren't as impactful
when you consider the peculiar two-hour limit
both of those cameras put on your clips anyway.
And you can always add a grip to this camera
to match the battery life and form factor of the Z9,
but for less total cost.
And this is a cheaper
entry point as well if you plan
on adding external recording hardware
to get past that two-hour limit.
So no matter how you slice it,
you're gonna be spending less to get the same or better.
They've basically made a great camera
more accessible and that's a win in my books.
Alright... I'm done.
(light upbeat music)