Richard & Caroline's Blog

The rumours for new cameras from Nikon are now coming thick and fast. The Z8 is the one most are expecting next but we are also due a refresh for the Z6 and Z7.

While we have had the Z30, the last major camera release was the Z9. Its interesting what people want from a Z8 and from what I am hearing, a lot of people are going to be disappointed.

• Mini Z9
• High megapixel studio / landscape
• Super high performance, low light low megapixel action / news camera

The first option, a mini Z9 is going to a difficult one for Nikon, it will have to have less video functions, over heating in the smaller body would be a major issue, plus you do not want to to match too closely the Z9 or loose sales of your flagship model.

High megapixel camera studio and landscape camera. Now here we get to a difficult position. While the crowd is still calling for more and more megapixels, at 50 mp diffraction starts to soften your images at f/11, going much higher then it will kick in at f/8 or less. Not what most of us want. Going much higher than 50 – 60 is going to start getting difficult to use unless you switch to medium format, but staying around 50 and not moving to at least 61MP like the new Sony A7R iv is going upset people, even through practically there is little difference between 50 and 60MP.

Super high performance low Rez camera with high lowlight performance. Canon have a good model here with the R3, and while the Z6 comes close it’s not a pro spec camera. For now it seems Nikon see the D5 as the camera for these people, but will the Z8 be the option for them?

Here in rural England Sunday mornings in the spring and summer are traditional car boot days.

COVID-19 stopped all of this and many have not restarted. Hopefully the traditional car boot will come back. Nearby to where I live, with the spring now here, the first car boot of the season was this last weekend. Not many people in attendance but hopefully as the weather warms things will pick up.

An optical high quality viewfinder is extremely useful in many situations, but the electronic viewfinder also gives photographers aids to getting the shot.

You will never please everyone, so highly customisable cameras are what we need. Someone may want nothing but the scene in their viewfinder; others like in the shot above, where blowing out the highlights was way to easy needs for me a camera with realtime histogram.

Also on the subject of high contrast scenes like above, blinkies, zebra guides etc are available in any mode on Leica and Sony mirrorless cameras. The photo above, I needed to ensure that whilst the window could blow out at all white, none of the highlights on Lilly’s back did so. With highlight warnings this is easy to achieve, but for some unknown reason, neither Canon or Nikon allow them when in photography modes, only video modes. I could take a shot and review it with highlight warnings but not while taking the shot. In a changing light situation this is not good enough. I have to give a shout out to Sony and Leica, as their high end mirrorless models do allow custom highlight warnings, live in the viewfinder in real time.

So what do you want in a viewfinder?