Nikon had been trailing in the full-frame mirrorless market for a long time, trying to catch up with Sony and Canon. With the Z9, not only has it caught up, there is a chance that the game may change.
The company has managed to match Sony with its 120 autofocus calculations a second and then some more — 120 frames per second with 11MP photos and full autofocus performance. The biggest innovation from Nikon is the absence of mechanical shutter, making the Z9 rely entirely on an electronic shutter and at the same time, removing several moving parts from the system.
Now that new levels of speed and autofocus performance have been achieved, it will be interesting to see how far this technology can be used to take traditional-style cameras in the future. It can well be a big step towards larger format cameras adopting computational smarts that smartphone cameras have been offering for years.
Though there is no mention of computational photography for HDR-style photos but the new 45.7MP full-frame backside-illuminated stacked CMOS sensor isn’t far off from what has been in phones for years, at least in terms of the core design, point out the folks at The Verge. This kind of construction uses a sandwiched architecture of sensor, logic board, and dedicated RAM — yielding extremely fast readout speeds. Computational photography on dedicated camera systems can help reawaken the camera market.
The Z9 can continuously shoot at 20fps to capture over 1,000 frames in JPEG or RAW formats, even when flicker reduction is turned on. This is a first for Nikon that is made possible with the high processing capability and large buffer of EXPEED 7 and the fast write speed of a CFexpress Type B card.
Not just still photography, Nikon, which has not greatly focused on video so far, will support on the Z9 8K 10-bit N-Log recording and also support multiple codecs, including H.265 and ProRes 422 HQ10. Next year, a firmware update will unlock 60 frames per second in 8K and 12-bit ProRes RAW.
The new Z9 body will be available for sale across Nikon authorised store in India starting end of November at Rs 475,995.
