I've used a lot of cameras over the
years, from film to point
and shoot, to my OG T3i,
the king of budget mirrorless Panasonic
G7, to cinema cameras
and this new wave of 8K
mirrorless cameras.
Every camera capable of creating
beautiful images, every
make and model coming with its
own advantages and disadvantages.
But no matter how many I
try, I am never satisfied.
I can't answer a crucial question.
Well I couldn't.
Until today.
How do you even decide what
the perfect camera for you is?
Does it have the best specs, the highest
resolutions and frame rates, biggest
sensors, fancy features?
Does it produce the best looking images,
perhaps through detail,
color science, or dynamic
range?
Are there specific workflow needs that
surpass all other wishes?
Or does it come down to size and feel?
What role does price play?
I had a daydream, an out of body
experience, wondering what
does the perfect camera look
like?
I have to find this answer.
I can't just keep flip-flopping.
It's haunting me.
It's not fun to have gas.
Well okay, maybe it's a little fun, but
it's not fun, especially
when you just want a reliable
workflow.
I'm always trying to refine my process,
to take my art to the next level.
And I want to be using something that
makes me feel like it wants that too.
The latest science experiment to answer
this question is Nikon's
new Z8 full frame mirrorless
camera.
Originally I wasn't even going to bother
collecting new data on a
camera that is basically
the same as the Z9 I tried and reviewed,
but slimmed down a bit.
Surely such a similar camera can't help
me conquer such a deep,
philosophical quandary.
Could it?
The size itself isn't that unwieldy, but
weight wise, it's heavier than I think I
would prefer, especially given part of
the point is to get me
something that's lighter
compared to my big cinema
camera in the first place.
Maybe, maybe that's
enough to change things.
Before we get to that, I truly try to
look at each new camera
I test and review as if
it's my first experience in the space, my
first time trying such
a big deal of a device,
preserving that naive enthusiasm.
535 gigabytes of video
footage for this project.
1200 photos.
I pushed the Nikon Z8 to its limits for
this review, to really
see if it's a camera I
would use forever.
Full disclosure first, Nikon lent me the
Z8 and a glimpse for a
couple weeks to review
this camera, but they're not sponsoring
the video and have no control over what I
say in it.
See the video before it's
published, any of that, yada yada.
I bought a couple lenses and adapters to
review this camera beyond
what's included in their
review kit.
As well, the sponsor will instead just be
myself and my OBS definitive guide course
and our free backing track screen music.
Links below.
The Z8 is an amazing camera.
Nikon is a big name in the photography
world, but not so much in
the creator space, although
that's changing more as their recent
releases like the Z30, the
ZFC, which I'm also reviewing
soon, and their new USB streaming
capabilities have
kicked up some momentum.
You're capable of reading specs yourself,
but I cannot
understate the significance of
8.3K 60fps, 4K 120fps, full frame
internal RAW video,
massive 45.7 megapixel photos,
and crazy shutter speed ranges from 30
second exposures to
1/32,000th of a second, fast
shots due to the
entirely electronic shutter.
Violent, stealthy, spectacular.
Shooting with this camera has been a
wonderful experience, from
the bizarrely intuitive 3D
tracking autofocus popping up whenever it
detects a subject,
including now airplanes
as an improvement over the Z9, to the
plethora of custom
function buttons and quick video
instills mode switching.
I think I might be in love.
All of this in a body that's
significantly smaller and
lighter than the Z9 due to the
lack of the built in
battery grip, among other things.
I loved the Z9, I really did, but I
couldn't see myself
carrying it around a ton for photo
shooting days due to the size and weight.
The new little brother isn't a small
camera by any means, but
with the super comfortable
grip it feels like the perfect weight.
Light enough to not strain my arms and
wrists, but heavy enough
to feel like I'm carrying
something that actually packs a punch.
If you want to edit your photos like me,
I'm gonna be that guy.
I've created a set of Nikon film
emulation presets for Adobe Lightroom.
I spend a long time when I'm editing my
photos trying to
emulate my favorite films
and the way I edit my favorite film
sucks, because frankly I
never even leave film photos
unedited for the most part.
And I'm trying really hard to match.
I'm basically trying to keep myself from
buying a Fuji camera
because of all the easy
button film simulation presets they have
in those cameras, and
so I'm doing my best to
emulate that with
every individual camera.
So this will work for the Nikon Z line,
the Z30, Z8, Z9, then
ZFZ, I'll show it even
more in depth in that video.
I have a whole video over on the Analog
Stream channel
explaining these, but you can pick
these up at the link in
the video description.
Does this make the Z8 the perfect camera?
What else can it do?
The more I look into it,
the more questions I have.
I need to breathe easier.
I need to find peace.
The 4-frame sensor is great for anything
from crisp, modern
autofocus shots with the bizarrely
wonderful 24-120mm f/4 lens Nikon lent me
with the camera, to
swirly, bocalicious vintage
lens shots, to the most crisp and clear
macro shots I've ever
seen on something outside
of the like $80,000
focus stacking setups.
Alright, arguably my biggest issue taking
pictures with this
thing is the lag when you
zoom in to check for critical focus.
The frame rate is just abysmal.
This happened on the Nikon FC and even on
a Nikon point and shoot my sister got for
Christmas a few years ago and I assumed
it was a lower end kind
of point and shoot camera
kind of thing.
But no, it's just like a Nikon thing.
It's really hard to manage
when the frame rate is so choppy.
Just look at all these photos.
Full frame packs so much detail and
allows you to crop in so much
while still being printable.
The colors, the character.
These are pretty great.
It seems like a fog
has been placed over me.
I had just about convinced myself that
this was the perfect camera.
Don't get me wrong, video on
this camera is… incredible.
The 8K in-raw footage you can record
inside this camera is
beautiful, the autofocus works
great, and it's hard to believe that a
traditionally stills focused
camera has such mostly zero
compromised video recording built inside.
To the extent that they settled with RED
regarding RED's
bullsh*t internal raw patterns.
And the higher res 8K or 8.3K
video beats out anyone else's.
But that's where it gets confusing.
As amazing as this camera
is, it's not a cinema camera.
It's missing all of the
cool cinema camera features.
It's a hybrid, but leans far
more towards stills than cinema.
It's more of a videographers camera built
to create top tier
wedding videos and travel
shots rather than to be used for
primarily video work.
The Z8 is missing a lot of features that
I've come to love on all
of my other video cameras.
Be it my RS-7i Pro I was shooting on for
a while, my Canon R5C,
the GH5S, the newly released
S52X, comes down to all the cinema stuff.
This is a Nikon Z8 microphone sample with
the D4 Duo microphone from Deity.
This is with the rear
pointing microphone.
And this is with the
front facing microphone.
Test test, 1, 2, 3.
It has no advanced monitoring stuff.
So no scopes, no
de-squeeze, anything like that.
It has no synchro scan for CRT shots.
Though I did notice when just doing a
couple test shots that
when viewing the full TV,
it actually did a great job at 1/60th of
a second, keeping my
CRTs in sync just on its
own.
And I think that's due to the wonderful
lack of rolling shutter
for the most part on this
camera.
It's not a global readout shutter.
It's still a rolling shutter, but as
Gerald showed in his
video, the latency of reading
the entire sensor is
actually incredibly fast.
So you get virtually no
rolling shutter in this thing.
I think it helps with the CRTs, but
whenever I get up close on
them, still get separation
there and I have no
synchro scan to make up for that.
It has no different
aspect ratio choices at all.
So I love the menu system where it lets
you choose which format
you want compared to my
Canon R5C.
It's actually a wonderfully refreshing
thing because in the
Canon menu, you have to go
to the like fast and quick or S&Q or
whatever module just to
go into 120FPS mode and you
got to keep changing codecs.
Whereas this just gives you a list.
And once you get enough codecs supported,
a list doesn't
necessarily work, but it's so
much quicker to go into like 120FPS mode
and get some slow-mo
shots than it is on my primary
camera, which is kind of frustrating for
my primary camera, but great for the Z8.
And then it has other wonderful things
that would typically you
would expect on a cinema
camera.
It has full size HDMI,
which my Canon R5C does not.
It is one of my biggest pet peeves about
this camera that I bought.
It has microphone in and headphone out,
which is wonderful to see.
They fixed the card door.
So one of my big complaints on the Z9 was
the card door was like
impossible to do with
one hand and you had to do two hands.
Now it's actually super easy, so much
that you can kind of do
it on accident, but this
is so much of an improvement over the Z9.
I am stoked.
They swapped to instead of dual CF
Express, it's CF
Express and SD card slot.
There's no redundant recording anyway,
but that way you can use
both, especially if you're
just doing pictures, which I love because
CF cards are super expensive.
They also have a sensor cover that is not
enabled by default,
which was kind of frustrating
to discover.
But if you could go into the menus, you
can tell it by default
to have a little sensor
door.
This isn't the shutter.
It's just a sensor door to keep this
sensor dust, you know,
from getting dust whenever
you're swapping lenses, which is huge.
I love that on my R5C.
I wish every camera had that.
And it's impressive that they added it
in, even though the
camera doesn't actually have
a mechanical shutter.
They also have.
So there's no USB recording option to an
SSD or anything like
that, which is frustrating.
Again, cause CF cards are super
expensive, but what they
do have is dual USB C ports.
This is wonderful.
So this allows you to have a USB power
delivery port, just
dedicated purely for power, which
is great for long recordings and things
like that, or for just
lots of constant use in
a studio and so on charging on the go.
But then the second
port is for communication.
So you've got USB ethernet adapters,
whereas the Z9 had ethernet built in.
You can do that for network streaming.
You can use it for connectivity to the
computer, for stop motion, tethered
shooting, USB streaming
for video, that kind of thing.
Like this is loaded out, but it's missing
so many things that
would replace my actual
cinema camera and my workflow.
I really wish it had them though.
Like I want a custom
cinema firmware or something.
These dual USB ports means that the Z8
would be great for stop
motion too, once Dragonframe
updates for the driver.
At the moment it works, but you can't get
any live view from it,
which obviously makes
it difficult.
Despite the fancy USB ports, we are still
limited to an abysmal
1024x768 with a letterboxing
output through the USB port for USB
streaming on the Z8, with
no audio included, even with
a microphone plugged into the camera.
And the frame rate is supposed to be 30.
I'm not so sure it is.
Come on Nikon.
You're so close.
Using a mirrorless camera, I can adapt
all kinds of amazing
lenses on it to shoot any
content I want.
Vintage lenses, EF lenses, fisheye
lenses, even old Nikon film lenses.
It took everything I threw at it.
At first I was worried.
Maybe all that gas was finally entering
my bloodstream, and I
was just fooling myself
into thinking every
new camera is the best.
The dramatic realization of how many
shortcomings the Z8 brings
for my work was a scary one.
I can be at peace now.
You see, I've come to
an important realization.
There is no perfect camera.
Some cameras are
better for some purposes.
Some brands focus on different things.
But no one, no company out there, has
made the perfect camera.
Not yet anyway.
Instead, I believe the perfect camera is
the camera that feels
the best when you're using
it the way you want to.
For video, the Canon R5C is absolutely
filling that role for me.
But for photos?
The Z8 will hold a
special place in my heart.
It felt so comfortable, so familiar,
intuitive to shoot
with in every condition.
So comfortable in the hand.
So seamless to change settings.
So smooth to edit.
I don't want to let it go.
I don't want to send it back to Nikon.
But if I'm going to
find peace, I have to.
The Z8 is leaving me for now.
But if it's truly the perfect photography
camera for me, it
will find its way back to
me.
Product and kit links are in the
description if you're interested.
Remember to be kind, rewind.