Over the last six months, I've made quite
a few videos on the Sony a7 III.
Including many on its lesser-known features and bugs.
And this has helped me create a list
of specific things to look for on the Nikon Z6,
so see if it's improved upon the Sony or not.
And I've got the results of those tests right here.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What is happenin' everybody? I'm Gerald Undone.
And this is my review of the Nikon Z6.
Now it's not gonna be a conventional review.
It's gonna be video-centric, and it's gonna be focused
more on seeing if the Nikon can dethrone
the Sony for full-frame video shooting.
But first, I wanna thank Camera Canada once again
for supplying me with the Nikon Z6.
Camera Canada has an excellent selection of Nikon products,
and terrific service to go along with it.
So, if you're looking to get one of the new Nikons,
make sure you check out their links in the description below.
I have my list of results here, and let's just go through them.
So, I broke it up by category, and the first category
we're gonna cover is Things I Didn't Like About the Sony
and have they've been improved with the Nikon Z6.
So, the first one is, there's no front-facing
Tally Light on the Sony a7 III.
There's a lot of problems with filming yourself on
the Sony, but one of the major problems with that
is you can't actually tell if you're recording.
And that's not really improved on the Nikon.
There is a light on the back, kinda just like the Sony,
but there's not really any better way to see
when you're recording or not using the Nikon Z6.
The next one is no face detection in 4K,
while connected via HDMI. And I made a whole video
on this in which I figured out that you can actually
record with face detection. But you can't do it using
internal recording, when you have an HDMI connected.
You can only do HDMI-only recording.
So, I guess the way to phrase this would be:
no face detection on the Sony a7 III,
when HDMI is connected, and you're recording internally.
The Nikon can. I tested this exact configuration.
You can record internally and externally
with HDMI connected, whether monitoring or recording,
and use face-detection in 4K.
So, that's fixed on the Nikon.
[gentle jazz guitar and piano]
♪
Another thing that bugged me about the Sony,
was that, when you are recording, on 4K,
both internally and externally over HDMI,
when you start to record, the screen goes black.
Not the complete screen, you can still see
your, you know, display information, but the image
disappears and you're just left with a black image.
And I talked about this in that previous HDMI Sony video.
It doesn't do that if you do the HDMI-only recording,
and you turn off internal recording.
But when you do the simultaneous recording,
that's when Sony faces all of its problems.
Uh, and again, the screen turns black.
It doesn't do that on the Nikon.
That's an improvement. It's the same thing
I was saying, the Nikon seems to be capable of
doing simultaneous display, in pretty much
all of its modes and settings. And so that's great.
OK, so now let's jump into the samples that I've recorded here,
because one of the things that I think would fit
into the category, like I said, of things
I don't like about the Sony, would be
its bit depth and its bit rate and that kind of thing.
But I actually was able to compare it to the Nikon,
to see, you know, how much of
an improvement are you getting with 10-bit,
and with a slightly better bit rate.
And with better external recording options and that
kind of thing. A quick comment on the bit rate thing.
Sony's obviously capped out at 100Mbps.
And you could have some pretty strong arguments that
this is not a sufficient bit rate, in order to,
you know, keep up with what's going on with the 4K.
The Nikon doesn't actually list its bit rates.
And there's some, you know, different information online.
So, all I basically did was record a bunch of different
scenes, and then check the bit rate in my computer.
And it seems to vary somewhere between
100Mbps, and about 140Mbps.
That one is rare and on the high.
I would say it averaged at about 115Mbps.
So, not really a big bump.
It's not like, you know, you're in the 150 to 200.
But it does seem to have a more variable window
which may allow for a little bit of improved quality,
but I wouldn't say it's anything to write home about.
OK, so let's start with these clips. Now these are of a sky,
because I thought that would be a great way to see
what happens when we push those blue skies.
Because that's something you might be likely to do.
And I've got a few different versions here.
This is, on the Sony a7 III, we used S-Log2
as a way to compare that to their N-Log.
I didn't use S-Log3, because I find
that S-Log3 is a bit too taxing
for the 8-bit colour depth of the Sony. So, I feel like
S-Log2 is something it can pull off a little bit better.
And, uh, then I applied it with a basic grade here.
Obviously focused on bringing the blues out.
And then I did one, where we have an extreme
colour push, and see how it can hold up.
Now with the Nikon, we've got N-Log 10-bit.
This is recorded externally, using the Atomos.
And then, this is with the basic grade.
Obviously, with enough saturation to push the--
The saturation's quite a bit high, that I have--
On Premiere Pro, I have a saturation up at about 200.
So, it's doubled, it's pretty high.
And then again, a colour push.
Now if we look a little bit closer here,
this is the Sony at 200% zoomed-in.
And, as you can see, it held up pretty well.
And then as we switch over to the colour pushed one,
we start to get a little bit, obviously,
of like artifacts and that kind of thing.
But I think it still holds up pretty well, considering
that I pushed this to green really, really hard.
Now if you look at the same thing over on the Nikon...
Again, it's a different kind of blue,
and it might be a little bit cleaner,
but I wouldn't say that it's extremely cleaner.
And the same thing when we push to green, we still
maybe get less so of the artifacts and of the banding,
but not an extreme difference considering that
we're going from 8-bit 4:2:0 or 4:2:2, to 10-bit 4:2:2.
I feel like I expected the Nikon to...
be a little bit better,
or the Sony a7 III to be a little bit worse.
I would say that if you were just doing
a quick regular grade,
that either of these would hold up well.
The Nikon maybe wins by a hair, but...
it's not like "Sell your Sony, go buy your Nikon,"
it's nowhere near that good of a difference,
if even noticeable to the average person.
I don't love S-Log on the Sony. Again, for 8-bit
and for a reproduction that I find personally pleasing,
I actually prefer the Cine2, with cinema colour.
And so this is my result here.
And if we compare that to Nikon's flat,
I would say those are more alike.
So, this is the Sony with the Cine2.
And then jump over here to Nikon Flat.
You can see they're pretty similar.
So, if we look closely at the quality of the colours
of the green, blue and red, and then we compare that
to the 8-bit, we can see the 8-bit
is a little bit worse, but again, it's minor.
And when you push these hard, I don't find that
the 8-bit falls apart that much sooner than the 10-bit.
And I was a little bit surprised by that.
But this is, you know, with their flat profile.
With the N-Log,
we'll notice that the colours change quite a bit.
But I would actually say the Flat was more accurate
to what my eyes remember of this shot: It was kinda moody
and it did have sort of a warmer feel to it.
Where when we jump over to the N-Log here,
the N-Log is a bit more clinical and...
there's sort of, some- A characteristic about it
that I find a little bit... strange.
And I think that maybe what this means
is that this N-Log is gonna need a LUT.
But when I checked making this video there wasn't a LUT
available from Nikon yet. And that I think that
maybe that could bring the colours better into spec.
Because right now I find them to be a little bit off.
The orange to yellow difference here
on the Rubik's cube, and the green to white.
But if we take a close look at the detail,
and compare that to the earlier shot, again
it's not really wowing me that much compared to the 8-bit.
It's good that it's there, and if you wanna use the N-Log,
you need it, and I think that that's great,
because again, I don't really like using
Log with 8-bit. By the way, everything
was completely static during these comparisons, so...
the lighting was exactly the same,
the power of the lights, the white balance.
For the Nikon, I'm using the 35mm 1.8,
the new Nikon Z lens.
And obviously I can't use that on the Sony.
But on the Sony I was using Sigma's 35mm f/1.4 art lens.
I do think there were times, especially when I was shooting
the sky stuff from earlier, like this shot
against this shot, that I found that the Sony can be
a little bit sharper or resolve a little bit better.
It's hard to know whether that's placed on the lens,
or on the camera itself. I would say if I had to choose
one for sharpness, I would give it to the Sony.
For me, this is more of a feature conversation
and a performance conversation, than it is about image quality.
I think that you'll get good results out of both.
OK, so before we move fully into my other, you know,
issues with the Nikon, I wanna talk about some more
things about the Sony that the Nikon didn't fix.
So, the first one is battery life.
I did some extensive battery life tests here.
I set them up side by side. Same settings:
4K, autofocus continuous, same exposure.
And sometimes I ran the tests with USB power,
to see how they would last with a USB connection.
And other times I ran the test without.
And here are the results:
The Sony without a USB connection,
will last two hours and 40 minutes, approximately.
And that's on battery. But it lasts much,
much longer if you have USB power being provided to it.
To give you an idea, when the Sony was at 100%,
and I recorded for 30 minutes,
it went from 100 to 97%, with the USB power.
That's only a 3% loss. So, if you do math like that,
it would suggest that you can run it for like 12 hours,
but I don't know. I know that it does work
for, like, five or six, with a good USB connection.
The Nikon on the other hand, didn't really improve at all
with USB power. So, I don't think that
it has the ability to run off of USB.
It's-- You can charge the battery when the camera's off,
but when you turn the camera on, it just...
ignores the USB connection altogether.
With the Nikon, during the same test,
at 100% for 30 minutes,
the battery went down to 78%, versus the Sony's 97%.
So, if you want to do some sort of USB, you know,
streaming or long recording or time-lapsing
or whatever, the Sony will definitely
work better than the Nikon in that case.
In terms of just regular usage, with no USB power,
the Nikon lasted me on average just under two hours
of 4K autofocus continuous recording.
The Nikon doesn't last as long as the Sony by a decent amount.
OK, now let's talk a little bit about video autofocus.
Now, there's some pros and cons here,
and a couple things that I found kind of surprising.
So, I set up a bit of a rig, where I could push in and out
towards a target, a focus target,
at a consistent speed.
And here's what I found. The Sony is snappier,
especially with pop-in focusing.
So, if you move something into the focus point
and back out, the Sony will respond faster.
And this is based on using their maximum settings.
So, with the Sony, you just have two options.
You have Standard and Responsive.
With the Nikon, everything is on sort of
a more degree scale. But I would say, to get
the best performance out of the Nikon, you want to
increase the responsiveness all the way up.
Now setting it to one though, doesn't get you
the same pop-in, super snappy responsiveness of the Sony
on Responsive-- the Sony still wins in that regard.
But because the speed can be adjusted on the Nikon,
I actually found the Nikon produced a better
result, when the responsiveness was high,
and the speed was left right in the middle.
Where the Sony, I don't love the Sony's speeds and I never have.
It's medium speed is kind of what I leave it at,
because when you set it to slow, I find it too slow.
And I find the medium already kind of too fast,
so I would never set it to fast, because that's
crazy even faster. I wish that it had
a few more degrees between medium and slow.
So, depending on your purpose, you might find
them to be one's better than the other.
There's definitely some trade-offs here.
I would say for what I do,
I like the Nikon's performance a little bit better.
But I wish that it engaged
as quickly as the Sony does. But it doesn't.
And I already have it set to its maximum responsiveness.
Another thing that I like about the Sony
that the Nikon kinda took a step backwards on
in my opinion, is on the Sony, the area around the OK button
is another wheel or dial. Where here it's just
sort of like a pushy d-pad kind of thing, and I've always
preferred a wheel. I like it on the Panasonic.
I like it on the Sony's. That way you can use it as
three controls for your exposure. You can do
your F-Stop, you can do your shutter speed, and then
you can do your ISO down here. You can't do that
with the Nikon, you have to do combo presses,
you know like, press the ISO and then move the dials.
And the button holds on the Nikon are really annoying.
There's a setting that I would recommend
that you change, which is going in,
and disabling that so you don't have to hold them.
But otherwise you have to press one of the function buttons
and then like-- Or hold ISO and then do something like this.
In my opinion, you'd much rather, and it's going
to be much easier to just press it, and then adjust it.
That's something you're gonna have to enable in the menu.
Otherwise, you have to do some pretty strange
grip holds in order to adjust things.
And I hate having to do that for the ISO; I would much
rather wish that this was just another wheel down here.
So, I prefer that on the Sony. The setting by the way
on the Nikon that you're gonna wanna adjust, so that
you don't have to do those weird holds,
is called "Release Button to Use Dial".
[Gerald] And that's gonna be found in F6, under controls
which is found in the custom setting menu.
Now while we're talking about ergonomics, let's jump over
to some things that I did like about the Nikon,
that I think maybe were improvements.
I think that generally, I really like
the ergonomics of the Nikon. I like the deeper grip.
Deeper than the Sony, so I prefer that
and I have big hands. I also like
the dedicated switch between video and photo.
You know, with the Sony I tend to just use the function dial
that changes it between maybe my C states or whatever.
But I like the ability you can just switch it over to video,
And when you do, the settings are separated.
A lot of brands have gotten this wrong, where when you
switch between photo and video, it keeps the setting,
and that's weird. But this one, when you're on photo, you can
have a different shutter speed, aperture, ISO and then
switch over to video and it's a different one still.
So, that's great. I like that the settings are separated
at just the flick of a switch, Which will be nice and fast.
I also think that the AF-ON button that they've got
right here, might be the best AF-ON button
I've ever seen on a camera. It's best--
you know, tactile, love the way that it pushes.
Its placement is fantastic. It really stands out.
It's easy to find. Nice size. I think it's great.
And I think it goes well with the joystick right below it.
And coming off of a couple other cameras that we've talked
about lately, that either eliminate the joystick
or put the AF-ON button at a weird angle, Nikon didn't
make any of those mistakes. These buttons are great.
Another thing I think that the Nikon improved upon, is you
get more screen real estate when you're shooting video.
So, when you're in 16:9, I wanna say corner to corner
you get a little bit over 3". Where the Sony you get
a little bit under. Now, it's not huge.
But it is noticeable, and when we're talking
about small screens already, every little bit helps.
So, I like having that bigger screen on the Nikon.
So, there is focus peaking, which is great.
And there's also zebras, which is great
but you can't use them both at the same time.
When you're in autofocus, obviously you don't need
focus peaking. So, it's like, zebras for autofocus,
peaking for manual focus, and they're exclusive like that.
I just found it kinda weird, I don't know why
you can't have both. So, that's something that I don't like,
because obviously the Sony you can. Also,
the video priority display isn't great on the Nikon.
You can't really customize it to the same degree that you can
on the Sony or other systems. So, with the Sony
for instance, there's things that you can turn off and on.
Like the histogram, and the audio levels.
On the Nikon, they kind of just only have presets
for display. So, you can cycle through them.
There's one that has everything on, including audio levels.
Then when you go to the next one, the audio levels
are gone, and it's just your basic exposure stuff.
Then you go to the next one, that one has a histogram,
and then the next one has a level. So, if you wanted
to see all that stuff, you kinda have to cycle through
four different pages to get each one of your devices
rather than being able to enable the ones that you want,
that work best for your shoot.
So, I don't like the video priority display.
I much prefer that on the Sony. Now a big deal however, and
a big con for the Nikon, that they haven't improved on
in previous models, is they still use
those same noisy, not great preamps.
And compared to most of the other cameras that
have come out this year, last year,
that have, you know, pretty decent preamps.
The preamps in this just aren't up to snuff.
If you bring up equal levels, you're gonna hear a lot
more noise, on the Nikon than you will on the Sony.
[white noise]
[slightly louder white noise]
I think that's pretty big deal or something to consider
because, that means if you wanna get clean audio,
you're gonna have to use an external recorder.
And if you're on location, you're gonna have to add that
as an additional expense. Which means that, I guess,
to get equal audio, the Nikon costs more.
And so that should contribute to the value equation.
So, that's pretty much it for the results of my tests.
But at the end of the results here, I asked myself
three questions, in order to be able to put some
practicality onto these tests. The first one is,
do I like the Nikon Z6? The answer is yes.
I think it's great. I think they got so much right.
And I think it's so close to the Sony which I like so much.
That it would be crazy to say that I don't like this camera.
There's some things that I like better, some things that
I don't like as much. Most of them are pretty minor.
So, yes. I think it's a great camera. I like it a lot.
I think it's really, really great. The second question
though, is do I think it's worth the price?
If the Sony never came out, and this camera came out
when the Sony came out-- keep in mind I thought the Sony was
probably one of the best value cameras ever--
then obviously I would have to say the same thing
about the Nikon Z6 because it's so close.
But the Sony does exist, and this came out
a little bit later, so it just sort of inherently
can't be worth as much; but they did add some benefits:
The 10-bit 4:2:2 over HDMI.
That gives it a little bit of extra money.
But the fact that you might have to buy
an external audio recorder if you wanna shoot with audio
on location takes a little bit of money off.
And it's sort of like a back and forth, like that,
where I find that it's probably...
close in value to the Sony, for shooting video.
There's a whole photo argument to be made here,
and because these are hybrid cameras,
if you were only shooting video
and you just wanted to do, like, cinema-style stuff,
then just get the Blackmagic, it's much cheaper.
But these are hybrid cameras, and that would be
the purpose to buy them. So, when it comes to value,
obviously if I'm talking to a Nikon shooter
that has Nikon lenses, the conversation's over.
That's the answer. You know, adapt your lenses,
whatever, move on. But if we're talking about
somebody, which is my third question,
which is that, would I buy it or the Sony
if I had no camera and I had to buy one today?
I think that the Sony is a better photography camera.
The Nikon has some benefits to video.
But I think as I demonstrated in this video,
the benefits don't necessarily make it...
that much better than the Sony.
The video focusing can be a little bit smoother,
which is nice, but not quite as responsive
which is, a bit of a con. The 10-bit is great.
And N-Log works in the 10-bit and all that.
But it's not that much better than the 8-bit.
And it's not that much better than Sony's 8-bit.
It's not huge. It's not a huge improvement.
So, if I didn't own a camera today,
and I had to buy one,
I think I would still buy the Sony:
for the lenses, for the photography aspect,
and I still think that it balances out
its cons quite well.
The Nikon fixed some of its cons.
But I still, I think as an overall package,
don't like it quite as much.
But I do want to say, as sort of a final word,
that this is minor.
For the photography side, it's not quite as minor.
But for the video side, the differences are so minor,
that I don't think you'd be making a mistake necessarily,
by choosing one over the other today.
I think you can go in either direction.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found this video
helpful, or at least entertaining. And if you did,
make sure you leave it the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already.
But if you did not find this video
helpful, or entertaining, feel free to hit
the dislike button twice. Alright! I'm done.
[gentle jazz piano]