The Nikon Z6 - 24 Months On
Nikon Z6 with 24-70mm f4 S lens
I made the switch to the Nikon Z6 system just over 2 years ago following a health issue that meant I was unable to carry the weight of a full size pro Nikon DSLR with its range of f2.8 lenses. While I still use these DSLR cameras and lenses at times, travelling with the smaller and lighter Z camera and lenses has made a big difference in my photography.
In short, the Nikon Z6 is a fantastic camera for my needs, especially after the firmware updates that Nikon has released to improve function and autofocus performance.
Build and Ergonomics:
The Nikon Z6 is a well made, high quality, rugged and weather sealed camera easily to the level of the Nikon D850 DSLR, the build is just as impressive as its DSLR sibling. Ergonomically, the camera fits into your hand without being cramped and all of the control buttons are within easy reach. I have large hands and my little finger lies naturally below the body of the camera but this was sorted using a SmallRig L-bracket that gives an extra 1cm of height.
The Z6 button layout is easy to navigate and will be familiar to Nikon DSLR shooters. The functions of many of the buttons can be customised to your own preference, allowing full control of the camera without the need to remove your eye from the viewfinder. Even the record button can be set for a function when in still photo mode. Overall there are fewer dedicated buttons than on the DSLR but with the i menu, you probably will not miss them.
Unfortunately the rear buttons are not backlighted like on the D850 but their layout soon becomes familiar.
The grip, customisation and the lightness of the camera means it is a pleasure to hold and use for extended periods of time.
Build quality of the Nikon Z6 is on par with the pro DSLR D850
The first thing you’re going to notice when shooting on the Nikon Z6 is how gorgeous the viewfinder and back LCD are.
Nikon’s 3.5 million dot EVF system on the Z6 camera
Electronic Viewfinder (EVF):
The EVF is one of my favourite things about the Z6, The EVF is approximately 0.5" (1.27cm) diagonal and 3.5 million dots (Quad VGA) fluorine-coated OLED electronic viewfinder that features approximately 0.8x magnification and 100% horizontal and vertical frame coverage. This viewfinder appears very large, noticeably larger than the D850's viewfinder, and I love how far the viewfinder extends behind the rear LCD, providing a comfortable amount of nose relief
Looking through you see a lot more information regarding exposure, drive mode, focus mode as well as a true representation of the exposure you have selected. The information in the viewfinder can be customised so you can select the information you need, including histograms and artificial horizon style level display. If it becomes too cluttered you can declutter with a touch of the DISP button, cycling through the modes and indcluding a completely information free view of the image.
The EVF can be zoomed to permit focus checking, ensuring that there is no excuse for out of focus shots. This offers significant benefits for macro shooting in particular, especially when using the focus peaking option to ensure critical sharpness in the scene.
Coming from a DSLR with optical viewfinder, the EVF takes a little getting used to, but bear with it and it will soon become more familiar.
Rear LCD Screen:
Like the EVF, the 3.2” 2.1million dot LCD is large, easy to read, and can display the most important photo information at a glance, The information available on the screen can be customised like the EVF, including an option to remove all information except battery and exposure, allowing you to concentrate on the scene.
The rear screen is a touch panel and operates like a smartphone with touch, swipe and pinch to zoom functionality. Most of the system settings and menu items can be changed by touching the screen icons. The screen tilts up and down so you can take photos at low levels without having to lie down in the mud!
Nikon Z6 Menu System for Customising Camera Buttons
Menus:
The Nikon Z is highly customizable and offers 3 dedicated profiles for stills and 3 for video modes. These U1, U2 and U3 modes are more like the settings on Nikon’s consumer cameras rather than the Custom Settings Banks on the pro DSLRs, but after a little while I became more comfortable using them - I never really got into the habit of switching between the different settings on the D850.
With a turn of a top dial, you can switch between landscape profile action shooting or portraiture profiles, for example, and if you switch to video you have 3 different profiles for that mode as well.
The i menu offers quick access most of the functions of the Z6 without needing to enter the main menu system and it can be customised Io show functions that you use most often. With the i menu button just under the focus selector joystick you never need to take your eye off the viewfinder to access and change settings.
Battery Life:
The Nikon website claims the EN-EL15b battery supplied with the camera should be good for approximately 350 shots but in reality I tend to get between 600 and 800 depending upon whether I use the rear LCD or the EVF. I have not used the video mode so cannot personally comment on the battery life for videography, but I have seen non the internet that each battery will give approximately 1 hour of shooting. While these numbers are significantly less than I managed with my DSLR, it is very rarely that I would shoot more than 600 photos without being able to recharge the battery. I would recommend you have at least one spare and the good news is that the EN-EL15 and EN-EL15a batteries from the Nikon DSLR range are fully compatible with the Z6. (Only the EN-EL15b battery can be charged in the camera using the USB cable, however).
Image Quality:
The 24Mp Back Side Illuminated (BSI) sensor provides outstanding images with exceptional sharpness, clarity and colour. Although the sensor is fitted with an anti-aliasing filter that blurs the resolution slightly, the overall look of the image is as good as any other camera I have used. While the amount of detail in the images is not as great as the 45Mp D850 (or Z7) the images it provides are still extremely detailed and vibrant. The images I have taken with the Z6 are easily capable or printing at 30” x 20” without any degradation of quality.
The ISO performance is also exceptional. I use auto ISO without fear of too much noise. Low light performance is very good, better than the D850 and close to the performance of the Nikon D5,. The native ISO runs from 100 up to 51,200 although I have only shot up to 20,000. At this level the images are clearly noisy but preprocessing the images with DXO PureRAW and its DeepRAW AI noise reduction system provides extremely clean and noise free images. PureRAW also applies distortion and lens sharpness correction to achieve even better results.
100% crop image at ISO 11,400 taken through double glazed window and processed through DXO PureRAW
100% Cropped image taken at ISO 20,000 processed through DXO PureRAW
Note the above images have not been taken in low light - just to test the performance of the sensor.
Low light image taken at ISO 12,800 - raw file from camera (300% crop) with no noise reduction
f5.6, 1/8th second
Same image at ISO 12,800 (300% crop) processed through DXO PureRAW
I am extremely please with these images - the zoomed in views exaggerate the effects of the noise, but processing through DXO PureRAW provides very clean images at least up to the ISO 20,000 levels I have tested. In my early photography days ISO 400 film was a realistic high speed film and ISO 1600 reserved for black and white images at a push. The ISO levels achieved by today’s digital cameras would not have been dreamt about 30 years ago!
There have been reports on the internet of banding with the Z6 (and Z7) camera but these have been were images have been severely underexposed and pushed in post processing to test corrections. These are not generally real world conditions and I try not to underexpose by 6 stops in low light conditions. As such it is unlikely that many people will encounter this issue and I have not seen any evidence of banding in normal use.
Vibration Reduction:
The In Body Image Stabilisation (IBIS) works very well. The system uses 5 axis stabilisation with native Z-mount lenses giving up to 5 stops of latitude and allows the use of non-VR lenses and obtain steady shots at much slower shutter speeds than normal. Using F-mount lenses with the FTZ adapter reduces the stabilisation to 3 axis although still providing between 3 and 4 stops latitude.
If you attach an F mount lens with built-in optical VR it will activate and run continuously for as long as the camera is powered on. With DSLRs, the VR only becomes active as you press the focus/shutter button and remain active until the acquisition of the image, then it turns off. This isn’t really an issue but hearing the VR run on the lens constantly does make you wonder whether the battery is being drained. The nature Z mount lenses are almost silent, but certain F-mount lenses can be particularly noisy in this respect.
You cannot disengage the lens VR and switch to in-camera VR only, doing so will turn off the entire VR system. The camera is not configurable to allow Optical VR only or in-camera VR separately. There is some logic in this approach since the VR equipped lenses tend to be longer focal length and there is some evidence to suggest that lens based optical stabilisation works better than IBIS for long telephoto lenses.
Focus Performance:
I have read a lot of posts on the internet that state that focussing with the Z6 is poor. I am mainly a landscape photographer but in my opinion the Z6 focus performance for landscapes is as good as any of my DSLRs. I tend to use mainly single point AF and the image achieves focus very quickly using both Z-mount lenses and adapted F-mount lenses. The image just seems to pop into focus.
The benefit of using on-sensor AF points is that images are sharp - many of my F-mount lenses had to be micr-adjusted to achieve best results on my D850, but this is not needed on the Z6. Images appear very sharp indeed.
With the updated firmware the Nikon Z6 now offers auto face, eye, and subject tracking modes which have been significantly improved with the latest firmware upgrades. Face and eye detection seem to be quite good following the firmware updates - although I have not tried any other camera systems to compare them. The system easily locks on to eyes and faces, even from a distance, and tracks them as the subject moves around the screen. The face detection and eye detection all seem to work quite well in real-world situations - again I’ve seen internet blogs and YouTube videos that concentrate on trying to prove the system doesn’t work by using unrealistic situations.
Focus tracking can now be achieved with a custom button setting, rather than the previous method of selecting tracking, then focusing, the selecting the OK button, then selecting Ok again to exit tracking mode if the camera lost the focus. Now I can start tracking simply by pressing the FN2 button without having to lower the viewfinder from my eye!
There are some issues though with the camera sometimes selecting shapes in the background and I can see how this could cause problems with fast moving wildlife like birds in flight, but for general day to day shooting I have not seen many problems.
Wireless:
The Nikon Z6 features both bluetooth and wireless connectivity. You can wirelessly transfer images to your smartphone via the Nikon SnapBridge app as you shoot and you can remotely control the camera using the app - convenient if you don’t have a remote trigger. The WiFi feature can also be used to connect to a WiFi router so you could, for example, connect to your home network and transfer images to a PC running Lightroom to give a wirelessly tethered facility. I have tried this on a number of occasions, particularly useful for macro studio setups, and found it to be very quick and stable.
Nikon FTZ Adapter
Using the FTZ adapter:
I tested all of my Nikkor and Sigma lenses and all appear to work perfectly using the FTZ adapter. The majority of the F-mount lenses even appear better on the Z6 than on the DSLRs. This only applies to AF-S or newer AF-P lenses - any screw driven lenses will not autofocus using the Z6 as the camera and FTZ adapter lack the screw drive system. Older lenses will mount on the adapter but only operate in manual focus mode.
The adapter has no optical impact on the quality of the images - it simply moves the lens away from the sensor to account for the different flange distances between the z-mount and f-mount cameras.
The focus speed for most adapted F-mount lenses seems slightly slower and varies from lens to lens, especially in low light, but I have not found this to be a problem in my types of photography - action and fast wildlife may show up the differences more.
The FTZ adapter weighs approximately 140g so even with the FTZ attached the Z6/FTZ combination weighs about 800g, still significantly lighter than the 1kg D850. The adapter does push the lenses approximately 30mm away from the front of the camera so can tend to make heavier lenses front heavy. I was concerned that this may put strain on the camera mount when using heavier lenses with the camera mounted on a tripod, but came across the excellent little FTZ L-bracket manufactured by Kirk Enterprises. This provides a sturdy mount for the FTZ adapter and takes any strain away from the camera mount.
Kirk Enterprises L-Bracket for Nikon FTZ adapter
Video:
The best video resolution is 4K (3840x2160) at 30/25/24p with no crop from the sensor but there are also resolutions of 1080 with up to 120fps and lower if required.
I have not compared video from the Z6 to other cameras but the general opinion is that the Nikon Z6 video performance is better than any other Nikon camera to date.
Limitations:
One Card Slot - This is the much-debated topic on the internet, the Z6 camera only has one XQD/CFE slot, if you can’t live with one then you will need to buy the recently released Z6 II. I am not a working professional photographer but over the many years that I have been using digital cameras, and the many thousands of images taken, I have never had a memory card fail or become corrupted. I have always used Compact Flash or XQD cards however, rather than the more flimsy SD cards so this may explain why I haven’t seen a failure. The XQD cards are extremely rugged and robust.
No Battery Grip - I have purchased Nikon’s battery grips for all of my previous cameras as I felt it made them more balanced in use and meant that I could use the truly amazing EN-EL18 batteries with all of my cameras. It was initially rumoured that a battery grip would be offered for the Z6 but due to a lack of coupling contacts on the bottom of the cameras there will never be a true working grip like the DSLRs received. Nikon did release a battery grip that is both ugly, completely different texture to the camera and not all that useful as it had no portrait orientation control functions. It did however permit the use of an extra EN-EL15 battery. Given my reasons for purchasing a lightweight camera system I am not sure I would have purchased the grip anyway so this is not much of an issue.
Conclusions:
Based on my experience the Nikon Z6 is an excellent camera for landscape, macro, portraiture, and general photography. The Nikon Z6 can do everything equally as well as my DSLRs, and in many cases do it better. In fact, I find it better in many regards especially for macro, landscape where the EVF and focus peaking offers significant advantages. The ability to use focus points across the whole frame (rather than concentrated towards the central areas) permits subjects to be located right at the edges of the frame without the need to focus and recompose. With the smaller size Z, you might just want to start considering street photography again.
The Nikon Z6 experience has been very pleasant, The camera is easy to work with and a pleasure to carry. It offers quick access to its many highly customisable features that can address most photography needs and its compatibility with Nikon's CLS flash systems and F-mount lenses means that you can switch to the new Z system without having to get rid of your previous equipment. Undoubtably, the new and future Z-mount lenses are superior to the older F-mount versions, but these F-mount lenses are still extremely sharp and excellent lenses even on the Z system cameras.
The Nikon Z6 is a fantastic camera
Pros:
Gorgeous EVF and LCD screen
Detailed information provided in the viewfinder and LCD including live histogram
The EVF displays the exposure in real-time so no need for chimping
No mirror for more quieter operation with less vibration - gives true silent shooting
Autofocus is directly off the sensor with no need for AF Fine Tune
Lighter and smaller - makes you want to use the camera and not dread carrying it
Better video and live view - the Nikon Z6 has the best video in any Nikon camera to date
Faster frame rates up to 12fps
Improved video autofocus compared to DSLRs
The best time-lapse of any camera
Good ergonomics
Full customisation with 3 photo profiles and 3 video profiles via manual dial
Bluetooth and Wifi connectivity
Light weight and compact size
Cons:
3D tracking AF not up to standards of DSLR
Single memory card slot.
Comparison to Nikon Z6 II:
Nikon have recently released their second generation Mirrorless Cameras, the Z6 II and Z7 II. These cameras are undoubtably improved over the first generation models, but there are a lot of similarities between the two cameras, so which should you buy?
The Z6 II has dual EXPEED 6 processors (compared to the single processor in the Z6) that provides enhanced autofocus performance in low light, improved autofocus tracking, faster frame rate (14FPS rather than 12), and improved buffer (124 shots rather than 34). The Z6 II also has dual card slots (one XQD and one SDHC) for redundancy or overflow storage and a proper portrait mode battery grip.
While some of these improvements will be crucial for sports and action photographers, much of the remainder is identical between the Z6 and Z6 II. Both currently remain on sale, but the Z6 price has been reduced. In the UK, the difference between the Z6 and Z6 II is currently just over £500.
Given the similarities and identical image quality of the two cameras it raises a question about whether the improved AF, frame rate and dual card slots are worth the extra £500. For photographers who need to track fast moving objects like sports and birds in flight the improved AF performance will probably be yes. For wedding photographers the dual card slots will probably convince them to go for the newer model. Many pros will be waiting for the Nikon Z9 I suspect.
For landscape and other photographers, however, the performance of the first generation Z6 would probably be sufficient to warrant the £500 saving, which could then be put towards the purchase of the excellent 24-70 f4 S lens (At the time of writing Amazon UK currently sell the Nikon Z6 + FTZ + 24-70 F4 kit for approximately £50 more than the Z6 II Body only!).