The quote from dpreview's interview with Naoyuki Murakami of Nikon: "The Z 9 is the most powerful Nikon flagship ever, and it will exceed expectations for every genre of photography and video, even surpassing the performance of the D6."
I've been using the Z9 for the past several weeks thanks to a loaner from Nikon Inc., plus the early unit I bought that replaced it. Do I think that quote is accurate?
No.
I'm still only starting my full-on testing of the Z9, but just from my initial use I can say that the Z9 falls short of the quote in several ways:
- For landscape work, the Z7 II is about a third of a stop better than the Z9 at base ISO (64). Expectations were that the Z9 would at least equal the Z7 II.
- For indoor event/sports work, the Z9 is about a half stop worse than the D6 starting around ISO 3200. Expectations when Nikon started using sports examples were that the Z9 would match the D6.
Obviously, expectations weren't met for both those things, and I'm pretty sure we'll find more. And that's just speaking about dynamic range, basically. (Note: we're not talking about my personal expectations here, but the general Nikon communities' sense; a lot of those NPS Priority Purchase orders were placed based upon those expectations, and I know that because I talked this over with a lot of pros who were trying to figure out whether to jump or not.)
For portrait work in the studio, where's the Portrait impression balance setting on the Z9 (the Z7 II has it)? For sports/event work where's the committed closest subject priority focus mode? Moreover, the JPEG+JPEG buffer isn't as good on the Z9 as the D6 for some reason.
"Every genre"? No.
"Surpassing...the D6"? Not in all things, for sure.
Now, could Nikon make the Z9 exceed expectations across genres? Probably. While I don't think they can do anything about the dynamic range as that's pretty locked in by the image sensor, nevertheless I'd be fine with the dynamic range if everything else were addressed.
I've outlined 30 things that can/should change in firmware. I'm sure I'll find more as I continue my testing and work through every feature for my eventual book on the Z9. It's actually in those "smaller" things that I think Nikon needs to address to truly make the Z9 a flagship that's truly memorable.
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It's amazing to see how many people read the above article and then attempted to prove me wrong because what I wrote doesn't agree with their world view of the camera overall. As I've outlined in many places in many ways, the Z9 is a fine camera, arguably the best in an all-around sense that Nikon has made. However, it does not exceed some other Nikon models in some attributes, and it's important to understand that. I only pointed out two items that I keep getting feedback on from others as they have started using their Z9s. I'm sure we'll find more.
