The Z9 received a firmware update to version 3.0 today. While there's nothing ground shaking in the update, we did get a series of new functionality and performance improvements:
- Focus got a number of changes: the low light performance has been lowered by 0.5EV; 3D-tracking got several improvements including the ability to ignore objects passing between camera and subject, better animal focus, and the ability to change the 3D tracking indicator color; the tendency to focus on backgrounds has been reduced; focus peaking now works outside of manual focus mode; several reported bugs including two I reported; Focus shift shooting now has a focus position reset option.
- Video also got a few changes: high-frequency flicker reduction has been added to video; a hi-res zoom function has been added; timecode can be reset via remote; new Atomos options are available; bug fixes.
- Other notable changes: A C60 option (19mp JPEG) was added; a new DX image size option has been added; Prioritize viewfinder now has two options; improved Show effects of settings with a new flash option; provides better auto rotation in playback (rotates with camera); added a full format option for CFexpress cards; supports FTPS; added options to custom settings menu controls (some I and others had requested).
The update is a fairly extensive one and will take some time go through all the changes and verify their veracity and usefulness. This also will postpone my planned update of my book. You may have noted that I held the 2.1 update of the book back, and now you know why. I prefer to deal with all these major changes in one book update, not keep doing smaller iterations. As a one-man-band, the issues that come up with each book update (e.g. mail servers marking the updates as spam) take a great deal of my time and detract from other things I'm doing.
Firmware update via SnapBridge should be available by tomorrow (10/27). In the meantime, you can get the update here. Note that there is a new Supplement manual and the function charts have also been updated.
