New camera introductions from competitors often help us realize what things we really want in our cameras.
While a lot of folk are grumbling about "when will Nikon do global shutter," that wasn't actually the thing that the Sony A9 Mark III launch triggered for me in terms of wants.
First up, Sony is promising support for the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). Recently, Leica introduced the M11-P with CAI. What a lot of folk forget is that Nikon showed off a Z9 with CAI support back at an Adobe conference last year. So where is it? Will we be getting another major Z9 firmware update with CAI? I hope so. Indeed, it could possibly even appear before an A9 Mark III is actually sold to a customer, given that there will be a significant wait for that ;~).
The new feature I want the most that the A9 Mark III introduced, though, is button override of frame rate. I'd love to leave my Z9 set for, say, 10 fps, and have the ability to press a button while I'm taking photos and have the camera instantly and seamlessly switch to 20 fps. I'd actually expand on that: I want a button that will override to pre-capture release too. In other words, I'm at 10 fps normal release ready to photograph, but I press a button and I'm instantly in Pre-capture release (as I've set it in Custom Settings).
And while we're talking about Pre-capture release, yes, the A9 Mark III can do raw at 120 fps in pre-capture. But why is it we can't do raw in pre-capture, at all? It doesn't have to be 30 fps. I'd be happy with 20 fps, or even 15 fps, and even with switching to High efficiency from Lossless compressed.
Another thing I noted in the A9 Mark III was a priority function added to subject detection. I want that, too. What am I talking about? Well, Subject detection set to Auto has a sort of sequence it follows. Birds is kind of down the list. Why can't we have Auto (Birds priority) and Auto (Humans priority)? In other words, tell the camera to look for a bird first and foremost, but if it doesn't find one, then go through its human, animal, vehicles sequence, too.
Yes, global shutter has some impact on potential flash use, so ultimately I'll want that, too, but Nikon's not quite as far behind as you might think with high-speed flash sync. At least up through 1/8000, Nikon's Auto FP is reasonably competitive with what the Sony flashes can do with the A9 Mark III.
Meanwhile, why is it that my iPhone 15 Pro Max can record video to an external device through its USB-C port but my much more expensive Z9 can't?
Add all of these things to my Z9 and I don't need a new camera.
