Besides not really promoting the ZR as a stills camera, it seems that the crowd that's been using pre-production ZR's has mostly glossed over one thing: cards.
While they gush over the R3D raw footage from the ZR, there's two small issues that are not getting talked about much: (1) cost, and (2) accessibility.
Let's start with accessibility. Because Nikon didn't put extra 1/4" mounting or cold shoes on the body, you're likely going to put a cage on the camera for video work. The SmallRig cage has the cutout for the battery door (the cards are behind the door), but you're still not going to want to be loading and unloading cards from the camera constantly. Particularly if you use any kind of external stability (gimbal, tripod).
Which brings me to the cost point: R3D consumes about 1TB every half hour of capture. A Nextorage B2Pro 1.33TB will record as much as 46 minutes of R3D footage, but that card lists for US$1100, so you're spending US$24 a minute and then have to pull the card out of the camera and either download that and put it back in (too time consuming and disruptive), or have another card handy and ready to go. Yes, there are less expensive cards that will work (and have Nikon's approval), such as the Nextorage B3AE, which runs US$400 for a terabyte. That's still over US$11 a minute. If you can find one (they're out of stock pretty much everywhere because, well, the ZR...).
Once you drop down to any of the other available video formats (e.g. 10-bit H.265 N-Log), the primary advantage of the ZR simply becomes the camera's small size, as it's not producing anything really different than the Z6III.
It's quite obvious to me at this point that the RED connection is indeed the outstanding video feature of the ZR. Specifically R3D raw and RED LUTs. I've not seen better 6K footage from a small camera, for sure, and the bright screen with LUT monitoring is also unique.
Now, I just need a RED Raptor to work through my review comparisons...
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Bonus: The Nextorage B3AE cards are probably the card of choice for R3D raw users at the moment, but you need one other thing: a CFexpress 4.0 card reader and a USB4 user interface. For example, the Nextorage NX-SB1PRO. Why? Because if you are going to use 1TB+ cards to record your raw video, you're going to want 40Gbs transfer speeds to your computer, not 5Gbs or 10Gbs.
