Here we go again.
The latest Nikon camera firmware release (version 1.10 for the Nikon Z50II) has renamed things. This time, it’s “Cloud Picture Control” being renamed to “Imaging Recipe.” Apparently someone at Nikon finally noticed that their naming conventions across their products don’t match. For what it’s worth, both Nikon’s names here are wrong from a sound product marketing management viewpoint. It should be Picture Control Basic, Picture Control Creative, and Picture Control Recipe, not Picture Control, Creative Picture Control, and Imaging Recipe.
The out of sync problem? Well, other Nikon cameras now need a firmware update to update the wording to match.
This is the problem that happens when you rush things and don’t have all parts of the company talking (and agreeing) with one another. From the user perspective, names that are different and keep changing cause cognitive dissonance and confusion about what is what. When you put that naming confusion on top of the unique and strange UI necessary to even connect your camera to Nikon Imaging Cloud (where Recipes mostly come from), you almost certainly get fewer users adapting something you went to great lengths to create. Moreover, that something here (Recipes and Nikon Imaging Cloud) are both unique and useful additions that are getting ignored by most of the Z9-generation users (and if you’re a Z9 user, you’re just SOOL).
If you make it hard to set up or difficult to understand, users don’t use it. When you make it both difficult to set up and hard to understand, users ignore it. So I have to ask: was Nikon Imaging Cloud and Imaging Recipes just make work for Nikon engineering teams, or did they actually expect users to embrace these new functions?
The truly sad aspect of this is that Nikon is probably the closest to any maker that can say “we have a complete range of products from entry (Z50II) to top-end pro (Z9) that operate and are controlled the same way, and really only differ on performance-related items.” Of course, now the Z50II uses different naming than the others, and the Z9 doesn’t even have the function that was renamed. Oops.