More musings from Thom Hogan regarding “something that might be called a Z9II.”
He lists the following as “low hanging fruit.”
- 5m dot or higher EVF. The natural thing would be to move to the Z6III viewfinder. That’s very low-hanging fruit. Going higher in dots or nits would still be relatively low-hanging, but requires a bit of extra work and may require more use of EXPEED’s bandwidth during composition.
- CFe 4.0 support. We have faster cards now, but the camera needs card slots that support them. This might not be as low-hanging a fruit as it first seems—at least not if you want to use all that speed—because EXPEED itself needs to support the extra PCIe lanes, and I don’t know if EXPEED7 does so directly or not.
- Fill in the missing features. Surprisingly, a Z9 after all the big firmware updates still doesn’t have HEIF, Pixel shift shooting, Nikon Imaging Cloud, and a few other things that appeared first on later, lesser cameras.
- Fix the customization. I outlined how the way to save and change configurations on the camera should work over six years ago. We still are using separate Banks and a single Save menu settings capability that is no longer anywhere close to state-of-the-art for a top end camera. A configuration-save rethink is mostly reprogramming the menu system to support it. Very low-hanging fruit, you just need some laborers to do the picking.
- Improve the existing features. Another pass on the machine learning for subject detection could improve focus, plus we should easily get things like stills-while-recording-video, and UVC direct streaming.
- Any kind of raw pre-release capture. It doesn’t matter if it’s 15 fps High efficiency, or even 10 fps Lossless compressed. While neither of those are optimal, they’re 100% better than we’ve got.
- Content authentication. Nikon was first to demonstrate this (on the original Z9), but it appears they’ll be last to ship it. This is fruit that probably will fall right off the tree if you look at it hard enough.
Can’t disagree with any of that. He also shares a list of “hard to reach fruit” and “fruit that is not yet ripe.” That, along with a list of capabilities of Canon R1 & Sony A1 II which are missing on the Z9.
I expect there will be robust commentary on Hogan’s post. Have at it BCG members!
Considering the next generation of Nikon Z System cameras, particularly the Z9II
www.zsystemuser.com
