Nikon Z System Thoughts

Looking to buy into this new system from Nikon?

My advice is simple – save your money, because the Nikon Z system appears to have ONE MASSIVE Achilles Heel.

It’s only provisioning you with one – YES, 1 – media slot.

That means you have ZERO storage media redundancy.

It doesn’t matter how quiet the new Nikon Z system Silent Shooting is, if you shoot a wedding on one of these cameras then you had better be carrying some hefty Liability insurance.

Do a corporate shoot and then try explaining why you need to do a re-shoot – you’ll never get your bill paid or work for them again!

I haven’t shot without backup ONCE since I bought my Nikon D3 11 years ago.

Leaving the photographer open to the vagaries of card failure without recourse to a redundant backup is the single biggest fubar any camera manufacturer can make.

And in this day and age it’s one that’s pretty much unforgivable in my opinion, especially when the purchase price of the Nikon Z cameras is so high.

The Sony fan club must be having a field-day with this.

For those of us who know what we’re talking about and are used to the way Nikon operate, it’ll be obvious that the Nikon Z cameras will be upgraded before too long.

And I’d bet that one feature of the upgraded models will be twin media slots!

Storage media doesn’t fail very often any more, but shooting to a single card is still a massive risk – one Nikon is in fact forcing upon you.

Nikon Z System Fallacy

Popular YouTubers like that idiot from Philadelphia have today stated that the wider 55mm Nikon Z mount lets in more light than the traditional 46.5mm F mount,  and he goes on to quote Nikon as saying it lets in 100% more light.

Let’s get one thing straight – it doesn’t and they didn’t!

The amount of light falling on the 36×24 sensor stays exactly the same.

If you look at a scene through a 4 foot square window, then switch to an 8 foot square window onto the same scene does the light from the scene go up?  No of course it bloody doesn’t!

What the 55mm Nikon Z mount does is give Nikon lens designers the ability to make lenses with WIDER internals – wider aperture holes/f-numbers.

So we can now design a lens with an aperture of f0.9 or f1.0 as opposed to f1.4 – which will indeed ‘transmit’ 100% or more light – f1.0 is 1 whole stop wider than f1.4.

But bare in mind that we are talking f-numbers here, and they actually have no true correlation with the real light output of a lens – for that we need T-stop values, and nobody’s mentioning those!

In Conclusion

It’s your money guys ‘n gals, so if you want to buy one then please feel free!

But just make sure you are aware of THE FACTS and are not being sold on THE HYPE.

Mirrorless cameras have a lot going for them – one would certainly agree with me when it comes to astro landscape photography that’s for sure.

But if I could afford to buy one just for astro then I wouldn’t touch one of these with a 10 foot pole – I’d be off down the Sony shop for sure!..and I can’t believe I just said that!

And that’s simply because of NO MEDIA BACKUP – WTF were Nikon thinking??

Z7 or D850?  D850 all day long – after all it’s got two card slots!