Canon R3 vs. Nikon Z9 (Price)

Tambopata wrote:

Wildkits wrote:

RedFox88 wrote:

z9 is a slightly better R5 for $1600 more.

I'm a proud owner of an R5 and I don't believe that assertion for a second. The z9 is better than the R5 in almost every way.

The Z9 is no doubt the better camera than R5 , but by how much depends on your main use of the camera.

Totally agree. If you don't shoot action or low light, then any fairly recent camera will perform admirably. The question is which cameras are best for sports and fast-moving wildlife.  In my case it's small fast moving wildlife.   While using the R5, I find that unless the bird is fairly large, or close, or not surrounded by other distracting objects, the animal-eye focus is useless.  I, therefore, program the AF-on button for eye focus and the * button (to the right of AF-on) for point focus.  Invariably when eye focus fails (so often), I switch to point focus. In the videos I've seen so far, the Z9 has a much higher percentage of initial captures and tracks better than my R5.  If true--and this appears to be true for all three cameras released this year with stack sensors (including the R3)--then this represents a huge improvement for my use.

They both do 20fps@45, but don't forget that the speed of Z9 is built around lossy raw.

Nope.  The Z9 shoots 20fps@45MP in lossless compressed RAW.  Moreover, its 14-bit RAW rather than the R5's 12-bit RAW.  Now, to be fair, I don't perceive a significant drop in quality shooting 12-bit RAW.  I suspect in the vast majority of circumstances, the bit rate is a lot like DR--good enough is really good enough and 12-bit RAW is probably above that threshold.

If you shoot in losless raw with Z9 early reports indicate that the buffer is awfully small at around 40.

That's true shooting with a slow CFexpress card.  The advertised speed of CFexpress cards is marketing rubbish.  Rather, the minimum guaranteed write speed (MWS) is what matters.  Most companies advertise their cards' maximum write speed (usually 1100-1500 mb/sec), but if that speed cannot be sustained during a long burst, who cares?   The two fastest cards, Delkin Black and ProGrade Cobalt have MWS of 1400mb/sec, which is 10x the MWS of slow cards (140mb/sec) and 3.5x the MWS of ProGrade's Gold card (400mb/sec).  When Chris Nicholls of DPR TV did his test, he "borrowed" (he may have used the word "stole") a Sandisk card, which is one of the slowest CFexpress cards available.   Hopefully, they will go back and repeat the test with a faster card to correct this misinformation.

Lossy raw/12bit raw will in most situations be as good as 14bit and it's not a big deal for situations that need 20fps.

Agreed.

Nikon probably has put much work down in the new lossy raw formats, and I'm curious to see if there's much difference between lossless and lossy raw.

Judging from the Canon R5's cRAW--which The Digital Picture has shown to be of very high quality, I suspect that Nikon's lossy RAW is similar.  But the wonderful thing is there is no need to go there since Nikon shoots 20fps/45MP in lossless RAW. The caveat is that you will likely need to purchase expensive fast CFE cards (unfortunately speed does vary substantially among cards, so you need to select wisely) to sustain a decent burst rate, but fully exploiting cutting-edge technology  is rarely cheap.