I still remember both the D1 launch and D3 launch very well. While both of them set important milestones for (digital) photography, Nikon's lead never lasted all that long. The D3 was announced in August 2007 and at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, people observed roughly equal numbers of Canon white lenses and Nikon black super teles. Prior to that, Canon totally dominated sports photography for a couple of decades. However, after a few years, past the 2012 36MP D800, Nikon was gradually falling behind again. It only took a few more years for Sony to take the lead for mirrorless and Nikon fell into 3rd place.
The Canon R1 should be next to take the crown in a year's time
Canon is certainly a strong contender and so is Sony, although personally I don't like those small Sony bodies, as a company, they have great electronics in general.
By doing what? Everyone’s AF is great at this point, even the R3 is amazing. They’re already doing 30 FPS in the R3. With a likely $10,000 price point (even the R3 is priced above the Z9), what do you think might be in there justifies the price tag?
What is it that people think is coming? The camera industry is pretty slow moving. I feel like the switch to mirrorless cameras has people convinced that things are going to move significantly faster than ever before. Technology doesn’t really do that.
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The Z6 is about three years old and the improved autofocus in the Z6II makes it look dated although it's own autofocus is considered below average vs. the competition. The technology is changing faster than it appears. When they were working on the Z6 they did not account for the jump in autofocus technology and it left them with a product they had to refresh much faster than anticipated.
The Z6’s autofocus was dated when it came out. It didn’t even have eye AF, it was added via a firmware update. That’s why Sony took over the mirrorless space. Nikon and Canon weren’t even in the mirrorless space, so both first gen cameras were behind where Sony was.
Yeah, Sony really innovated and established the capabilities of mirrorless cameras. Although the Z9 isn’t just a catchup IMO.
I wonder whether you remember that technologies changed rapidly from the 1999 Nikon D1 to the 2007 D3, and it continued to evolve. The D3 broke new grounds on high-ISO results, but the 2009 D3s got much better ....
On the Z9, the uncompressed RAW option is gone. And instead of lossy compressed, Nikon give it nicer-sounding names High Efficiency* and High Efficiency. It reminds me that junk bonds are also called high-yield bonds.
Use your imagination ;-)
I am waiting for a time when press conferences will not be filled with the incessant clack-clack-clack of mirror slap and shutter smack.
How about a specialized battery grip that can hold an M.2 ssd card with 4 PCie lanes and write speeds of 3300MB/s? Would instantly drop storage costs and improve performance. Third party would do it in an instant if there was a PCie pipeline to that part of the camera.
Technology will change over the next five to ten years, but there isn’t anything that Canon is going to release that’s going to make the A1 and Z9 irrelevant or make users of those cameras consider switching systems.
Err, no, it does not. The Z9 can do 20fps in 14-bit lossless RAW. It can do 30 fps in JPEG. The Sony A1 can do 30fps in RAW, but that is lossy 12-bit RAW. And the Z9 can do 120fps in 11MP JPEG.
I think the bottleneck is memory card speed here. 45MP files are about 55MB each. Write 20 of those per second to a memory card and you have to have a minimum sustained writing speed of 1100MB/s. Which is doable, though the camera probably isn't writing 100% of the time (due to overhead, starting new files, etc). 30 14-bit lossless frames per second though... yeah you're starting to get into trouble. The fastest cards do 1400MB/s sustained, so even they would not be able to cope.
I think type-B has a theoretical limit of 2000 MB/s. Matt Granger mentioned this in his video anyway.
I watched this video yesterday in which Seth Miranda hinted at more capabilities coming to the Z9 via firmware upgrades. He couldn't be specific of course, but he was quite enthusiastic.
