Today I wanted to show you my first shots and talk a little bit about the Nikon Z6. This is a mirrorless camera from Nikon. There are two versions, there’s the higher end Z7 and this is the Z6. This is the competitor, I guess you would say with the Sony a7 III and then maybe the Z7 would be the competitor of the a7R III. I was super excited about trying out this camera because when I was at NAB, I stopped by the Nikon booth and they had a bunch of them on display and I’d been maybe a little intrigued from the beginning because Nikon just kind of jumped in and started making mirrorless cameras where Canon kind of dabbled in it a little bit, had some failures and then kind of got serious about it.
Nikon Z6 with 24-70mm f/4: http://jerad.link/nikonz6kit
Nikon Z6 Body Only: http://jerad.link/nikonz6
64 GB XQD Card: http://jerad.link/xqd64gb
So I was really interested to see the camera. I spent a few minutes with it and was just really impressed with how it was performing with Nikon DSLR style lenses adapted to it, the autofocus with super snappy. That was one of the reasons why when I switched to Sony, I got rid of all my Canon glass because even with the adapters, it still was just a slow process. I mean, yeah, I was putting Canon glass on a Sony and this is Nikon, like older Nikon glass on newer Nikon icon system. So something could be said for that. But nonetheless, it still just, I wasn’t expecting it to be that good of a process. So I talked to somebody at the Nikon booth and they said that they would send me a Z6 to play with and so I’ve been spending some time with it. I’ve been out shooting in just the normal scenarios that I typically would be shooting in. Haven’t done anything professional with this camera yet, but I have gone out and shot a lot of different things just going on.
So I think maybe the type of person that would buy this camera anyways would be someone who wanted a higher end camera for taking photos of just their everyday life, things that are going on, maybe special events and some sports and stuff like that. So that’s where I spent most of my time with this camera. Of course, I have a couple of professional events coming up that I’m going to be shooting and I’ll have this camera. Nikon has it on lend to me for quite some time, so I’m going to have a lot of time to spend with it and I’ll probably come back with a full review after I’ve spent at least another couple of weeks with the camera because for me, Nikon is kind of a new experience. I don’t have a whole lot of experience with Nikon cameras and so I really wanted to make sure that I understood what this camera was capable of.
Now if you’ve been following my YouTube channel for any length of time, you know that one of my most popular videos on the channel is actually a settings video on the D7200, very popular camera, kind of a entry level DSLR, but has a lot of good features and that video did really well on this channel. So that was my first actual dive into Nikon DSLRs, this being my second but with a mirrorless system. So I’m going to take some more time before I come back and do a full review. But I wanted to talk about some of the things that are stand out features right from the get go. The first is that the autofocus is super fast. I am very impressed with the autofocus system on this camera. It’s very quick. It’s pretty accurate.
I upgraded the firmware to the Eye autofocus and that does work pretty well. I have seen it kind of be hit or miss at times. I think Sony really does kind of have that locked down, but the Eye autofocus is fantastic on this camera when we compare to the fact that we just didn’t have Eye autofocus prior, so not too bad. The display on the back of the camera is absolutely fantastic. It’s a beautiful display, nice and large so you can see all the details in your images and zoom in and make sure that you’ve got focus on your subjects. They sent it to me with the kit. Essentially, it’s kind of a kit lens, I guess, the 24 to 70 f/4. I do have the 24-70 f/2.8 on the way and I’m curious to see how it compares to the Sony G Master 24-70 which is what I shoot on quite a bit. It’s what’s on the camera that I’m looking into right now.
So things that I haven’t really done much with this camera yet is played with video. Obviously, it’s been touted as a fantastic camera for shooting video, especially when paired with like an Atomos Ninja V. That’s something that was heavily shown off at NAB this year and so I’m excited to play around and do more with that. But what really stood out to me was just how easy this camera is to use. Being that it felt like I was driving on the opposite side of the road for a little while. I got used to it really quickly and found that some of the button layouts, absolutely were kind of, I wouldn’t say game changing, but they definitely made my flow of shooting photos a lot easier.
For example, the dedicated ISO button here that makes it very easy for you to toggle through your ISO and increase or decrease without having to look at the camera. I’ve had to remap buttons on my other cameras to make that easily adjustable, especially on Sony cameras, so I really liked that. I love the fact that this camera has the touchscreen on the back. I’m always tapping to focus and moving that around. Also it has that Kinda D-pad on it or a joystick on the back that makes it very easy for me to move that autofocus point around and it’s super responsive. I’m the type of person that shoots with selective point autofocus all the time. So I like to put that focus point exactly where I want it to be. I don’t like having to pull the camera out from in front of my face and look and see where my autofocus point is. So having that joystick right there is absolutely fantastic.
I love the dedicated switch for switching between photo and video mode instead of having to go up to the toggle on the top. It’s just an easy flick of the switch and I’m ready to go and it remembers its settings. So if you have photo specific settings, you’re shooting photos and then you have video specific settings, it remembers those video settings. So I’m not having to constantly go and adjust my settings or use some sort of a custom mode to remember the settings so that I don’t have to remove them and them all the time. That’s absolutely something that’s a bummer on a lot of the other cameras.
So I’ve been showing you some photos and some of the things that I really like about this camera. I think it’s an absolute fantastic debut into the world of mirrorless for Nikon. It’s a great camera. I’m excited to see what they have coming out in the future with upgrades and firmware and different things. They are also launching a whole lot of lenses and so it will be interesting to see what happens with the lenses. Later on next month, I will be comparing this with the Canon EOS R and spending some time comparing it across not only with the EOS R but with the Sony a7 III as well. So if that’s something that you might be interested in, I would love for you to check that out. Make sure to subscribe to the channel here so that you can get updates. Click that little bell icon so you get notified when we put out the videos. You can also go over to jerad.photo.
I’m going to be putting out some settings videos also for this camera. I think that even though it is a great camera out of the box, there are a few settings that I still tweaked just to give it that better experience overall. So make sure to check that video out as well. Always, if you want to learn how to use your cameras better, make sure to check out the Ditch Auto – Learn to Shoot in Manual Mode Course. I’m in the process of revising it right now, but it’s a free course you sign up for and we teach you everything that you need to know about shooting in manual mode, which of course is how you get the best quality photos out of your camera. Thanks so much for checking this out and I hope to see you back in the next one.
