Another Nikon Z interview

Another interesting interview, this time by DigitalCameraWorld with Nikon’s Senior Product Manager. Here are the main points:

On the Nikon Z6 & Z7 target audience:

There’s the peer pressure in the photographic world, that says that mirrorless is the future. And I think everyone agrees it is – but it’s basically how quickly people get there. What our system does is is enable what I call a soft switch. So you could buy into the system, you could buy a body, you can use all of your old lenses.

On the EVF:

We’ve got the best quality monitor that we can fit – with 3.6 million dots. It’s got a refresh rate of 60 frames per second. But, as I said in the presentation, it’s not just about the monitor, it’s about the optics that we’ve put in front of it, in terms of making it clear, bright, large, and easy on the eye.

On the new Z-mount:

We don’t have to bend the light so much, and we can get much sharper images at the edges of the frame. And what we can do is just really concentrate on building high-quality lenses that, to be honest, are not as complicated as for the F-mount. (btw, I first reported the first Z-mount rumor back in January)

On the future of the Z Nikkor mirrorless lenses:

But I think after five years, I don’t you’ll ever see as many Z-mount lenses as F-mount lenses. But I think what you’ll see is the right set of lenses. Because, the direction here is all about the image quality. So the lenses, and the development are picked get that best image quality.

On Nikon Z6 & Z7 video features and Atoms:

Atomos have been involved in the development of the cameras. The new compact Atoms Ninja V external video recorder is already set up to work with the Z series.

On using IBIS + VR lenses:

It only ever do a maximum of five. But basically it will take the best readings from both. And then what you can have is if you have an old F-mount that doesn’t have VR, you’ve now got five stops of stabilisation with it.

On the one XQD memory card slot:

It’s about speed and space. So we had to have an XQD slot in our opinion, because of the amount of data and the write speed. So it had to be XQD because everything else isn’t fast enough. And there’s just not enough room to fit two in, in terms of our compact design that we’ve made. So we had to make the decision just to go with one card slot. So rather than compromise on the speed of the card and throttle the camera, we went with the higher speed card, but only one slot. The performance of XQD far outweighs anything else. And we’re going to bundle an XQD card in the camera for the first few months of sales as well. Just to help people switch.

On the Nikon Z6 & Z7 batter grip:

It’s not a grip, it’s a battery pack (without a portrait format shutter button).

On whether the Nikon D5 replacement be mirrorless or a DSLR:

Yeah, it’s a really good question. One that I don’t know the answer to at the moment. I think the safe thing to say is, we will watch how this first generation of the Z-system goes down very closely

The last paragraph:

We’re not abandoning DSLRs. Both systems will work alongside each other. What we can uniquely offer is the best DSLR system, and the best mirrorless system, side by side. The best of both worlds.

Via DigitalCameraWorld