Nikon ZF - The Retro Camera You've Wanted!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enforeign Nikon ZF it is a full-frame retro inspired camera that combines a 24 megapixel sensor with the processor that we saw in the Z8 this camera delivers interesting options for photographers who prefer the Vintage aesthetic combined with one of the most powerful autofocus systems that you can find on the market welcome back everyone in this video we are going to be talking about the brand new Nikon ZF now before I get into this I do want to talk about my experience with this camera so the way it works with Nikon pre-releases they called me a few weeks back and they said would you like to check out the new ZF I said are you kidding I would love to check it out so the way that Nikon roll when they do these is they actually have to send somebody out with the camera to spend the entire day with you which is fine it's better than not having any time with it all so this is kind of a first impressions based on a long day of use with this where I got all my b-roll and all my sample images in one day but I can say this it is very impressive so this is not the Nikon ZF this is a Nikon fe2 and I brought this out because the design on the ZF pretty much takes all of its cues from cameras that were big in the 70s and the 80s so things like the FM series of cameras or the Fe series of cameras they were awesome cameras and I really like seeing Nikon bring this direction back the other thing that's really cool about it is that means you're going to get actual physical dials and buttons on your camera which is something that in the digital era we've strayed away from somewhat so it's really nice to see that back I was really excited to get to use this camera and it did not disappoint so I want to talk about my experience with it I want to show you some images but real quick let's talk about the specs that we're dealing with the Nikon ZF has a 24 megapixel backside illuminated CMOS sensor it is not a stack sensor and the camera does utilize a mechanical shutter but we have the new x-speed 7 processor so the autofocus performance is going to be pretty much on par with what we saw with the Z8 this means we've got nine different types of subject recognition it features 3D tracking and the camera can detect faces as small is three percent of the image frame another feature that I really liked is that when you're in manual focus it still uses face detect so the way this works is you'll go into manual focus and you'll still see the yellow box around faces or human subjects you can select between them and then what it allows you to do is when you punch in for critical focus it goes straight to the person's face not just the middle of the frame so this is extremely useful if you're using manual focus and let's say you're shooting people the ZF also features five axis image stabilization or as Nikon calls it vibration reduction on the sensor which gives us an eight stop increase on shutter speed possibilities for handheld shooting continuous shooting with the mechanical shutter is 14 frames per second you can go to 30 frames per second if you use the electronic shutter the shutter speed dial is pretty much exactly like what you see on cameras like the F3 the FM the Fe we also have dials for exposure compensation as well as ISO settings another nice detail is the shutter release and you kind of have to feel this in person to know what I'm talking about but what's really cool is it feels exactly like using an older camera it even has a threaded cable release socket on it a lot of attention was put into the details on this and it really is cool and while a sub-dial isn't exactly a retro feature this does have a retro function so we have a sub dial here for your mode selection switch so we can go between Stills mode video mode there's a dedicated black and white mode which is very cool if you just want to flip over in between color and black and white if you're shooting jpeg images let's say the camera also allows for Pixel shift shooting to create images up to 96 megapixels and you can select between 4 8 16 or 32 raw nef files to create the composite video on this camera is pretty much what you would expect from a non-stacked CMOS sensor and 24 megapixel variety you can shoot 4K video over sampled from 6K up to 30p as well as 4K 60 but if you're in crop mode or DX mode internal log recording is supported on this camera unlike the Z6 or the z62 the camera uses a 3.6 million dot OLED viewfinder with 0.8 X magnification the monitor is a fully articulating type with a 3.2 inch 2.1 million dot touch enabled LCD screen so a few observations from my somewhat limited time with this camera so I shot all day on this thing and I used exactly two lenses and this was my favorite part one of the lenses that I used was the nikor Z 40 millimeter F2 lens which is sort of a pancake super compact lens I have to say this I'm not normally a big fan of pancake or compact lenses because I feel like there's a trade-off with image quality however I was pleasantly surprised with the Nikon the 40 millimeter F2 is an awesome lens and it really complements this camera because it keeps the package really small like what you would have in an actual Retro Camera so that was pretty cool the other lens that I wanted to use and I was really dying to try that since it's a retro kind of configuration I wanted a retro look on the lens one of my favorite lenses that Nikon has ever made this is the 58 millimeter knocked F 1.2 this version is probably from around 1978 or or so it's one of my favorite lenses ever that it has such a unique look that you're not going to get on anything else you can stop it down to clear up aberrations and stuff but wide open it is just absolutely beautiful and it did just fine on this lens I just used the standard ftz adapter that Nikon makes for the Z series of cameras and I shot pretty much most of these images on this lens it was one of my favorite lenses and it did not disappoint on the ZF so one of the comments that I want to make is on the actual image quality that you're getting on the raw files I actually was able to shoot raw files and have not only the Nikon Studio software read them but also Lightroom which was a surprise normally new cameras when they come out you can't read raw files until they're actually updated but looking at the raw files on this camera this is some of the best Imaging I've seen on any Nikon camera to date some of this may have to do with the fact that we have a 24 megapixel backside illuminated sensor but it does really well in low light the high ISO performance is actually very impressive as well one of the problems that you have with digital cameras when you get into higher isos over 60 four hundred twelve thousand eight hundred and you get into that zone you start getting a lot of color noise and a lot of noise in general and I thought that the Nikon handled these extremely well in fact they could handle them maybe even a little bit better than what I was able to get with the Z8 and the z9 and that's not a Slam against those cameras it's just I think there's something special about this camera in terms of the quality you're getting I also really like the contrast definition that was coming off the raw files Nikon tend to lean on the contrasty side and of course if you're shooting raw this is something that you can go dial in however you want you can reduce contrast very easily in image editing software but they came in just slightly less contrasty than normal and it was very controllable and of course using a vintage lens with many of these shots I did want to get more of a film look and post-production to complement the look of the older Optics that I was using so a few years ago I actually started developing a set of presets that I could use to replicate the looks of older film stocks for digital files and that's what you're seeing me using this video I started this by emulating the various looks of Kodak slide films like Kodak Chrome or even the c41 emulsions such as portra after I had developed a set of 16 film emotions that I really liked I started working with Fujifilm stocks so I ended up making Emulsion simulations for provia velvia astia and even some of the older stuff that's no longer made such as natural I adapted both of these presets to both Lightroom and capture one and last year I decided to make them available for anyone who wants to check them out I'll put a link in the description this video if you want to try them for yourself typically I apply the film look that I want to have and then I adjust the white balance to make sure that's correct and these are pretty sensitive as film stocks have a very specific contrast to them but once that's dialed in these pictures are pretty much good to go and this speeds up my workflow considerably it gives me the look that I'm after if we look at some of these images though particularly the ones that I shot in the Jazz Club so this is very low light it's a basement jazz club it's very cool has a great vibe to it and you can see here and I did a lot of various testing with high Riso settings and if the camera performs very beautifully now one thing that's interesting about this cam camera and we've started to see this with a lot of cameras that have rolled out in the last couple years is when we have improvements with in-body image stabilization it opens up possibilities you can hand hold the your shots at much lower shutter speeds and so that's one thing that's really cool the other thing that's cool is you can go with a lower shutter speed you don't have to be wide open on the lens all the time so if you need that depth of field you can also stop down but the other interesting side effect of all this is that sometimes you're able to hand hold it a speed that is so slow that you're getting a lot of motion blur whether it's wind in a tree or somebody moving in the frame so it becomes more susceptible to that so that's why higher ISO is still very important in a camera it's really cool to see that the ZF has them both another thing that I'd like to point out with the ZF so forget the Retro styling for a second and just look at the fact that we've got a 24 megapixel camera and what does that mean well this camera does come in at a very interesting price point it is just under two thousand dollars U.S I think it is a much better camera than what we have with the existing Z6 cameras so the Z6 the z62 I think those were very good for what they were they were early on in Nikon's move to mirrorless even I say that it was just a couple of years ago but they were kind of version one and version two of that camera and this camera I would not think of as an extension to the Z6 at all it is its own thing plus it has the Retro styling which I personally kind of like the reason I think the retro design is really cool is when this has a lot to do with where I came from as a photographer but I want to share this with you so this is my ancient Nikon F3 this was my main camera for a number of years and it shows it's pretty worn but I love this camera and I did a review on this years and years ago early on in my channel because it was camera still using and you know we're dealing with a film camera here this was pre-autofocus and so a lot of the limitations on this camera are there and it is a little bit crude in its design so it's manual focus you're going to Twitch the lens to focus you twist the aperture ring to set the aperture and you can set your shutter speed manually but you could also put this in automatic so it's pretty much stuck in an aperture priority mode when you do that so you have two choices aperture prior priority or manual priority of course the iso is set and determined by the film speed so one of the things that I said in that review that far back is that there was something that I missed on digital cameras back in the DSLR age we still had some knobs and buttons to a degree but there was still a lot of diving down into computer menus and I always wanted a digital camera that had the Simplicity of my F3 or even my fe2 that I used as a backup but it was digital and it was Modern and with the Nikon ZF I think we finally got that it offers way more options than that but I love the way that Nikon designed this camera from a user interface standpoint everything's easy to use it's very simple I love just being able to put a manual focus lens on it and this is the kind of shooting that I like to do and it's the kind of stuff that just I don't know as a photographer it's the tool that I want for the job that I have now I wouldn't necessarily recommend this camera to somebody who needs a high speed camera for sports for wildlife something like that where you need just a high burst rate of shooting this camera is not that and I would also say that while I thought the video video quality was outstanding it's going to depend on your needs there too if you're just shooting stuff like I am for YouTube and you're just doing talking head stuff and you don't need a lot of high speed it's probably more than adequate however if you want 60 frames per second you don't want to be able to crop or if you want to be able to shoot even 120 frames a second it's going to be limitations that are on that 24 megapixel sensor and has to do with the scan speed of the CMOS but it's not going to achieve what you want it to do there but for most of us out there who don't necessarily have those requirements or somebody who wants to do a lot of Photography and maybe they want to do some video I think this is an awesome choice and I've stated my case with the Retro thing and if you guys have seen my videos before you know I'm a gigantic vintage lens nerd and so be able to be able to put my old Nikon F lenses on a camera that kind of looks the part and feels the part more importantly it was something that was really outstanding and special to me I would really love to do a full review on the Nikon ZF so stay tuned and we'll see if I can get to that I would love to know what you guys think so drop me a comment below I'll see you guys in the next video until then laterforeign Nikon ZF it is a full-frame retro inspired camera that combines a 24 megapixel sensor with the processor that we saw in the Z8 this camera delivers interesting options for photographers who prefer the Vintage aesthetic combined with one of the most powerful autofocus systems that you can find on the market welcome back everyone in this video we are going to be talking about the brand new Nikon ZF now before I get into this I do want to talk about my experience with this camera so the way it works with Nikon pre-releases they called me a few weeks back and they said would you like to check out the new ZF I said are you kidding I would love to check it out so the way that Nikon roll when they do these is they actually have to send somebody out with the camera to spend the entire day with you which is fine it's better than not having any time with it all so this is kind of a first impressions based on a long day of use with this where I got all my b-roll and all my sample images in one day but I can say this it is very impressive so this is not the Nikon ZF this is a Nikon fe2 and I brought this out because the design on the ZF pretty much takes all of its cues from cameras that were big in the 70s and the 80s so things like the FM series of cameras or the Fe series of cameras they were awesome cameras and I really like seeing Nikon bring this direction back the other thing that's really cool about it is that means you're going to get actual physical dials and buttons on your camera which is something that in the digital era we've strayed away from somewhat so it's really nice to see that back I was really excited to get to use this camera and it did not disappoint so I want to talk about my experience with it I want to show you some images but real quick let's talk about the specs that we're dealing with the Nikon ZF has a 24 megapixel backside illuminated CMOS sensor it is not a stack sensor and the camera does utilize a mechanical shutter but we have the new x-speed 7 processor so the autofocus performance is going to be pretty much on par with what we saw with the Z8 this means we've got nine different types of subject recognition it features 3D tracking and the camera can detect faces as small is three percent of the image frame another feature that I really liked is that when you're in manual focus it still uses face detect so the way this works is you'll go into manual focus and you'll still see the yellow box around faces or human subjects you can select between them and then what it allows you to do is when you punch in for critical focus it goes straight to the person's face not just the middle of the frame so this is extremely useful if you're using manual focus and let's say you're shooting people the ZF also features five axis image stabilization or as Nikon calls it vibration reduction on the sensor which gives us an eight stop increase on shutter speed possibilities for handheld shooting continuous shooting with the mechanical shutter is 14 frames per second you can go to 30 frames per second if you use the electronic shutter the shutter speed dial is pretty much exactly like what you see on cameras like the F3 the FM the Fe we also have dials for exposure compensation as well as ISO settings another nice detail is the shutter release and you kind of have to feel this in person to know what I'm talking about but what's really cool is it feels exactly like using an older camera it even has a threaded cable release socket on it a lot of attention was put into the details on this and it really is cool and while a sub-dial isn't exactly a retro feature this does have a retro function so we have a sub dial here for your mode selection switch so we can go between Stills mode video mode there's a dedicated black and white mode which is very cool if you just want to flip over in between color and black and white if you're shooting jpeg images let's say the camera also allows for Pixel shift shooting to create images up to 96 megapixels and you can select between 4 8 16 or 32 raw nef files to create the composite video on this camera is pretty much what you would expect from a non-stacked CMOS sensor and 24 megapixel variety you can shoot 4K video over sampled from 6K up to 30p as well as 4K 60 but if you're in crop mode or DX mode internal log recording is supported on this camera unlike the Z6 or the z62 the camera uses a 3.6 million dot OLED viewfinder with 0.8 X magnification the monitor is a fully articulating type with a 3.2 inch 2.1 million dot touch enabled LCD screen so a few observations from my somewhat limited time with this camera so I shot all day on this thing and I used exactly two lenses and this was my favorite part one of the lenses that I used was the nikor Z 40 millimeter F2 lens which is sort of a pancake super compact lens I have to say this I'm not normally a big fan of pancake or compact lenses because I feel like there's a trade-off with image quality however I was pleasantly surprised with the Nikon the 40 millimeter F2 is an awesome lens and it really complements this camera because it keeps the package really small like what you would have in an actual Retro Camera so that was pretty cool the other lens that I wanted to use and I was really dying to try that since it's a retro kind of configuration I wanted a retro look on the lens one of my favorite lenses that Nikon has ever made this is the 58 millimeter knocked F 1.2 this version is probably from around 1978 or or so it's one of my favorite lenses ever that it has such a unique look that you're not going to get on anything else you can stop it down to clear up aberrations and stuff but wide open it is just absolutely beautiful and it did just fine on this lens I just used the standard ftz adapter that Nikon makes for the Z series of cameras and I shot pretty much most of these images on this lens it was one of my favorite lenses and it did not disappoint on the ZF so one of the comments that I want to make is on the actual image quality that you're getting on the raw files I actually was able to shoot raw files and have not only the Nikon Studio software read them but also Lightroom which was a surprise normally new cameras when they come out you can't read raw files until they're actually updated but looking at the raw files on this camera this is some of the best Imaging I've seen on any Nikon camera to date some of this may have to do with the fact that we have a 24 megapixel backside illuminated sensor but it does really well in low light the high ISO performance is actually very impressive as well one of the problems that you have with digital cameras when you get into higher isos over 60 four hundred twelve thousand eight hundred and you get into that zone you start getting a lot of color noise and a lot of noise in general and I thought that the Nikon handled these extremely well in fact they could handle them maybe even a little bit better than what I was able to get with the Z8 and the z9 and that's not a Slam against those cameras it's just I think there's something special about this camera in terms of the quality you're getting I also really like the contrast definition that was coming off the raw files Nikon tend to lean on the contrasty side and of course if you're shooting raw this is something that you can go dial in however you want you can reduce contrast very easily in image editing software but they came in just slightly less contrasty than normal and it was very controllable and of course using a vintage lens with many of these shots I did want to get more of a film look and post-production to complement the look of the older Optics that I was using so a few years ago I actually started developing a set of presets that I could use to replicate the looks of older film stocks for digital files and that's what you're seeing me using this video I started this by emulating the various looks of Kodak slide films like Kodak Chrome or even the c41 emulsions such as portra after I had developed a set of 16 film emotions that I really liked I started working with Fujifilm stocks so I ended up making Emulsion simulations for provia velvia astia and even some of the older stuff that's no longer made such as natural I adapted both of these presets to both Lightroom and capture one and last year I decided to make them available for anyone who wants to check them out I'll put a link in the description this video if you want to try them for yourself typically I apply the film look that I want to have and then I adjust the white balance to make sure that's correct and these are pretty sensitive as film stocks have a very specific contrast to them but once that's dialed in these pictures are pretty much good to go and this speeds up my workflow considerably it gives me the look that I'm after if we look at some of these images though particularly the ones that I shot in the Jazz Club so this is very low light it's a basement jazz club it's very cool has a great vibe to it and you can see here and I did a lot of various testing with high Riso settings and if the camera performs very beautifully now one thing that's interesting about this cam camera and we've started to see this with a lot of cameras that have rolled out in the last couple years is when we have improvements with in-body image stabilization it opens up possibilities you can hand hold the your shots at much lower shutter speeds and so that's one thing that's really cool the other thing that's cool is you can go with a lower shutter speed you don't have to be wide open on the lens all the time so if you need that depth of field you can also stop down but the other interesting side effect of all this is that sometimes you're able to hand hold it a speed that is so slow that you're getting a lot of motion blur whether it's wind in a tree or somebody moving in the frame so it becomes more susceptible to that so that's why higher ISO is still very important in a camera it's really cool to see that the ZF has them both another thing that I'd like to point out with the ZF so forget the Retro styling for a second and just look at the fact that we've got a 24 megapixel camera and what does that mean well this camera does come in at a very interesting price point it is just under two thousand dollars U.S I think it is a much better camera than what we have with the existing Z6 cameras so the Z6 the z62 I think those were very good for what they were they were early on in Nikon's move to mirrorless even I say that it was just a couple of years ago but they were kind of version one and version two of that camera and this camera I would not think of as an extension to the Z6 at all it is its own thing plus it has the Retro styling which I personally kind of like the reason I think the retro design is really cool is when this has a lot to do with where I came from as a photographer but I want to share this with you so this is my ancient Nikon F3 this was my main camera for a number of years and it shows it's pretty worn but I love this camera and I did a review on this years and years ago early on in my channel because it was camera still using and you know we're dealing with a film camera here this was pre-autofocus and so a lot of the limitations on this camera are there and it is a little bit crude in its design so it's manual focus you're going to Twitch the lens to focus you twist the aperture ring to set the aperture and you can set your shutter speed manually but you could also put this in automatic so it's pretty much stuck in an aperture priority mode when you do that so you have two choices aperture prior priority or manual priority of course the iso is set and determined by the film speed so one of the things that I said in that review that far back is that there was something that I missed on digital cameras back in the DSLR age we still had some knobs and buttons to a degree but there was still a lot of diving down into computer menus and I always wanted a digital camera that had the Simplicity of my F3 or even my fe2 that I used as a backup but it was digital and it was Modern and with the Nikon ZF I think we finally got that it offers way more options than that but I love the way that Nikon designed this camera from a user interface standpoint everything's easy to use it's very simple I love just being able to put a manual focus lens on it and this is the kind of shooting that I like to do and it's the kind of stuff that just I don't know as a photographer it's the tool that I want for the job that I have now I wouldn't necessarily recommend this camera to somebody who needs a high speed camera for sports for wildlife something like that where you need just a high burst rate of shooting this camera is not that and I would also say that while I thought the video video quality was outstanding it's going to depend on your needs there too if you're just shooting stuff like I am for YouTube and you're just doing talking head stuff and you don't need a lot of high speed it's probably more than adequate however if you want 60 frames per second you don't want to be able to crop or if you want to be able to shoot even 120 frames a second it's going to be limitations that are on that 24 megapixel sensor and has to do with the scan speed of the CMOS but it's not going to achieve what you want it to do there but for most of us out there who don't necessarily have those requirements or somebody who wants to do a lot of Photography and maybe they want to do some video I think this is an awesome choice and I've stated my case with the Retro thing and if you guys have seen my videos before you know I'm a gigantic vintage lens nerd and so be able to be able to put my old Nikon F lenses on a camera that kind of looks the part and feels the part more importantly it was something that was really outstanding and special to me I would really love to do a full review on the Nikon ZF so stay tuned and we'll see if I can get to that I would love to know what you guys think so drop me a comment below I'll see you guys in the next video until then laterforeign Nikon ZF it is a full-frame retro inspired camera that combines a 24 megapixel sensor with the processor that we saw in the Z8 this camera delivers interesting options for photographers who prefer the Vintage aesthetic combined with one of the most powerful autofocus systems that you can find on the market welcome back everyone in this video we are going to be talking about the brand new Nikon ZF now before I get into this I do want to talk about my experience with this camera so the way it works with Nikon pre-releases they called me a few weeks back and they said would you like to check out the new ZF I said are you kidding I would love to check it out so the way that Nikon roll when they do these is they actually have to send somebody out with the camera to spend the entire day with you which is fine it's better than not having any time with it all so this is kind of a first impressions based on a long day of use with this where I got all my b-roll and all my sample images in one day but I can say this it is very impressive so this is not the Nikon ZF this is a Nikon fe2 and I brought this out because the design on the ZF pretty much takes all of its cues from cameras that were big in the 70s and the 80s so things like the FM series of cameras or the Fe series of cameras they were awesome cameras and I really like seeing Nikon bring this direction back the other thing that's really cool about it is that means you're going to get actual physical dials and buttons on your camera which is something that in the digital era we've strayed away from somewhat so it's really nice to see that back I was really excited to get to use this camera and it did not disappoint so I want to talk about my experience with it I want to show you some images but real quick let's talk about the specs that we're dealing with the Nikon ZF has a 24 megapixel backside illuminated CMOS sensor it is not a stack sensor and the camera does utilize a mechanical shutter but we have the new x-speed 7 processor so the autofocus performance is going to be pretty much on par with what we saw with the Z8 this means we've got nine different types of subject recognition it features 3D tracking and the camera can detect faces as small is three percent of the image frame another feature that I really liked is that when you're in manual focus it still uses face detect so the way this works is you'll go into manual focus and you'll still see the yellow box around faces or human subjects you can select between them and then what it allows you to do is when you punch in for critical focus it goes straight to the person's face not just the middle of the frame so this is extremely useful if you're using manual focus and let's say you're shooting people the ZF also features five axis image stabilization or as Nikon calls it vibration reduction on the sensor which gives us an eight stop increase on shutter speed possibilities for handheld shooting continuous shooting with the mechanical shutter is 14 frames per second you can go to 30 frames per second if you use the electronic shutter the shutter speed dial is pretty much exactly like what you see on cameras like the F3 the FM the Fe we also have dials for exposure compensation as well as ISO settings another nice detail is the shutter release and you kind of have to feel this in person to know what I'm talking about but what's really cool is it feels exactly like using an older camera it even has a threaded cable release socket on it a lot of attention was put into the details on this and it really is cool and while a sub-dial isn't exactly a retro feature this does have a retro function so we have a sub dial here for your mode selection switch so we can go between Stills mode video mode there's a dedicated black and white mode which is very cool if you just want to flip over in between color and black and white if you're shooting jpeg images let's say the camera also allows for Pixel shift shooting to create images up to 96 megapixels and you can select between 4 8 16 or 32 raw nef files to create the composite video on this camera is pretty much what you would expect from a non-stacked CMOS sensor and 24 megapixel variety you can shoot 4K video over sampled from 6K up to 30p as well as 4K 60 but if you're in crop mode or DX mode internal log recording is supported on this camera unlike the Z6 or the z62 the camera uses a 3.6 million dot OLED viewfinder with 0.8 X magnification the monitor is a fully articulating type with a 3.2 inch 2.1 million dot touch enabled LCD screen so a few observations from my somewhat limited time with this camera so I shot all day on this thing and I used exactly two lenses and this was my favorite part one of the lenses that I used was the nikor Z 40 millimeter F2 lens which is sort of a pancake super compact lens I have to say this I'm not normally a big fan of pancake or compact lenses because I feel like there's a trade-off with image quality however I was pleasantly surprised with the Nikon the 40 millimeter F2 is an awesome lens and it really complements this camera because it keeps the package really small like what you would have in an actual Retro Camera so that was pretty cool the other lens that I wanted to use and I was really dying to try that since it's a retro kind of configuration I wanted a retro look on the lens one of my favorite lenses that Nikon has ever made this is the 58 millimeter knocked F 1.2 this version is probably from around 1978 or or so it's one of my favorite lenses ever that it has such a unique look that you're not going to get on anything else you can stop it down to clear up aberrations and stuff but wide open it is just absolutely beautiful and it did just fine on this lens I just used the standard ftz adapter that Nikon makes for the Z series of cameras and I shot pretty much most of these images on this lens it was one of my favorite lenses and it did not disappoint on the ZF so one of the comments that I want to make is on the actual image quality that you're getting on the raw files I actually was able to shoot raw files and have not only the Nikon Studio software read them but also Lightroom which was a surprise normally new cameras when they come out you can't read raw files until they're actually updated but looking at the raw files on this camera this is some of the best Imaging I've seen on any Nikon camera to date some of this may have to do with the fact that we have a 24 megapixel backside illuminated sensor but it does really well in low light the high ISO performance is actually very impressive as well one of the problems that you have with digital cameras when you get into higher isos over 60 four hundred twelve thousand eight hundred and you get into that zone you start getting a lot of color noise and a lot of noise in general and I thought that the Nikon handled these extremely well in fact they could handle them maybe even a little bit better than what I was able to get with the Z8 and the z9 and that's not a Slam against those cameras it's just I think there's something special about this camera in terms of the quality you're getting I also really like the contrast definition that was coming off the raw files Nikon tend to lean on the contrasty side and of course if you're shooting raw this is something that you can go dial in however you want you can reduce contrast very easily in image editing software but they came in just slightly less contrasty than normal and it was very controllable and of course using a vintage lens with many of these shots I did want to get more of a film look and post-production to complement the look of the older Optics that I was using so a few years ago I actually started developing a set of presets that I could use to replicate the looks of older film stocks for digital files and that's what you're seeing me using this video I started this by emulating the various looks of Kodak slide films like Kodak Chrome or even the c41 emulsions such as portra after I had developed a set of 16 film emotions that I really liked I started working with Fujifilm stocks so I ended up making Emulsion simulations for provia velvia astia and even some of the older stuff that's no longer made such as natural I adapted both of these presets to both Lightroom and capture one and last year I decided to make them available for anyone who wants to check them out I'll put a link in the description this video if you want to try them for yourself typically I apply the film look that I want to have and then I adjust the white balance to make sure that's correct and these are pretty sensitive as film stocks have a very specific contrast to them but once that's dialed in these pictures are pretty much good to go and this speeds up my workflow considerably it gives me the look that I'm after if we look at some of these images though particularly the ones that I shot in the Jazz Club so this is very low light it's a basement jazz club it's very cool has a great vibe to it and you can see here and I did a lot of various testing with high Riso settings and if the camera performs very beautifully now one thing that's interesting about this cam camera and we've started to see this with a lot of cameras that have rolled out in the last couple years is when we have improvements with in-body image stabilization it opens up possibilities you can hand hold the your shots at much lower shutter speeds and so that's one thing that's really cool the other thing that's cool is you can go with a lower shutter speed you don't have to be wide open on the lens all the time so if you need that depth of field you can also stop down but the other interesting side effect of all this is that sometimes you're able to hand hold it a speed that is so slow that you're getting a lot of motion blur whether it's wind in a tree or somebody moving in the frame so it becomes more susceptible to that so that's why higher ISO is still very important in a camera it's really cool to see that the ZF has them both another thing that I'd like to point out with the ZF so forget the Retro styling for a second and just look at the fact that we've got a 24 megapixel camera and what does that mean well this camera does come in at a very interesting price point it is just under two thousand dollars U.S I think it is a much better camera than what we have with the existing Z6 cameras so the Z6 the z62 I think those were very good for what they were they were early on in Nikon's move to mirrorless even I say that it was just a couple of years ago but they were kind of version one and version two of that camera and this camera I would not think of as an extension to the Z6 at all it is its own thing plus it has the Retro styling which I personally kind of like the reason I think the retro design is really cool is when this has a lot to do with where I came from as a photographer but I want to share this with you so this is my ancient Nikon F3 this was my main camera for a number of years and it shows it's pretty worn but I love this camera and I did a review on this years and years ago early on in my channel because it was camera still using and you know we're dealing with a film camera here this was pre-autofocus and so a lot of the limitations on this camera are there and it is a little bit crude in its design so it's manual focus you're going to Twitch the lens to focus you twist the aperture ring to set the aperture and you can set your shutter speed manually but you could also put this in automatic so it's pretty much stuck in an aperture priority mode when you do that so you have two choices aperture prior priority or manual priority of course the iso is set and determined by the film speed so one of the things that I said in that review that far back is that there was something that I missed on digital cameras back in the DSLR age we still had some knobs and buttons to a degree but there was still a lot of diving down into computer menus and I always wanted a digital camera that had the Simplicity of my F3 or even my fe2 that I used as a backup but it was digital and it was Modern and with the Nikon ZF I think we finally got that it offers way more options than that but I love the way that Nikon designed this camera from a user interface standpoint everything's easy to use it's very simple I love just being able to put a manual focus lens on it and this is the kind of shooting that I like to do and it's the kind of stuff that just I don't know as a photographer it's the tool that I want for the job that I have now I wouldn't necessarily recommend this camera to somebody who needs a high speed camera for sports for wildlife something like that where you need just a high burst rate of shooting this camera is not that and I would also say that while I thought the video video quality was outstanding it's going to depend on your needs there too if you're just shooting stuff like I am for YouTube and you're just doing talking head stuff and you don't need a lot of high speed it's probably more than adequate however if you want 60 frames per second you don't want to be able to crop or if you want to be able to shoot even 120 frames a second it's going to be limitations that are on that 24 megapixel sensor and has to do with the scan speed of the CMOS but it's not going to achieve what you want it to do there but for most of us out there who don't necessarily have those requirements or somebody who wants to do a lot of Photography and maybe they want to do some video I think this is an awesome choice and I've stated my case with the Retro thing and if you guys have seen my videos before you know I'm a gigantic vintage lens nerd and so be able to be able to put my old Nikon F lenses on a camera that kind of looks the part and feels the part more importantly it was something that was really outstanding and special to me I would really love to do a full review on the Nikon ZF so stay tuned and we'll see if I can get to that I would love to know what you guys think so drop me a comment below I'll see you guys in the next video until then later\n"