Why I Still LOVE My Nikon Z6 Five Years Later

On the fifth anniversary of buying my first Nikon Z6, I look again at why this is still a great little mirrorless camera for photos and video.
#nikon #nikonz6

Gear used to make this video:
Nikon Z6 camera (B&H) (discontinued)

Chapters
Intro: 0:00
Z Series history: 0:37
Why Nikon Z6? 1:38
Z6 video: 2:26
Why/where Z6 in 2024? 3:23
My other Z6 reviews: 3:57
My Zed journey: 4:25
Z-mount lenses: 4:48
My Z6 experience: 4:58
Internal 8-bit video: 7:49
External video recording: 8:06
Cards: 8:43
Firmware: 9:04
The newer Z cameras w/ Expeed 7: 9:34
LCD screen: 10:11
Focus: 10:16
Why mirrorless? 10:56
Low light performance: 13:34
Timelapse: 14:50
Outro: 15:05
Z6 timelapse example: 15:55

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[MattIrwinPhotography]

Great video Ray, I too still have my 2x Z6 (and Z6 II) and one of my Z6's is set up as my permanent green screen camera, and being happily used today, and working exactly as you have described. Considering the image quality, and the cost they are today, for someone wanting a great start into 4K recording, or beautiful 24MP images, you can't go wrong. And of course there is endless Z lenses both first and third party, along with adapted options from F mount, E mount, L mount and so many more !!! Cheers Ray thanks again.

[JT]

I agree, the Z6/ Z6-2 are still superb camera's and I continue to use one on most days!

[nethbt]

I have DSLRs (D7k, D7100, D610, D750) and Mirrorless (ZF, Z6ii, Z6iii) ... The key is understanding the limitations of the camera you currently have...I still use DSLR because it's fun and nostalgic

[JukeBoxNuke]

Almost bought a Z6iii for weddings, but decided to stick with my current Z6 since I do so few weddings I can’t really justify the purchase. Besides the AF and some minor quirks of a first gen product, it’s a very capable camera especially in image quality and high ISO.

[jbtubman]

So many other videos are about making us unhappy with anything that isn't the latest and greatest; this is a refreshing change.

Tangentially related to the topic of switching to mirrorless: the term "mirrorless camera" has a sort of "horseless carriage" vibe to it. I wish we could think of a better term.

[tc]

I have a Z6ii and a Z8. There is still something about the image quality of the Z6ii that I like. If you don't need the quick autofocus and can fill the frame, the Z6ii is a fantastic camera.

[MainlightDrone]

I'm still using my Canon 5D3 that came out in 2012 and it's still a great camera, but I don't make a living with it like you. I tried to get the shutter count and found it impossible to get. Thanks, Canon. I appreciate how you always reason out your decisions and choices, Ray. Your material is valuable no matter which brand you own.

[kl]

Z6 is great but two things pushed me to use Z30 more when traveling… weight and the more important autofocus selection. The Z30 has better autofocus interface similar to Z6ii but with only one Expeed6 processor (same as Z6) and performs great. Like the ability to quickly switch between face/eye or animal or none unlike the Z6 interface where I have to use menu to do it which really slows me down. Z30 also lets me use wide-area with face/eye or animal on top of auto-area, extremely useful when doing travel photography. I’m sure Z6 can handle the new features as Nikon have demonstrated with the Z30, but probably didn’t release such firmware update because of Z7 which may have problems supporting such features due to 46MP sensor. I hope more Z6 owner make noise and push Nikon to make the autofocus update available to the Z6. Nikon, please?

[jpdj]

With a background in professional photography and photography school, there's a lot of real medium format as well as large format in there. "Digital" did not seem serious for a long time. Trying a 2MP compact and then a 12MP compact that both could not save raw (it's in there but cannot be brought out), I decided at one point that I would buy into a DSLR as soon as there was (a) a full frame sensor and (b) it did 24MP.
In and before 1980, a standard resolution for film and very good lenses was 100 LinePairs per millimetre (LP/mm) where the best lenses did (significantly) better in the center of the frame but significantly less in the corners. If we average this at 100 LP/mm, assume that each pair needs 2 photosites, then we need 34.6MP effective resolution in a sensor.
As we do not have the empty space that film has between grains, and as we have software that can scale up, or even sample up, (by inventing more pixels than are in the 100% file), the 24MP is a sweet spot.
I started to see the limitation of my older professional primes and bought 1.4G primes. These are very sharp, indeed.
But I had issues with that. Some of them my recurring rant since I bought my first Nikon (1975, an F2).
- The F mount lenses had significant chromatic aberration and the faster lenses had more of that (at full open aperture0.
- F mount lenses had subtly but easily noticeably visible to me tint differences
- The sharper and shallower Depth of Field 1.4G lenses did not facilitate single point AF ++ recompose as fast alternative to old manual focus, when fully opened, because of the shallow DoF. Phase One address the latter in their real medium format camera with a special sensor that measures camera rotation and adjusts focus (distance setting) to that.
- While this was more felt in "digital"with pixel pepping lurking all the time, the biggest rant still had to come. The 24MP Nikon has an OLPF and that filter has some distance from the sensor, which opens up to total reflection of colour cast across the entire frame. And I suffered from that.
So when Nikon was rumoured to come up with a mirrorless system with new lens designs, I started to broadcast to Nikon and fluencers that I wanted (a) less or zero chromatic aberration more than more resolution, (b) zero tint differences (could be a simple lens-specific ICC profile), (c) be freed from OLPF total reflection, (d) have an alternative to Phase One's motion sensor that works well but is dumb.

As to (c) the solution became to simply migrate to a full-frame Nikon with higher resolution than 36MP as these never have an OLPF. So 45MP became the choice.
As to (a) and (b) the Z lenses really answered my prayers.
Which left me hanging with (d).

I migrated to the Z 7 and invested into the "S" primes. Wow, these are great. Call me arrogant, but I look down on photographers shooting weddings and talking about background blur ("bokeh" is plain everyday common Japanese for "blur") of their lenses. What do you do when a bride does not look like a supermodel in your shots and complains about that? Say, but look at how beautiful the background blur is? Bokeh is not the decisive factor in getting your images in the National (Portrait) gallery or the Smithsonian or Museum of [...] Art.
The "S" class lenses answer my lens-dependent prayers and are great.

Initially, raw processing in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) would give me some Bayer noise because of its inadequate raw processing of Bayer colour images shot without OLPF. The Mudbricks (a mudbrick is AKA adobe) improved nothing to their ACR for cameras without OLPF that had become available since the Nikon D800E version of the otherwise identical D800 but has the OLPF Eliminated. Look in DxOMark what the OLPF does to the sharpness of the best F-mount lens in DxOMark by comparing that lens on the D800 to on the D800E. Are you shocked? Now also check what more MP do for that lens between a 24MP D with OLPF and a 36MP D800 with OLPF. Shocked? Next, to finish the homework, compare that lens on the 36MP D800E without OLPF to that lens on the D850 without OLPF.

Only last year, the Mudbricks launched their "Enhance AI Denoise" option into ACR (ACR is the Develop tab in Lightroom Classic LrC). When you see Bayer noise in your images from a camera without OLPF as grain in the blurry image zones, the low contrast zones, the darker zones, then apply this Enhance option. Or run the raw image through Topaz DeNoise AI that has years of head start on ACR, alternatively through DxO PureRAW that also has a head start on ACR (the algorithm in the PureRAW stand-alone plug-in is called DeepPRIME and also present in LrC competitor PhotoLab).
So now we have removed the OLPF and do not necessarily suffer consequences, my point (c) is behind me.

What about (d)? Well, the Z 7 is an excellent camera that produces beautiful raw files and I would still use it today if ... The mirrorless camera offers us a focusing tool in called Autofocus that works, but again needs tweaking during a shoot and to me is distracting.
It does better than optical focusing in darker circumstances, but "recognition AI AF" in lower light is frustrating.
When Nikon announced the Z 7ii, I pre-ordered it, assuming it would solve this kind of issues of mine. But it did not. Nikon assigned the processing power of the second EXPEED 6 to a higher FPS in the electronic viewfinder, while I had wanted better (low light) recognition AI AF. The Z 7 gives equally beautiful raw files as the Z 7ii. Differences may exist but are marginal.

The Z 9 then promised to solve my (c) with the EXPEED 7 and firmware that is twice as elaborate under the hood, but it is simply too big and heavy. It did not become clear to me what progress Nikon had made as to (c) to me. Influencers would not test, considering their test shots in their reviews with exposure details, under LV 10. And that's what I need.
In the meantime, Nikon released the Z 8. It was clear to me that Nikon had worked on its firmware with a different team, probably behind a different "Chinese Wall" (the metaphor used in large enterprise business to indicate confidentiality separation between people), than the team that had worked on the Z 9. I could not assume that a Z 9 would give me the experience that a Z 8 would. Then I bumped into a review of the Z 8 that did exactly what I needed (to know). And it became a balancing act to determine the upgrade moment - balancing between Z 7ii depreciation and Z 8 price coming down.
I upgraded to the Z 8 and this is the first camera that puts a smile on my face since since the Nikon F2 and a few years later the Sinar P.

Firmware version 2 makes the Z 8 even better and while I still have a wish list, it is great.

The Z 7, in the meantime, shortly after the launch of the Z 7ii, got a firmware upgrade to 3.0 that made having upgraded look silly. And this got even updated to version 3.4.
In that sense a Z 7 is a great camera after all these years since the launch.
It's a pity that Nikon has not adapted its firmware to run faster when in DX mode, by the way. The Z 7(ii) is a few millimetres smaller than a 20MP D500 APS-C camera (that doesn't have an OLPF so comparing it to a 24MP full frame with OLPF violates ceteris paribus). Now you know why the APS-C is so darned good. There must be some "real time" programming in the firmware (meaning program execution with the precision of the clock) and adapting lower resolution to higher frame rates and other performance characteristics may not be easy. But some people in the market "need" it.

But this video/post was about the original Z 6!
Yes, as long as you do not suffer from one or more of my (a)..(d) points, you can upsample its images in Topaz's Gigapixel AI to 32, 000 on the long side and at 3:2 aspect this gives ~680MP. You will be flabbergasted with images that Topaz's AI works with well.
Still, in some of my use cases, I cannot use it.
I would not use it as a second camera because the OLPF through ACR's Adobe Standard camera profile gives e.g. a yellower rendition that we can correct in post but don't want to have to.

[craigmckernan]

After picking up my first Z series camera, the Z6 camera last month, I'm pleased to see a video like this which is hard to disagree with anything you stated. The Z6 right now is still the best value in the line-up of Z bodies.

[martyseppala]

I use my Z6-2 to photograph real estate with the Z14-30, what a great combo. Thanks Ray

[bobpollack]

Ray, interesting video and a good point about. The Z6, “If it is not broke don’t fix it.”Right now I am moving over to a Z6II I am also looking for a new body later with a Z7II of a ZF. I have not yet made up my mind yet. The Z6 is more than a useful camera, to get started on.

[SimonBurnCreative]

It's good to see you talking about the Z6, it's a very underrated camera. I still use mine as my main workhorse for client shoots, it's fantastic. And although only 8-bit, the video quality is superb. 👍

[thomasasannes]

Thanks for the video! Great production, great sound, great video quality and nicely scripted. Keep up the good work!

[bozina]

There is nothing wrong with the Z6... even though it's several years old, I still use the 2 I own regularly for portraits, events, real estate, and street work. Other than resolution, I appreciate the output of the sensor in that camera more than the output I get from my Z7... As you mentioned, the Z6 also does so well in low light.

Since I have a pair of them and I'm waiting to see if Nikon will drop a Z6iii or not, I'm not sure what I might do next. The thing I personally miss on the original Z6 is a vertical grip with a shutter release (even though I didn't miss it enough to jump to the Z6ii).

If no Z6iii appears, then I'll likely trade the Z7 along with some Fuji gear and F Mount stuff and go for the Z8 or Z9. (I'm not a fan of that grip they made for the Z8 either.)

P.S. Great channel and content!

[malekith]

I got mine one year ago with the 24-70 F4 for 999€, that camera is really great :)

[peterrussell]

Ray, like you I bought two Z6 bodies the day they were announced and have never regretted it, nor been tempted to trade up to the Z6II. I subsequently added a Z9 and am about the get a second one, but, and this is important, I still regularly use my Z6 bodies for either B roll video or for stills where I don’t want to lug a heavy Z9 body around, or as an adjunct to my Z9. They’re still very good, competent capable cameras that would perhaps benefit from another firmware update, although that’s relatively insignificant for the majority of second line everyday uses. As you rightly point out, lenses are a much more valuable asset and you’d have to be a nerdish pixel-peeper to distinguish between the final files delivered to a client from any of the full frame Z generation. I’ve never had a client even ask what the shots were taken on, never mind poke around the metadata to check! Long live the ‘old’ Z6!

[NikolajFreiesleben]

IMO its the sensor that is so beautiful on the Z6 and the megabyte is all you need and no more.

[davewalker]

Had my Z6 for almost 4 years, has been fantastic, never letting me down and still love it. It is my primary travel/street/low light camera while my Z8 is my 'everything else' camera.A Z6iii is imminent I think so I may get one next year, relegating the Z6 to a back up role, maybe.

[ConfusedAstroStation-mbch]

love my Z6! first Nikon mirrorless. Almost switched to Sony (when it's hyper hyped) and Canon R5/R6. Tried Z6 and kept me in the Nikon fold and not jump ship. I have Z9 with 135 plena and S lenses (2.8 S zooms) and I still love using my Z6 with it. Actually, can't even tell which one is shot in any of my images between Z6 and Z9.