REVIEW : Nikon Z50
/
I am grateful to Nikon for sending me one of their newest mirrorless cameras for evaluation. I am always appreciative of their support.
Reading the promotional literature for the Z50 it is clearly targeted at the social media user. The camera is built to be as small as possible, as simple to use as possible and has the connectivity capability required by the demanding social media user. Goal stated, goal achieved.
Guess what? I am so not the target buyer. I could care less for social media. For the most part I think it is a pox on society and that those who live there are more concerned about blasting someone else than facts or actually being creative. There you go. Please don’t bother sending all the “ok boomer” emails and comments, they’ll go straight to the trash, because, frankly, I don’t care.
The Z50 Kit with the 16-50 lens sells for around $1300 in Canada at time of writing. This is a bit less than the kit for the D7500 with the 18-140 zoom based on current bundle prices.
The Z50 is small. It evokes to me the Olympus OM-D E-M10. Candidly, it is too small for my average sized hands. Only the gift of stubby fingers makes it usable by me. The control layout is as advertised. it is stunningly simple. There is a large mode dial, an ISO button and an exposure compensation button on the top deck and a programmable AE/AF button on the back right where it should be for your thumb to find it. Even as a left eye shooter, the layout is quite usable. There is a large clear toggle for moving between stills and video.
The camera has a touch screen. I give Nikon beaucoup credit because try as I might, i could not activate it with my nose, a common challenge for me with touchscreens. The rear display is large and bright and tiltable. It has 1M dots, rather compromised in today’s market but ultimately it is usable and easy to see from an angle. Tilting is very useful when composing from different angles, but given that the camera is built for the social media savvy, who like selfies and vlogging, the fact that the screen only flips around to face front underneath the camera, where a tripod or gimbal would go is a design error.
The video capabilities include support for 4K at up to 30fps and Full HD at up to 120fps. Given the target buyer, this is ample and also optimal because it will reduce the editing load when shooting in 4K. It has a built in microphone and just like any camera with a built in microphone, your first accessory should be an external microphone if you will be recording audio. This is no shot at Nikon specifically, the facts are simple. Built in mics have all the sound quality of a dented soup can. A simple RODE shotgun, or Nikon’s own ME-1 in the shoe will do a stellar job for the target buyer. Personally I would save the $250 and go with a RODE and put the money into spare batteries and memory cards.
Storage is on the cheap and cheerful SDHC and SDXC card format. There is a single card slot, again just fine for the target buyer. Given the SD bus, there is no option to select your video bandwidth. Recording for stills is JPEG or RAW or both. Recording for video is MOV or MP4 and given the SD format limit is going to be fairly aggressively compressed. Given that the recorded video will show up on the web in the form of social media, no one should worry about the compression, because the web is way more compressed by design.
Battery life from the EL-25 battery is rated at 300 stills or 75 minutes of video, pretty consistent with other mirrorless cameras in this form factor. Charging takes a couple of hours. As always, I recommend getting a spare battery because of the EVF and the demand on the battery. No different from any other mirrorless camera.
The sensor is a DX format (crop sensor) with just under 21 megapixels. This means that the camera will do just fine for the web and even moderate sized prints at a proper viewing distance. Video resolution by comparison is so low (4K is only 8MP) that the buyer has nothing to worry about.
Shutter speed range is from 1/4000 of a second down to 30 seconds. More than sufficient for most shooters. ISO goes all the way to 51200 natively with the expected fake high and fake low ISOs. See the sample shots later on to determine your personal limit.
The lens mount is the Z mount. In order to offer a lower cost of entry, Nikon has built a Z range of lenses not fundamentally different from their F series of lenses for DX cameras. Glass elements, but the rest is plastic, including the mount on the 16-50 kit lens. The lens is the expected f/3.5-5.6 variable aperture, basically a newer version of the venerable 18-55/3.5-5.6 No professional would use this lens, but the target buyer is going to love it for size and weight. Sadly, Nikon still cheaps out by not putting a $20 lens hood in the box with the kit. That’s $20 retail so a build cost of about 32 cents. Nikon is not alone in this space, but still deserves a beating with a heavy stick. The target buyer is not going to be a serious photographer or videographer and NO accessory adds more value for the dollar than a lens hood.
Nikon also sent me their new Z zoom lens, a 50-250/4.5-6.3 that is reminiscent of the old DX 55-200. It’s small and light and optically slow. Again, this lens is designed to hit a price point and achieves that goal. Unfortunately, Nikon continues to treat these consumer lens as a lesser grade and fails to include a lens hood. Lens hoods are the most cost effective way to improve images easily and the new user will never know the value if one is not provided. I understand that Nikon may feel pressure from resellers to leave them out, so the reseller can do a high margin add-on. This is a failed concept as most reseller staff only know how to add-on extended warranties of spurious value and cheap crap “protective” filters that do nothing more than degrade the image quality.
Autofocus with the Z lenses is plenty quick for the target buyer. I would not say high speed sports fast, but quick enough for most uses. The professional sports photographer is not going to use this body anyway. While Nikon is working to increase the Z range, the only vaguely long zoom is the recently announced 70-200/2.8 Z and that means if you want long glass, you will need to use the Z to F lens mount adapter.
The lens mount adapter does the job, but is built tough and weighs almost half what the camera body alone weights. It also adds an inch to the front of the camera, throwing the weight balance off. This was no issue on the Z7, but in my opinion, becomes problematic on the Z50. I mounted Nikon’s superb 24-120/4 FX lens to the mount adapter. This made the entire package massively nose heavy and that combined with the hard for me to get a hand on small body challenging to use.
I hate to sound harsh when Nikon is so supportive of independents such as myself, but only consider mounting F glass via the mount adapter if your subject is dead or concrete. The autofocus performance is grindingly slow. Even in landscape work, I found the performance so horrible as to be mostly unusable. Focus is sharp when it is achieved, it just takes a REALLY long time to achieve it. If you have a repository of F mount lenses, the Z50 and mount adapter will give you apoplexy, so do not even bother.
Thus I gave up on the mount adapter. The story with flash is a bit better. There is a popup flash, which as a flash is harsh and ugly. However there is full support in the shoe for Nikon iTTL capable devices. Nikon sent me an SB5000 flash for my evaluation. I accept that I am not the norm as I load a flash in the bag before the second lens. The SB5000 works a charm with the Z50 just like the other Z cameras. Other than that, the camera is pretty brain dead when it comes to flash. There’s no Commander mode, and the port on the side is not correct to use Nikon’s WR10 remote flash adapter. Not that you could control it from the camera anyway. Probably fine for the average buyer, I however find it stupid to be omitted. It smells like feature removal on my more cynical days since it’s just firmware.
Given the lack of remote ability, I decided to try the wireless. Nikon did a lot to improve SnapBridge over the last couple of years. WiFi connection was effective but one still has to do the network dance. Bluetooth connectivity never worked. The app would see the camera, go through the connecting procedure and then pop up the Select Accessory window. This is where you should select the camera, except nothing appears. So even though the app can see the camera, I was unable to complete a successful connection. This is sad as it reminds me of the utter crap that SnapBridge used to be. My device is running the current iOS and the SnapBridge version is the latest from the app store. The firmware on the camera is 1.00. There is no update on the Nikon Canada web site, so i am calling Bluetooth connectivity and therefore SnapBridge a complete fail. Given that this is a function the target buyer is going to be demanding, this is very bad news.
I shoot only in RAW and in that regard am probably unlike the target buyer, but as I hate JPEG in general wanted to see what the actual image quality looked like before it was compressed within an inch of its life. I initially tried opening a NEF file in DXO PhotoLab 3 because I like the DXO RAW converter best. Image format unknown or corrupt. Ok, check for updates. Apply update and voila! Tried in Affinity Photo. File was fine and looked as flat and boring as I expect an unprocessed RAW to look. I also checked Photoshop 2020 and Lightroom 9 and all is good. I had set the white balance in camera to Auto1 which is supposed to be white and preserve the ambient. Hated that because of the jaundiced look and went to normal AWB and all was good. White balance settings do not actually impact the RAW files, but the settings are in the metadata and processing software uses them as hints on where to start. Perhaps Auto1 would be ok for JPEGs. I did not test that because I don’t shoot JPEGs.
At the risk of sounding like a grumpy bastard, putting the SD slot in the battery compartment is as dumb a move as it has always been. If the camera is on a tripod, this is a major pain if you want to get access to the card, and even if it is not, everything is so small it is very difficult to get the card out of the slot. I used a proven Lexar 64GB card for my tests, for those who wonder about that sort of thing.
Everyone wants to ask about the image quality. I have to ask what folks are worried about. It’s 2020 and the image quality is excellent. And the noise about “kit lenses” can stop now. The images are sharp and display good contrast and colour fidelity. Even shooting on an overcast and windy winter’s day, the rendition is very accurate. Shooting indoors, using the SB5000 bounced off the ceiling as the source delivers excellent colour with the expected “Nikon look”.
The first image was shot in the ambient light of the dining room at ISO 12800. This is about one stop higher than I would recommend for this sensor. At this ISO, colour noise becomes evident requiring correction in post processing. Other than that it is quite successful. Luminance noise is much less visible. The outdoor sample vary in ISO and lens use. The 16-50 included in the kit is very usable and the 55-200 makes a great second lens, for the target buyer, the two together are about all that most would require. Nikon may have a build a store kit combining the two at some point as this would make a lot of sense.
The SB5000 is massive overkill for this camera body. While I think it is a superb flash, you don’t have the capability to use its advanced features, so while I think that the built in flash looks like crap, as all of this type do, adding a third party iTTL flash and radio trigger would be a good step. I like the Godox system in this price point. The TT685N with accessory on shoe transmitter would be around $200 CAD and serve the target buyer very well indeed.
Noting the price point as being pretty close to the DSLR D7500, why choose the Z50. Size and weight come to mind immediately as well as the advanced video capability. I remain stunned at the incredibly poor design of the flip LCD screen for vlogging purposes as otherwise this would be a superb little product for this purpose. Add a shoe mount Lilliput display and a RODE microphone and you’ll be off to the rumoured races.
I don’t know if the Bluetooth issues were unique to my eval unit and my phone but if not, that needs immediate work, because on other cameras, Snapbridge is now excellent and serves the target market very well.
Conclusion
In my opinion, Nikon has done a very good job building a mirrorless camera for the target buyer in this space. I would have preferred seeing them enter priced between the D3xxx and D5xxx families as budget is a major criteria and they could have picked up share. I wonder if they were concerned about self-erosion in this profitable entry space. If so, I think that is a mistake. Once you kick over a thousand bucks, you remove a big chunk of marketplace.
Folks coming to more serious photography will not bring the misperceptions of DSLR vs Mirrorless so that’s a battle that should never happen. Only a poor seller will even bring it up. Sadly, they outnumber the good ones by a large extent, particularly in big box and warehouse stores. If Nikon could get the street price under a thousand dollars they would be in better shape but the effective price fixing that MAP brings to the entire space makes that impossible without Nikon repricing things.
Canon has nothing to compete with in this range and the options are more limited from the other mirrorless players, with the Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark III being the closest competitor. With a couple of firmware upgrades to unlock some deprecated features they could win this dollar space.
