When rumours of a Nikon Z8 started flying around the internet, I contacted my local camera store, and put myself on the wait list for whatever it was going to be. So, on launch day, I felt myself fortunate to take possession of a brand new Nikon Z8.
I'd tried the Z9 before, and liked it, but it was just too big and heavy for me, so I (a bit reluctantly) decided to wait for the technology to percolate down to something that would be easier to lug around.
There are a LOT of Z8 reviews on the net, so I'm not going to describe the camera, the handling, or the image quality. They're all pretty good. Actually, the hardware is pretty much state of the art, and Nikon can feel justifiably proud of it.
To be clear, I really like the Nikon Z8. The hardware is terrific, and they physical handling is as good as it gets.
But right now, I want to talk about the firmware. Oh my, that darn firmware!
Maybe it's because I'm (among other things) a firmware designer, that I think of the Z8 as a terrific camera that's handicapped by a 25 year old firmware design.
The Z8 is a good camera. But it could be a really great camera if only Nikon had the vision to gift it with better firmware. I think that Nikon is leaving market share and money on the table by just focusing on hardware, and not thinking about the total user experience, which is a combination of hardware and software.
Back in 1980, Nikon retained famed automotive designer Giorgetto Giugiaro’s Italian design firm, Italdesign, to design its new generation of cameras, starting with the F3. The ergonomics were great, and the design was a terrific success. Nikon's cameras have consistently followed that design ever since.
At the time, firmware was carefully hand crafted to work with limited program storage space, limited memory, and a CPU that was very limited by today's standards. Those firmware designers were smart people, and they made the firmware incredibly fast. As in essentially instant when you powered the camera up. Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) were used to speed up the important camera functions as film cameras evolved into digital cameras, but the user interface still looks pretty much the same now as it did a quarter of a century ago.
Since then, computer memory and computer power have come a long way. But the firmware in the Z9, like all of Nikon's professional cameras, looks an awful lot like the firmware on my ancient F100 film camera, and the firmware on every pro Nikon camera since then.
I think that's because Nikon is a hardware and optics company. Hardware. Not software. Very much not software, and very much not user interface.
Nikon got good help with the physical aspects of their user interface, but the software interface just doesn't seem to be something that they think about. At all.When you use a modern phone, you are using a user interface that simply wasn't possible in 1980. But all of the Japanese camera manufacturers have been slow to adopt more modern interface techniques. To the minor degree that they have, it's been on lower-end consumer products ... and I have to say that those efforts tend to feel more like toys than like serious professional equipment. That's not to say that cameras should use a phone operating system. That doesn't work. But it would be nice to be able to configure a camera using a modern, flexible interface. It could make the hardware so much easier to use!
I think that there's something in Japanese culture that doesn't value or appreciate elegant user interface design. That's particularly odd in a culture that's known for the elegant beauty of its physical spaces and its art.
There's a lot to like about Japanese culture, and there's much that we can learn from it. But, taken as a whole, the software produced by the Japanese camera companies is pretty much awful. I know of no serious photographer who would even consider using Nikon's software for image processing - it's simply not good enough. Not good enough, by a mile.
Here's a bit of low-hanging fruit that could easily be implemented in firmware, which could transfer the Z8 from being a really good camera, to being an amazingly good camera:
Let's start with focus stacking, even though I appreciate that it's not at the top of everyone's list, since it's what I mostly was hoping for in the Z8 / Z9.
Nikon's implementation of focus stacking is simply awful. So awful that it's unusable for me. Focus stacking (Nikon calls it Focus Shift) on the Z8 is precisely the same as it is on my Nikon D800e. It's set in the menus, and operates in its own little modal world.
BUT, while it could be used (with some effort) on the D800, it's simply unusable on the Z8, because Nikon turns the viewfinder off when you are in Focus Shift mode! So you can't see what the camera is pointed at! That wasn't as big a hurdle with the D800, because it had an optical viewfinder that couldn't be turned off.
Maybe it wouldn't be quite so bad if you could set up the number of shots you want in the focus stack, and then assign a button to start the process, but Nikon doesn't let you do that.
That's stupid, Nikon! Really, truly, stupid. Not deliberately stupid, but it shows that the firmware designers at Nikon don't really have a clue what focus stacking is good for, and that they paid it precisely zero attention during the design.
Now, the big problem with focus stacking, is subject movement between frames. And the best way to reduce inter-frame movement is, of course, to reduce the inter-frame interval. Here, the Z8 and Z9 could be really great for focus stacking - they can shoot 20 frames a second, making hand-held focus stacking perfectly feasible. Except, of course, that you can't assign the start sequence to a button. And, by default, there's no provision to take the exposures at the fastest speed at which the camera can focus.
Now maybe Nikon is saving a version of focus stacking that actually works, for a future camera model. Or, more likely, they aren't thinking of it at all. But it would sure be a big help to me! use focus stacking all the time - but I manually refocus the lens to every position, because I'm typically at a remote location with no tripod, so I'm using the Z8 handheld.
This would be an easy fix for Nikon, if they wanted to make focus stacking work. But I don't speak Japanese, and so I'm almost certain that they will never hear anything that I might have to say. Too bad.
Nikon's image banks are a hot mess. There are four shooting banks, and four custom banks. Which sounds decent, but the important shooting functions are randomly distributed between the shooting banks and the custom banks. So you have to set both of them to get your camera into a known state for a particular style of photography.
You can't protect these banks from changes - every time you change something as simple as your aperture, you are making a permanent change to the shooting bank. And there's no easy way to restore your camera settings from a saved configuration. Every Nikon photographer I know complains about this. But Nikon isn't listening. These things haven't changed since 1980.
Named configuration files, and a way to restore to your preferred configuration is an absolute no-brainer from a user interface design point of view. Except at Nikon, where nobody's listening.
The Z7 had a good idea - three user settings that could be set with the turn of a physical dial. They didn't save all of the important settings, and you couldn't name them, but I found them to be an improvement over the silly banks system.
Speaking of configuration files, putting them on the camera's memory card, where they will be destroyed every time you format a card, is just stupid. Non-volatile flash memory is cheap, and it's where named configurations belong. Of course you should still be able to copy them to and from the memory card.
Beyond this, there is absolutely no reason why each user configuration shouldn't have its own personality. Raw shooters don't need the menus to be cluttered by twenty ways to fine-tune JPEG images.
One nice thing about the Z8 is that you can configure most of the buttons to do what you want. Except of course, that Nikon has put inexplicable restrictions on what you can assign to each button.
People who shoot a lot with the Z8 and Z9 know that the subject detection, while a huge improvement over older Nikon cameras, is not 100% reliable. Sony is the clear leader there. But Nikon shooters have learned to have an arsenal of autofocus techniques at their disposal, and to assign them to physical buttons.
So in my case, I might have the default focus mode be automatic subject detection, but I have Fn1 programmed to switch to 3D tracking, and I have Fn2 programmed to restricted area subject detection. Subject detection gets confused sometimes, so I have the video record button programmed to turn subject detection off (a process that Nikon unnecessarily complicates). So far, so good ... except that I shoot a lot of stitched panoramas, so I also need to be able to lock auto exposure. And now I'm in trouble, because most of the buttons I'd like to use for that are arbitrarily restricted from performing that function. So I eventually settled on using the Disp button, because it's close to where the exposure lock button was on the D800. But now I simply can't find a button to cycle the viewfinder displays, because ... Nikon. Sheesh.