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Nikon Z5II Review | Is This the Best Sub $2000 Camera?
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May 31, 2025
Photographer Dustin Abbott shares a deep dive review into Nikon's hot new Z5II entry level full frame camera. Find out why the Nikon Z5II is probably the best sub $2000 full frame camera we've seen. | This episode is sponsored by Fantom Tracker. Visit store.fantomwallet.com and use code DUSTIN20 for 20% off. | Read the Text Review: | Visit the Image Gallery: https://tinyurl.com/Z8photos | Purchase the Nikon Z5II @ B&H Photo https://bhpho.to/4jtI3Wv | Adorama https://howl.link/65nqciq16fayh | Amazon https://amzn.to/4dz2oIk | Camera Canada https://shrsl.com/4wn3t | Amazon Canada https://amzn.to/4mR6u30 | Amazon UK https://amzn.to/43w1zeN | Amazon Germany https://amzn.to/4jiWoVn Check out the DA Merch here: https://bit.ly/TWIMerch | Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/dustinabbott | On the Web: http://dustinabbott.net/ | Sign up for my Newsletter: http://bit.ly/1RHvUNp | Instagram: http://bit.ly/DLAinsta | Facebook: http://on.fb.me/1nuUUeH | Flickr: http://bit.ly/1UcnC0B | 500px: http://bit.ly/1Sy2Ngu Follow Craig @ https://www.instagram.com/craigstoffersen/ Want to support this channel? Use these affiliate links to shop at: B&H Photo: http://bhpho.to/1TA0Xge Adorama: https://howl.link/nt4zdz1goa7ql Camera Canada: http://bit.ly/DLACameraCan Sony Canada: https://www.thesonyshop.ca/?ref=abbott Amazon: https://amzn.to/3HrY64d Amazon Canada: https://amzn.to/3qG1p18 Ebay: http://bit.ly/DustineBay Into the AM Clothing: https://bit.ly/intotheAMda and use code DUSTIN10 for 10% off Fioboc Clothing: https://tinyurl.com/FiobocDA20 and us code DUSTIN20 for 20% off Make a donation via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/dustinTWI ============================= Table of Contents: ============================= 0:00 - Intro
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0:00
[Music]
0:10
i am Dustin Abbott and I'm here today to give you my review of the Nikon Z5 Mark
0:15
II now in the short time since the Z5 Mark II has been announced it has already increased Nikon's market share
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why well because it's a full-frame camera that cost under $1,700
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not that that in itself is unique but what is unique about the Z5 Mark II is that it doesn't have any of the typical
0:34
hallmarks of being intentionally reduced or crippled in order to not compete with
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the higherend models in in Nikon's lineup and so we've got all the features that typically might be removed things
0:47
like dual card slots inbody image stabilization having you know a good
0:53
performing and high specs on both the monitor the LCD and the viewfinder we
0:58
have a full-size battery we have decent burst and along with that decent buffer
1:05
rates so all of these things are areas where a lot of times they'll be
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scrimping or intentionally kind of settling it down market and so that it won't compete with higher models none of
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those things are true here and so a lot of people are saying at what I can afford this is the best camera that I
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can buy and I would say that my opinion after having spent time at the Z5 Mark II is it is definitely the best camera
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that you can buy under $2,000 if you're looking for fullframe and very likely to compete with those that are even a
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little bit north of $2,000 and so we'll explore why that is in today's review right after a word from our sponsor
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dustin20 for 20% off now in disclosure this uh camera and then also the 35
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millimeter f1.8s 8 S lens that I'm reviewing on it uh they were loan to me by Nikon Canada however they have had no
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input in this review and they won't see it before you this is a completely independent review and my conclusions
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are my own let's dive in and take a look at the build handling and feature set
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here now I will say this this is it is the smaller of Nikon's bodies but it is
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only small in the Nikon sphere and and so it is as you can see here it's
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considerably smaller than say my Z8 but it's really this smallest of Nikon
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full-frame cameras is really as big as say the Sony Alpha 1 which is maybe the largest of Sony's cameras this is a full
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half pound heavier than say the uh the Canon R8 which competes in this class
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and so it's not a small camera and I think that that's a niche that still needs to be filled by Nikon but this is
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probably not it even if it is smaller than some of their other models it is 5.3 in in width or 134 millime it is 4
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in in height or 100.5 mm and it is 2.8 8
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in deep at the grip or 72 mm now surprisingly the previous camera
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that was in this class that has shares a lot of the overall specifications is Nikon ZF and it has a more retro style
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body you know it's got some style in that and more retro style control scheme however in many ways the uh the Z5 Mark
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II just kind of makes more sense for a lot of people ironically the ZF is actually both taller and wider than what
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the Z5 Mark II is but the huge difference as you can see from this diagram is where it comes to the actual
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um the grip itself and the grip uh is almost non-existent on a ZF it's more of a pinch style camera whereas this grip
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actually feels really great not only in my hands but I handed it around to a variety of people with different size
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hands and everyone says "Yeah it feels good in my hand." Now you can see here on me that I do have room to get most of
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my pinky on the grip not 100% of it maybe about half but enough to where it still feels comfortable in my hand and
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so I do think that as far as as the physicality if if the goal is ergonomics
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this is really a great size camera it's not over large it's not over small the only concern I would say is for those
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that really want to travel light and certainly Nikon has nothing that is the equivalent of Sony's A7C series for
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example the body here is magnesium alloy and so as a byproduct this is a little
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bit um heavier than what a lot of the competing cameras are it is 1 12 lb or
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700 g and so it's not particularly lightweight it does have a lot of custom
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controls for this class and so that includes having two function buttons on the front and frankly I don't ever see
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that except for on you know the more mid-tier to premium level cameras and so I love having that up top we have a a
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button that is kind of dedicated by default towards picture control but it is a fully customizable button and of
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course the majority of other buttons on here can be customized to different functions and so you really can create a
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lot of shortcuts and so I certainly appreciate that again that doesn't feel entry level at all one of the things
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that is consistent about Nikon's control scheme so if you're used to it it's fine
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and you know I'm somewhat used to it at this point it's still I think it's an area that could be improved and that is
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where a lot of these processes like changing exposure compensation or ISO they're a two-step process you've got to
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click a button and then you've got to rotate the rear wheel wheel now there is a setting that you can change which I
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immediately do that will allow you to where you don't have to hold down the button and rotate the wheel but you can
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just press it and then rotate the wheel uh to get that job and I I find that it just helps you to not be trying to do
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two things at once in the same way but I would prefer that control scheme to to
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change a bit as it is on most other cameras other thing that I would like to see changed is that we have a D-pad here
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in the back i would love for them to move to a Sony or Canon style wheel there this is kind of a Nikon consistent
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thing but that wheel just gives you one more control point something like ISO like like that's on my Sony cameras i
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always map ISO to that uh and so it allows you to would allow you to control something like that so that's one area
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that I would like to see improved outside of that however this has a quite a very typical Nikon control scheme uh
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there's a variety of buttons here on the back that will and again you can tweak functionality with that we do have a
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joystick and I love the fact that here at the display button we also have this
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toggle that will allow you to switch between a different setup for uh stills and for video and so all of that is very
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very welcome as far as what is here as far as the wheels everything moves with good precision i like the placement of
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the onoff power button which is a toggle around the shutter button allows that to
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be a one-handed operation and so that's great rather than having to involve a second hand over on the left side for
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controlling that uh and so overall these these controls particularly the fact that we do have those you know function
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buttons at the front all of that is great we do have a dedicated video button that is near the ISO and uh
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exposure compensation buttons there up on top we have a pretty typical mode
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dial here it is not lockable and I will note that if I was using a smaller bag
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there was a few times that just in the inn-out you know that it's you know it's got a grippy side and so something
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grabbed that and rotated it into some mode that I did not want but I mean uh
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I'm no serious issues there viewfinder is actually uh it's it's
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similar spec to what we see on something like the Z8 not 100% in terms of refresh
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rate but in terms of resol resolution it's 3.69 million dots and on top of
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that it's extremely bright it can get up to 3,000 nits nikon claims that that is
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six times brighter than other cameras in this class uh they don't really give data as to who they're comparing that to
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but I can say it's a great viewfinder and particularly a great viewfinder for this class it blows away something like
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what you're going to find on the A7C series for example so nice and bright uh good visibility good level of
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magnification all of that I consider to be excellent likewise we have a fully articulating LCD screen here uh
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touchscreen i love that i also love the fact that this is 2.1 million dots of
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resolution it's also a little bit bigger 3.2 in as opposed to 3 in compared to the competing ones and so it's higher
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resolution it's a little bit larger it's a great great uh screen and allows you
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to use it because it can get nice and bright you're able to use that even in bright conditions and so um both both of
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those specifications are fantastic for this level or class of camera all of
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that is great also great is the fact that we have a nice uh door here on the
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side rather than down in the battery compartment and we have dual uh slots
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for now it's only SD cards but it's UHS2 uh rated uh SD cards here at the side
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and so that's fantastic we do have good weather sealing in the body itself and down here at the bottom we do have a
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fullsize battery the ENL15C battery it's a 2280 mAh rated
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battery pack so you know similar to the the you know the higherend ones that you're seeing in you know models ranging
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from from Canon Sony you know Fuji all of those type things nikon does have a
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larger capacity battery that they put in the Z9 but this is the same battery you're going to find in the Z8 or the Z6
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Mark III etc etc it's rated up to 380 stops uh in this setting as is often the
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case most real world people are going to get more shots out of that but you know it's always a smart thing to have some
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backup batteries anyway you do have the ability on the side here with the ports you do have the ability to charge view
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via USBC and you can even um if you're shooting video for example you can you
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know be continually powering while shooting during that and so you know you could extend your battery life kind of
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indefinitely though there's other limitations that will come into play we also have both a microphone input 3.5
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millimeter and a 3.5 millimeter headphone monitoring jack that also doubles as a remote trigger port now uh
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HDMI here is micro HDMI i don't love that but I mean that's the standard for
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this class every other camera in this class has the same so I'm not really going to dock it over that not only do we have VR or uh inbody
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image stabilization in here but it is excellent it is rated up to 7.5 stops
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and so nothing about that feels entry level that best what's in my Z8 for example and I was able to get really
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good handheld results uh when I was testing for low light performance I shot with the Viltrox 135mm uh f1.8 I shot a
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15 of a second uh exposure and uh in handheld and it was perfectly steady no
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problem with that at all i one thing I will say about Nikon's VR particularly in relation to Sony is not only do I
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think that it's better it seems to perform better with third-party lenses to where they just feel more stable in
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fact I would say that in almost every case where I have reviewed a say a Tamron or a Viltrox lens on both Sony
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and then on Nikon I have preferred their performance on Nikon and so that's
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fantastic now a couple of things that I that I'll continue to critique a little bit first of all I mean it's not going
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to change at this point but I just do want to point out the absurdity of it and that is that Nikon persist in doing
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everything in reverse to everyone else and so that includes you know the process of actually removing and
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mounting lenses it goes in the opposite direction and because it's against the standard it means that in the process of
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removing lenses it you're taking lenses off in the same direction that lens
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hoods come off and so particularly with smaller lenses as you grab them it's not all that difficult to dislodge a lens
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hood in the process i mean they're not going to change at this point they can't change it right in the middle of of the Zmount segment but I I certainly hope
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that in the next iteration of Nikon that they just kind of go along with everyone else with that other thing that I do
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miss here and and it's it's a very very minor niggle considering the price point of this but I as soon as I took off the
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front camera cap I noticed a bit of dust on the sensor doesn't have that protective shield that is on a cam
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camera like the Z8 and it certainly is missed here and of course the other thing they're going to get as a the one
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kind of price cutting thing you get in this class relative to say the Z6 Mark III there is no top-mounted LCD here and
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again I I'm not really critiquing that because none of the other cameras have it uh in this class however it is
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something you might miss but at $1,700 this is a remarkably fullyfeatured camera um in terms of the controls the
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specifications on viewfinders VR card slots all of that fantastic great job
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Nikon so as we shift towards autofocus let's talk a bit about the shutter burst
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rate buffer those type things and so we have a mechanical shutter it is a
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maximum of 18,000th as opposed to 1/4,000th it's not unusual for in this
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class for mechanical shutters to be limited to 1/4,000th and so again we've got that higher rate um we don't really
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have the same kind of faster electronic shutter that you'll sometimes see in this class it's there but I'll get to
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that in just a second this uh does have a much lower readout speed it's not a
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stacked sensor and while you know these cameras start to encroach a little bit into you know because they have good
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autofocus system they have the ability to track you know not as we're going to see not bad buffer not bad burst speed
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but it is a lower readout speed and so you will have more potential issues with things like rolling shutter and that's
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going to be much more magnified if you shift into the electronic shutter and so if you're doing that to to track action
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the problem is if it's action that's moving you know quickly at all you may regret that decision because you're not
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going to get as good of results as far as the maximum flash sync it is 1/200th
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of a second again that's not bad at all for this class there's some that are lower we'll go down to like 1/ 1/60th of
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a second and so that's certainly like power for the course essentially in this class as far as the burst rate the burst
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rate is 11 frames per second with full and that's shooting raws that's with full tracking along the way that's
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really not bad at all particularly when you consider that the Mark1 Z5 only had
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a 4.5 frame per second burst rate so we've more than doubled the burst rate on that and 11 frames per second gets
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into the class of being very very useful now you can as mentioned you can move
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into JPEG only modes where you can get anywhere between 14 and 30 frames per second uh you know with with some
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caveats some limitations there and JPEG only and so I mean if you're your
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absolute priority is just getting some shots in then you certainly do have that option there but if you can stick in the
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11 frames per second and shoot with the and shoot with the mechanical shutter you'll probably be happier with your uh
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end results in terms of the photos as long as that's fast enough for your setting the maximum raw buffer depth can
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be it's it's capped at 200 um frames which is not bad at all that's actually
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great now more practically you will see some diminishing returns depending on how much uh you're doing as far as like
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a lossless compression so your compression ratios will limit that a bit more however even shooting at lossless
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uh at at 11 frames per second you can still get 145 frames in the buffer depth
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and that is actually really really competitive for this glass that's certainly enough to capture any kind of
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action you don't have a higher shutter rate you know sometimes you can go all the way up to say 130,000th of a second
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with an electronic shutter there's no such option you're you are capped at 18,000th of a second frankly I don't
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find that to be a particularly limiting principle most of the time and so for this class all of these specifications
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are actually really really good as is the autofocus system it doesn't have the same autofocus system as their you know
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highestend sports type cameras however it has had trickle down technology you know that started with the Z9 that has
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flowed down into this and so you have the ability to have nine different trackable subjects including dedicated
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you know bird AF mode and what this has that I still am waiting for Sony to
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really do um Canon does have it as well is that it does have a very good automatic mode where you can just put it
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in auto subject recognition and it typically works very very well if you're in a specific instance where you're
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doing birding for example certainly switch into the birding mode but for most of the time if you're switching
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between humans and animal subjects etc like that it it switches over on its own
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just fine and so I really really appreciate that the specifications here are 299
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uh autofocus points frankly those figures have become less and less relevant in my opinion because every
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company has a different way of of calculating those and sometimes they get into the you know the ridiculous where
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there's thousands of AF points what really matters is coverage and in this case we've got most of the sensor
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covered with AF points and so you can track all across the frame that's really what matters most to me there is uh you
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know tracking capabilities are really quite good now with this viewfinder this is not a stack sensor so with this
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viewfinder you are not going to get uh like a blackout free when you're tracking if you're in the viewfinder and
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you are shooting a trackable subject with AF you are going to see blackout in
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between frames now that means that it's just not as easy to track subjects because you you're you're not visually
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able to predict quite as well because your vision is continually just coming in little chunks and so uh if you're
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really serious about shooting sports you're going to want to move up into a model like the Z6 Mark III uh something
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where you're not getting that blackout however uh for again for casual shooters and people that occasionally do sports
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it's fine i mean it's it's not as good but it works i found that when I I shot
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a couple of things with action i shot softball and I had zero problems there the action is not super super fast and
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so it was able to pick up quickly um recognize subjects as it should and everything is very very well focused so
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I have zero problems there when it came to tracking bees coming into my hives it
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wasn't like I I definitely saw better results with the Z8 than what I did here but it wasn't by a a huge margin i was
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still able to pick up bees in flight which is is pretty mind-blowing and to get accurately focused results on those
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so I mean it's it's pretty great also it it focuses down as as far as minus 10 EV
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according to Nikon i tried to test this in basically shooting in the dark and certainly autofocus slowed down no
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question about that however it did eventually lock on accurately even in essentially dark conditions i mean this
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is 1/5if of a second at f1.8 at 12,800
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with a third-party lens i mean nothing to complain about there and so in less
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extreme situations this is going to quickly lock on and give you accurate focus so that's great because it just
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expands the kind of venues that you can work with uh those of you that have used
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various adapters like from Megaap it's you know again this is a capable autofocus system and enough so that it
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can compensate somewhat for porting over you know Sony E-mount lenses and still
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do the calculations necessary to get decent autofocus with them so you know all told that's pretty great video AF is
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also good and I one thing I will say with with Nikon that I have learned is that I do need to be a little bit more
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proactive about tweaking menu settings i don't find that I can go right off the default settings as effortlessly as I do
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with Sony and Canon however if I tweak uh the settings I'm able to largely get
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what I'm looking for and I shot multiple segments like this where I had like more of a stable shot it did perfectly fine
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with those and then in other settings where I was moving along from subject to subject I found that you know autofocus
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it generally worked well i will see maybe a a bit more pulsing every now and
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then uh in making subject transitions sometimes a bit of a a back pulse and doing a focus pull i see a bit more on
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that on Nikon than what I do on Canon or Sony but I mean it is close very very
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close and uh relative to other Nikon cameras I think it's doing just fine in
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terms of the video specs themselves we can get up to 4K60 that does come with a 1.5 times
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crop however the uh f 4K30 has no such crop factor it is giving you a full
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readout there you can you have a variety of bit rate options now I will note what you don't necessarily have at 4K is any
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like low bit rate to where if you're wanting to just kind of shoot more like long format um and have want a lower bit
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rate you don't have a lot of options there however on the higher end you've got lots of options all the way up to a
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12 bit in RAW in camera at 420 megabits per second which is is pretty impressive
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in terms of the quality of the footage that you can get out of this camera you can shoot in N log you can shoot uh HLG
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and I will note that Nikon's been kind of proactive in terms of developing LUTs and some that they have developed with
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RED that are free downloads that will allow you to get I in my opinion better looking uh in results than what we have
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seen with some of the other previous LUTs in the past recording limit seems
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to be pegged at 2 hours and 5 minutes that's according to uh real life experience and then also what Nikon says
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and so but I mean if you're just shooting off the battery you're at 4K 30 you're probably not going to get uh
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anything longer than that out of a battery anyway and also that's going to use up a fair bit of storage media so I
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think it all kind of shakes out appropriately and so anyway you do have uh those options there so video specs
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good foot footage looks good af as I've already mentioned during video all of that is good no big concerns there and I
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think again that this is solid specs for this level of camera now the sensor
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itself is nothing new or glamorous this is a 254.5 megapixel um full-frame format
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CMOS sensor same sensor as what you're going to find in a camera like the ZF for example it's a sensor that's been
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around a bit to this point and it does have a little bit higher resolution than
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what some of the other 24 megapixel sensors do those tend to be 6,000 by
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4,000 in terms of resolution this is very slightly higher at 6,048x
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4,032 pixels it could technically get you up to 24 12 megapixels as far as the
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dynamic range and by the way I for those of you that want to deep dive into the sensor performance I'll throw that in at
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the end of the video but just the broad strokes uh the dynamic range is rated by
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photons to photos which is a source that I trust at uh 11.15 stops and so that
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falls slightly behind the R8 which is right under 11 12 stops and the A7C also
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they're within you know a few fraction points of each other again around 11 and a half stops the shadow recovery I found
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in my test is actually quite good and one thing I want to highlight about this sensor I was very impressed by the color
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fastness and all the various tests that I did I got consistent colors i didn't see any kind of color cast or tent i did
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not see any kind of color banding and so really great job in that regard from Nikon shadow recovery i found that I
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could do very cleanly at four stops with just a little bit more uh negative impact at five stops but still usable I
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would say and so very good on the shadow recovery in highlight recovery was also quite good in my opinion i was able to
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do very clean at two stops and really not bad at three stops i did it wasn't perfect the image isn't as bright as
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what it should be and there are a few hot spots there but color swatches were mostly recovered you know really I would
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say for a camera like this this is doing a really really good job when it comes to dynamic range there it's it's yes
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it's not quite as good as what the Canon or Sony sensors is competing with however all of these sensors are so good
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relative to what they were a generation ago that you know frankly it's not all that big of a deal the ISO range native
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ISO range is 100 through 51,200 i found that really my ISO
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performance I I thought it was quite good i saw that it was very still very clean at 1,600 looked clean to me at
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3,200 certainly I would say usable at both 6400 and 12,800 and that wasn't just in
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my test uh for example if I show you this shot that's just a real world shot
26:47
taken at ISO 12,800 you can see that certainly there is at even at 100%
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magnification there's some noise there um as as far as like just pixel noise
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some roughness to that but overall the image is is entirely useful again colors look good it looks like a natural image
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with almost kind of a film grain type look to it and so I found even at the higher levels of 25,600 and 51,200
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they're you know increasingly dirty along the way but you know in a pinch they could be usable particularly if
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you're shooting monochrome and a bit of that roughness is maybe a desirable effect but even taking monochrome out of
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the equation there's no color cast there there's no color shift and so that to me makes them a lot more usable and what I
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also didn't see is any kind of like grid pattern start to show up and so overall
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I was actually quite impressed in that regard now as mentioned with the resolution at 648x 4032 pixels uh it's it's it's okay
27:47
for most applications you know I I've become very accustomed to having higher resolution i own five cameras right now
27:54
and all of them are a minimum of 40 megapixels and so I am used to higher resolution however I will say that this
28:02
is usable for a lot of situations um the one thing that I will say is that if you're you're wanting to crop you you
28:09
obviously have less flexibility to do so if you switch into APS-C mode for example it's only 10 12
28:15
megapixels that's not super useful i mean you can get by with it but you have
28:20
like zero you crop room left after that there is a pixel shift mode you can shoot up to 32 frames in that and it you
28:27
can combine that into a 96 megapixel image i will say on that it does require you to use uh it's free software from
28:33
Nikon but you can only do it through a Nikon software to combine those you can't combine in camera you can't really
28:40
combine it easily through you know Lightroom or or Photoshop and so uh it's
28:46
it's to me it's a little less useful because of that e extra step but uh that does allow you if you have a still
28:52
subject because remember you're shifting the sensor and getting a variety of images it it it does mean you need to
28:58
have a very still subject for that to be successful but if that's the case you know that's an option of getting higher
29:03
resolution out of this camera as far as the storage size your like lossless RAWs
29:10
they're going to be around 30 megapixels high efficiency um plus around 16 high
29:16
efficiency around 12 there isn't other resolution uh points to choose but again
29:22
file size is not too bad the colors I found looked good out of here i don't really have any major complaints i do
29:28
still just kind of instinctively prefer either Canon or Fuji's color science over Nikon's but you know it's it's
29:36
splitting hairs they're all roughly similar again you do have a variety of looks we'll call them film simulations
29:43
again not as good as what Fuji offers but there is some interesting options there if you're a RAW shooter and not a
29:49
JPEG shooter you might want to reprogram that top button to something that's more useful because again you can in RAW you
29:55
can apply any of those looks in post and so you don't have to it's kind of pointless to select one uh in camera uh
30:03
because of that if you're shooting JPEGs obviously a different story so a a good
30:09
sensor not an exceptional sensor but a good sensor and I really didn't have any actual complaints when I tested it so my
30:15
conclusion is this this is a camera that I think is strong in all the areas that an average photographer needs there's no
30:23
fatal flaw or compromise that I can put to and say "Oh Nikon they really you know crippled the camera in this way or
30:29
another." And so I really really appreciate the fact that Nikon has just kind of gone all in in this particular
30:36
model and yeah it probably will cannibal cannibalize some Z6 Mark III type sales
30:41
because you can spend $500 or more less and get a fully capable camera but as is
30:48
already happening I think it's a smart move by Nikon because they are stealing some market space from Canon and from
30:54
Sony and and I think in particular I would be worried if I were Canon because
31:00
uh Nikon does now have more access to third-party lenses and so it has become
31:06
a more attractive platform to I would say to me personally as compared to Canon because I can get some really
31:11
compelling lenses on there and you know a lot of the Nikon lenses I tend to like as well and so anyway I think that it is
31:18
going to it is and it will continue to steal some market share from the those other two major brands to me that makes
31:25
it a smart move by Nikon i will say on the negative side it's still not a very
31:31
compact body and one thing I think that Nikon does need to do is they do need to have some kind of dedicated travel body
31:38
i mean I I would love to see something that is a competition for the the A7C
31:43
series from from Sony where it's smaller lighter and actual travelworthy because there are some really interesting
31:49
options particularly now that you can get all the Vtrox Air lenses that are coming those lenses are really
31:54
intriguing on a small body and yeah they make more sense on the Z5 Mark II than
32:00
what they do on my Z8 but it's still a pretty big camera to put some of those lenses on so I love to see them do that
32:06
all told however I am very very impressed by what Nikon has done here and based on what I've seen from this
32:12
camera they deserve a little bit more market share now if you want more information you can check out my full
32:17
texture review that is linked in the description down below there is linkage to an image gallery and buying links
32:22
there and if you want a deeper dive into the sensor performance stay tuned with me right now and we're going to jump into that together all right we'll start
32:28
our examination of this sensor by taking a look at ISO performance so here is base ISO 100 if we take a look around
32:35
here we can see that the blacks are nice and inky there's no pattern or noise
32:40
that's in the v various color swatches you can look at this mirror which is a place that shows up and then definitely
32:46
in this pattern here is where you'll start to see kind of the roughness of noise increase so this is what
32:51
everything should look like optimally so through ISO 800 we can see if we're looking at a pixel level that it still
32:58
looks remarkably similar maybe just a tiny bit of noise showing up there but
33:03
down in this zone it's still nice and clean black levels look nice and inky
33:09
colors are basically identical moving on to 1600 and still comparing to our base
33:14
ISO we can see that once again there is a tiny bit of noise there but not enough
33:19
that you would see it anywhere outside of a pixel level still clean looking here black levels so thus contrast still
33:26
looking pretty good moving on to 3200 now obviously we're starting to kick up into what you would start to consider
33:32
high ISO range still looking nice and clean here you could tell that the black levels are not 100% as good but still
33:39
nice and black and also very even and the color swatches are looking good looking in the mirror of this SLR you
33:45
can see a very very fine noise there but nothing destructive at all now by 6400
33:50
you can see that that noise pattern has just increased a bit and so if I toggle
33:55
back and forth here you can see that difference that there's just a little bit more noise that's present now but
34:01
again while it's a little rougher here it's still not looking too bad and if we
34:06
step out for a moment color uh constancy is still very very good that's true up
34:11
to ISO 12,800 which is what I often will kind of use as a practical limit and what I
34:18
will actually use and maybe an event type setting i try not to go any further than that typically in this case you can
34:25
definitely see that there is some of that fine pattern noise but what I don't see is any kind of grid any kind of you
34:31
know color issues black levels are still looking pretty decent here you could see it's getting rougher in terms of the
34:37
noise here but not in any kind of unusable way i referred to this image here and so now you can look at maybe a
34:44
little closer and so you can definitely see some of that fine pattern noise that's throughout the image itself uh
34:50
looking at at a pixel level yeah you can see that it's there it's showing up in all this but no grids no
34:58
discoloration i think it's still a very usable image now beyond this it becomes
35:04
a law of somewhat diminishing returns though I will say you can still see that colors stay very good and I'm
35:09
particularly impressed at the upper limit of 51,200 it's not unusual at all even with much
35:15
more expensive cameras to see a whole kind of color shift towards magenta or green i don't see that at all now our
35:23
noise is increasingly getting rougher as you can see here but I don't know it's
35:29
not all that destructive to me and frankly I don't see 51,200 as being all
35:34
that much worse than 25,600 and I'm pleasantly surprised by the fact
35:40
that while I can see a little bit of that snow going on there in the black levels the black levels still look
35:46
pretty decent to my eye so overall high ISO performance very good so next
35:51
dynamic range and so we're going to start with our highlight recovery and so I've already moved up to two stops here
35:57
you can see what happens when it's overexposed by two stops some of the color swatches start to get washed out
36:02
you can see here that there are various hot spots where it's no longer even but if we shift over here to the right we
36:08
can see that colors have come back you can see in this row for example colors have returned that weren't there before
36:15
uh some of the gray levels have returned and just general saturation levels are better what's more if we zoom in here we
36:22
can see that some of these places where hot spots had emerged and texture information was lost it has been
36:28
recovered color is even once again now in the uh timer face there so you know
36:34
good now if we move on to three stops it's still a good performance but you can also see some of the flaws now if we
36:41
look up here at the color swatches there's a lot of them that have been lost and here we can see that they have
36:47
mostly but not entirely been recovered mostly being you know pretty good in this situation on the timer face by and
36:55
large we still have a fairly even performance no kind of really weirdness to it however you can see here at the
37:02
Honeywell Pentax some of the texture of the metal has been lost and not regained
37:07
places like this hot spot here have not quite come back and so you can see also
37:13
generally that the image looks a little bit dim we've lost some contrast in the process that carries on to its logical
37:20
conclusion at four stops of overexposure where you can see now that the image just looks dingy and a lot of stuff has
37:26
been lost colors are lost that have not been recovered the consistency of color across the timer face a lot of this
37:33
texture information all the stuff blown out not a usable image and so up to three stops you can might get away with
37:39
it anything beyond that you won't now shadow recovery tends to be easier for modern cameras i'm going to jump all the
37:46
way to four stops and so you can see here with the original exposure this is very very underexposed and so there's
37:52
lots of stuff that is crushed here so let's see how we've done in terms of recovery if we look here on this texture
37:59
of the grip of the SLR you can see that not only has it been recovered I don't see any kind of like color blotching
38:05
there no issues there if we look inside here not a lot of noise showing up down
38:10
in this zone here you can see it was completely crushed it's recovered and I don't see a lot of noise in that area as
38:16
well and so in general that is a very successful recovery now if we jump up to
38:21
five stops of recovery it still actually looks pretty good however it's a little
38:28
less good you can see just a little bit more noise that's showing up there and particularly if I look down in this zone
38:33
there's a bit of noise showing up there and maybe just a little less consistency in the dark areas i also can see a
38:40
little bit of a you know a hot pixel that has popped up there but overall um it's looking really quite good even for
38:47
that type of recovery so that means I'm going to have a lot of versatility within a single frame now I'm not
38:52
recommending that you do what I've done on the right i'm doing this to exaggerate what you can do as far as
38:57
trying to recover the highlights of this image and then the shadows of this image and so it's this is for illustration
39:03
purposes this looks like the uh the HDR craze where people were combining images
39:09
to get this effect you know uh a decade ago it's not really a great look so you can see here in the highlights this
39:16
being one of the brightest points you can see it really hasn't fully successfully recovered there pulling
39:21
that all the way up here where it was less extreme we have pulled more color back into this area and so I would
39:28
consider that to be more successful now as far as shadow recovery basically all of this grass was crushed out you can
39:34
see that that's been recovered fairly cleanly it doesn't look too bad in this area here where the bench was almost
39:42
obscured in the shadow you know that's all been recovered quite well enough information here if this was higher
39:47
higher resolution you could probably read these signs in here so I would consider the shadow recovery to be really quite impressive overall so let's
39:55
talk resolution so you as I mentioned you can do the pixel shift and so that
40:00
pixel shift can do up to 32 different frames to combine into one image so here is just one of those images from that
40:06
sequence and here is the end result when they have been combined together and it produces this nefx file format so you
40:14
can see if we go into a pixel level there's a lot more pixels on tap here and so uh this is both at 100%
40:20
magnification and so this just shows how much more is there again you're going to need a still subject because any kind of
40:27
movement is going to be create uh an issue where they won't combine as cleanly but you can see you can
40:33
definitely very successfully with the right subject vastly improve the amount of resolution that you can throw on it
40:39
now in terms of the native resolution just as I've mentioned the cropping capabilities are you know they're
40:45
limited you're not going to be able to deeply crop into this image because there's just not enough pixels to do so
40:50
here for example I've taken a crop out of that image and it looks okay but you can see that even I'm actually at a
40:58
greater than 100% magnification trying to fill a 4K screen and so here's what the actual pixels would look like and so
41:05
you're just you know it's it's a law of diminishing returns you're having to scale up to get to a larger display like
41:10
this now finally colors i felt like colors were generally very good out of this sensor i didn't notice anything
41:17
that threw me off colors here look bright and clean uh here I used the
41:23
Sunday preset and so that kind of brightens everything up i actually am quite partial it with um a lot of like
41:29
forest or landscape type images and so it looks nice here colors are bright but you know not garish or anything here
41:36
this is a more subtle color palette but again it's handling the various shades of greens they all look greens and
41:42
yellows all look nice here here we've got some various you know shades of of red that are a part of this and again it
41:49
all looks natural and clean to me skin tones here are looking good again the
41:54
image itself looks very true to the setting i think the colors look nice and
41:59
clean and crisp and so overall a good result not a bad sensor at all really
42:04
and so as you can see this is really quite a compelling camera not just in what it does as far as its features but
42:11
it does a very solid job in terms of its sensor as well as always thanks for watching to the very end have a great
42:17
day and let the light in [Music]