Nikon Announces Mirrorless Z-Mount 24-70mm/f2.8 S and Future Firmware Upgrades

[ilkka_nissila]

It may also be that CFexpress is closer to CFast in name, so that could help Canon get on board as it seems like it were a continuum instead of losing face. Still, Canon have not stated that they will release a camera with CFexpress yet. I think the owners of those expensive CFast cards may not be too happy.

[ShunCheung]

Again, CFast is reaching it’s teacnical limitations so that a switch to CFexpress (CFX) will be inevitable down the road, although not necessarily imminent.

 

Back in 2002, I paid $100 for my first 256M (M, not G) CF card and then in 2005, I had like four 2G CF cards that I paid $200 for each. Not too long ago I gave some of those away for free. I no longer actively use any body that uses CF, and those cards would have been way too slow and way too small anyway. I have inserted that 256M card inside a D800, and it shows the capacity of three RAW files although it may be able to hold 5 or 6. It takes over 10 seconds to write one D800 RAW file, though.

 

The fact of the matter is that memory cards will depreciate rapidly. Whatever expensive cards you buy today will be out of date in 5, 10 years, including all CFast and XQD cards today and CFX cards tomorrow. Always buy what you must have today and maybe a little extra for safety, but it makes no economic sense to stock up on memory cards.

 

When we are paying $2000, $3000 and $6000 for a new body, a few hundred dollars for a couple of memory cards isn’t that expensive.

[Andrew Garrard]

To be fair, prior to the roll-out of XQD and UHS-II, we'd kind of stalled in card advances - the 95MB/s UHS-I SD cards were state of the art for at least a couple of years, as were the 1000-ish x CF cards (if I've got my numbers right). Things are moving again now, although a doubling in card speed doesn't necessarily mean any improvement in the performance of a camera.

 

CFast is certainly limited, although I don't entirely put it past Canon to do their own thing. The situation is better than it used to be - I still have a SmartMedia card in one camera, I've got a Memory Stick Duo from a phone, fortunately I dodged xD, I have devices using mini-SD as well as the more obvious SD and micro-SD (and MMC), I have type-II CF cards in MicroDrive form (and I'm old enough to have more than one thing called a MicroDrive). But then I have an S-VHS recorder, 3.5" and 5.25" floppies (I dodged 3", although I might have a hard-sectored one somewhere), all of DVD-RAM, DVD+RW and DVD+R, and DVD-RW and DVD-R. I kind of wish everything would just have a type-A USB connector (or maybe type C Thunderbolt) and have done with it. (I suspect like everyone else I have a share of mini- and micro-USB connectors, some of which support different display variants; my Nikons are the only thing I own that uses mini-HDMI.) So... companies have historically done an epic job of refusing to agree on anything in a way that might benefit the end user. If we standardise on a mix of XQD/CFExpress and SD variants for a bit, that'll be a significant step forward - but the 5D IV is still current and using CF, so it's not dead yet.

 

My 128GB UHS-II and XQD cards cost me a total of about £500 last year (plus about another £70 for a reader). That wasn't an insignificant bump on top of my D850 purchase cost - and it would have been more visible if I'd done a trade-in on the camera. I'm not ungrateful that the D850 will use my stock of old SD cards if I need more storage.

[ilkka_nissila]

a few hundred dollars for a couple of memory cards isn’t that expensive.

 

Looking at Delkin's CFexpress preorder prices in Finland, the cheapest one that gives a real write speed advantage (900MB/s) over XQD costs 449€ (256GB). The 125 GB model is less expensive but has only 450MB/s write speed, so you get about XQD speed and XQD prices (though read speed is faster, that may not help unless you have very fast drives on your computer). IMO this is quite expensive stuff. If one needs 2-3 cards then that's about 1500€ + cost of reader. I wouldn't consider this a trivial expense.

 

Additionally one needs to consider the cost of high-speed SD cards if one wants dual card write (not on Z6 or Z7, but given the feedback on that Nikon may be adding an UHS-II slot to future models) and those cost money as well, and are not as fast. Although SD as a standard has proven its longevity, the durability of the cards themselves is poor in my experience, with two Sandisk Extreme Pro and one Lexar card showing either corruption issues or failure to work at all. I don't want to spend significant money on those, but if someone really wants in-camera backup on a camera other than the D5, then they may have to.

 

Anyway since the Nikons continue to work with XQD cards there is no great urgency to buy those CFexpress cards soon. If one wants to shoot 45MP files at 9fps then one is perhaps motivated to buy them (provided there is a real improvement in burst performance) but the costs add up quickly. I don't see how compressed 8K video would need more speed than XQD can provide (arent' the bit rates around 200Mbps, so that's quite a bit less than required to store 45MP raw files at 9fps).

 

The cards go obsolete if camera resolution and/or speed increases substantially, but since applications requirements for resolution haven't really increased, I don't see why current XQD cards would feel slow in 5 years. They're faster than my computer's SSD let alone hard drives or network drives, so those will be the bottle neck in handling the image data in the end, even if I got faster memory cards then it would just lead to further problems later on in processing.

Edited March 8, 2019 by ilkka_nissila

[ShunCheung]

There is no point to buy/pre-order those expensive CFX cards right now. With so many competitors, the price will collapse once there are a few alternatives on the market.

 

Perhaps in a few years, Nikon will have a 30MP mirrorless sports body that can capture 30 fps or even faster, or you capture 8K video at 60, 120 fps. CFX will become relevant then. Currently the D5 can write to XQD cards from 2016 faster than it can capture at 12 fps lossless compressed RAW. Any additional write speed from CFX is meaningless, and I wonder whether the D5 can take advantage of that anyway. The bottleneck is on the D5’s side. Keep in mind the D5 is now 3 years old and is a little dated.

[ilkka_nissila]

The D5's burst depth is more than sufficient but with the D850, I've run into the burst limit in some situation where I was shooting in live view (camera held by my arms extended near the roof to get a better view into the dance floor) and in that case the buffer isn't that large. Because of the distance to the screen in that situation, it was hard to time shots manually, so I would shoot in CH mode. Anyway, as long as I don't use the SD slot the camera performs quite well.

 

However, the Z7 is more buffer limited than the D850 and I imagine some of its owners will want CFexpress cards (provided Nikon implemented it so that it can take advantage of the increased write speed). Of course, one can argue why shoot burst with a high resolution camera, but usually one has to use the camera that is in hand. ;-)

 

Time will tell how the prices change. I am not convinced there will be a rapid reduction of prices of fast cards as e.g. Canon still use slow card types in many of their cameras and they are the market leader in ILCs, showing that users don't care as much as some of us might.

[ShunCheung]

I finally picked up a D850 recently because I knew that there would be a lot of excellent landscape opportunities in Antarctica, and I wanted a state-of-the-art landscape camera that is less than medium format. (The Z7 probably would have been great too, but currently there is a lack of native lenses.) At least to me, I would mainly use those 36MP, 45MP cameras at or near its base ISO, stop the lens down to f5.6, f8 (or f11 if I need depth of field, at the expense of diffraction), and preferably use it on a tripod.

 

IMO any subject motion or significant deviation from the base ISO (64 for the D850 and Z7), such as ISO 400, ISO 800 and up, you will quickly negate all the advantages of high MP. Usually I find 1/1000 sec on the D5 not quite sufficient for birds in flight. For the D850, you probably need 1/2000 sec and then suddenly you may need to compromise on the ISO side.

 

I have friends that got the grip and EN-EL18 battery for the D850 to get 9 fps for bird in flight. Personally I don't think that is an effective way to use a 45MP camera. Of course I have one XQD card inside the D850. For the SD slot, I just use a 128G, 95MB/sec UHS-1 SD card. Even that is more than fast enough for landscape.

 

The D500 is a different story. Even a UHS-II SD can still be a bottleneck, and I am forced to use only the XQD card inside. Now I am used to the Z6, just one XQD card seems acceptable, but not ideal.

 

In any case, I think the demand for CFX will be future mirrorless sports cameras and video cams. The Sony A9 can capture 20 fps but only at 12-bit compressed RAW, and only one of its SD slots is UHS-II. Without the burden of the mirror, I can see future mirrorless sports cameras to go up to 30, 40 fps and beyond. The pixel count will not be sky high; it is the high frame rate that will generate the volume that demands some very fast CFX cards and expensive electronics inside the body. Heat will also likely to be a challenge at that kind of speed.

 

BTW, Nikon announced the D5 and D500 on January 6, 2016. A few days later, we had this thread about getting the CF or XQD version of the D5:

CF or XQD for D5? XQD + SD for D500?

 

I captured some screen shots of B&H's XQD prices so that we have a record.

• On January 11, 2016, the 128G Lexar 2933x XQD was $440.95 (four hundred and forty dollars, not a typo).
  
• By January 27, it was down to $371.95.
  
• On February 2, it was $299.95
  
• By March 8, it was $159.95
  
• It was $150 by year end of 2016, and it never dropped significantly from there until Lexar was dropped by Micron in 2017, purchased by the Chinese Longsys company but never produced XQD cards again (despite some false starts).
  

From January to March 2016, in less than 2 months, the 128G XQD lost like 65% of its value, but interestingly, XQD hasn't gotten much cheaper in the following 3 years. In fact the price has gone up somewhat after Lexar was gone.

 

Can't wait for more competition from CFX. :cool:

[Andrew Garrard]

Re. the D850, I've run into the buffer writing just raw to XQD (no JPEG anywhere) with the grip at 9fps. At 12bpp lossless compressed, with a DX crop. That's with one of the faster Sony XQDs. I'd take a faster card if there was one, although quite possibly the D850 drive circuitry is the limiting factor.

 

A D850 should, for what it's worth, be roughly comparable at a pixel level at ISO400 to the D500 under the same circumstances. That might be an argument for not storing 14bpp, but unless you think the same of the D500, I wouldn't argue against using it under those circumstances - though I absolutely shoot all the D8x0 series at minimum ISO when I can, for more dynamic range recovery. If the D850 is using a longer lens and a smaller (relative) aperture, and also needing a higher shutter speed to avoid blur, and that puts the ISO through the roof then I agree there are limits - but direct sunlight gets you 1/2000s at below ISO 200. Dawn and dusk make things worse, but sometimes the really bright continuous light source in the big blue room works in our favour.

[ilkka_nissila]

I believe that the XQD card price reduction in 2016 was largely due to the increase in demand going from a card type only used in the low volume D4 and D4s (and some Sony professional camcorders) to the relatively high-volume D500. Since Nikon haven't been able to increase the volume of sales of the XQD-using cameras that they produce further, there haven't been further price reductions in XQD cards (Lexar exiting the market was another factor). If Canon and Sony were to produce cameras that take XQD/CFexpress cards, then we could expect to see further price reductions, but so far there is no word that they intend to do this. They may, or they could stick to SD or some other formats. The Sony E mount (still) cameras are really small and implementing XQD/CFexpress card slots would build pressure to increase the size which Sony seem intent on not doing (I recall in a recent interview they said that if someone wants a larger camera, they should look at other brands). Canon are a big unknown. Their EOS R has a single UHS-II slot though I suspect in that camera, there would be plenty of space for XQD/CFexpress card slots.

[ilkka_nissila]

I don't need higher frame rates than the 9-12 fps in D850 or D5 (in fact usually I have the D5 set to 8 fps if I use continuous shooting), but I can benefit from the high resolution sensor because it allows somewhat more detailed images to be obtained when the image needs to be cropped and I cannot due to practical reasons use a longer lens. Even though the D5 gives nicer tonality and colour when used at moderately high ISO, the D850 images are more detailed and this means I can't necessarily tell the cropped image from the full frame one, or the difference is more subtle. With the D5, if one needs to crop by 2-3x it becomes evident that there is a loss of sharpness. I know the benefits are debatable (and tonality & colour may be more important than detail to some). As to why I might need to crop, it's because the skaters move very fast and there may not be enough time to switch between horizontal and vertical, or there may not be enough zoom range (or there may be none). One cannot always have exactly the right lens when a photographic moment takes place.

 

If one increases the frame rate further, I suspect there isn't enough time for the system to do full AF on subjects that move rapidly towards or away from the camera. I don't believe ultra high frame rates with shallow depth of field action photos are a recipe for success. To get clean backgrounds I usually shoot at the widest possible aperture. A too high frame rate will just result in lots of out of focus images.

[ShunCheung]

So far we have Delkin, ProGrade, Apacer, Sony, SanDisk and Lexar (now owned by LongSys) announcing CFexpress cards. There will certainly be plenty of competition. I would imagine that so many companies are getting into CFX because they know the demand is coming, and it is not only from several Nikon camera models. I am no video expert, but I understand some early 8K video cams would write directly onto external SSDs. The smaller form factor of CFX inside the cam will make life easier.

 

BTW, it looks like there will be types A, B, and C CFX cards. Type B will be similar (identical to?) to XQD as we understand it. Apparently Type C will be larger, but it is still working thru the standards committees:

 

SD™ Express: A Comparison To CFexpress™ - ProGrade Digital, Inc

 

Potentially we'll just have CFX cards inside laptop computers, instead of hard drives and SSDs.

[Dieter Schaefer]

I don't need higher frame rates than the 9-12 fps in D850 or D5

I am quite satisfied with the 10fps the D500 provides - at least for what I shoot, I can't see that doubling, tripling or even quadrupling the frame rate provides much of a benefit most of the time. I do know that it will make culling images a lot harder. And it will certainly require more and/or larger memory cards. It also appears that it may only happen with a stacked sensor design like the one utilized in the Sony A9 - and then require ultrafast cards to never run up against any buffer limit.