NIKON Z 8

Is this the spiritual successor to the D850? A baby Z 9? Or both?

- Adam Waring

www.nikon.co.uk £3,999/$3,999 (body only)

Rumours of a Nikon Z 8 mirrorless camera, fitting into Nikon’s lineup somewhere between the Nikon Z 7 II and Nikon Z 9, had been doing the rounds for years but now it’s finally here. The manufacturer is touting the Z 8 as both the “true successor to the Nikon D850” and a “baby Z 9” and these are both fair descriptions. It looks and feels like the Z-series equivalent of the D850, with a similar design, yet squeezes all the high-end specs of the flagship Z 9 into a smaller – and more affordable – body.

The specs-wise, the biggest news is that the Nikon Z 8 has the same 45.7MP stacked CMOS sensor as the Z 9, which boasts the fastest scan rate in any commercially available camera. So while this isn’t a ‘global’ sensor that captures the image instantaneously, but renders the image line-by-line in the same way as traditional sensors, it does so incredibly quickly; so quickly, in fact, that the camera forgoesa mechanical shutter entirely.

There are plenty of ‘shutterless’ cameras out there (including the ones in your smartphone) and most existing DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have the option of an electronic shutter mode, but these suffer from what’s known as rolling shutter distortion. If you’re shooting a fast-moving subject or panning the camera quickly, by the time the sensor has rendered the entire image the movement will be evident, giving the resultant photograph a ‘sheared’ appearance.