Here's a picture of Hopper taken with the Nikon Z50 that I rented. It's fine. But there was never any reason to expect much difference between the Z50 and my old Sony for casual snapshots.
Sadly, the Nikon bundle performed poorly on every other dimension. The Nikkor 18-300 zoom lens was pretty sharp in the center at full telephoto, but soft at the edges. That's to be expected with any zoom lens, but the Nikkor was pretty bad. The entire right and left hand quarters of images were quite blurred at 300mm, even when I stopped down to f/11.
That was disappointing, but at least the Z50 made up for it by having a bigger sensor that produced better low-light images. Right? In a word, no. I took picture after picture at different settings, many of them using the same settings I used for night pictures in Rome with the Sony. I took lots of pictures because I had a hard time accepting the results: the Sony's low-light performance was equal to or better than the Nikon. Sharpness was better and, crucially, noise was more controlled. I still have a hard time believing this, but I have a whole pile of images that tell me it's true.
I dunno. The Sony RX10 continues to be a miracle camera. So I'm going to send it in for repair and stick with it. Perhaps someday Sony will produce a newer version, but there's barely even a rumor of if or when that might be, so I'm not going to wait for it.
That facial expression tells me Hopper wants somebody to start a fire -- NOW!
"Here he comes AGAIN with that new camera. How long must I lay here, my front paws artfully posed? I ought to lash my tail and spoil the shot. (heh, heh)"
Good thing you rented first. Hoping the repair goes well. If not, I’m sure you will entertain us with your frustrations!
Renting was worth it. Yes, the RX10 lens and sensor are really good. Did you notice any wide-open shallower depth of field with the Nikon?
Good job you rented then!
You don't mention it, but I'll bet the Sony autofocus is better too.
Maybe she'll lounge on the terrace, or nap in an evening chair, or retire to an unoccupied bed. How to choose? Why can she not do all three? It is like a force preventing her, so here she is, until fate happens and she wakes up in another place.
It's easy to forget that Sony had a lot of experience with video cameras and television studio equipment. Their $4K calibrated Trinitron monitors ruled professional video for decades, and they made great video cameras with surprisingly good low light performance and what we now call ultra-zoom lenses. I have one of their ultra-zoom point and shoot cameras, and I've been pretty happy with it.
Lucky you didn't take my advice, then. Although, I suppose it's always possible that if you work with the Z50 for a while you might find ways to get better results.
“Really, must I be forced to share my magnificence with an inferior instrument? You owe me.”
Sony is generally better than Nikon ( much to my disappointment). One option might be a used a7ii. It’s not too much less functional than the A7iii, which is the predecessor of the a7iv. There is also the a7c which doesn’t look bad. (FWIW I use the a7iii, and will eventually use the a7iv, for semipro photography.)
Your best bet is to use an iPhone or a Pixel as your night camera. Their software puts them miles ahead of cameras until the camera makers adopt.
I don't know about the Nikon, but my camera will do in camera HDR stacking, which is basically what "night mode" does. But it also has a real cool feature called live composite, which allows you to create all kinds of cool night effects w/o using a really long exposure. Plus there are other cool things like Live ND, which allows you to take the silky moving water photos that Kevin likes so much w/o having to use an ND filter, you can even preview the effect before taking the shot. Sweet!
And I won't even talk about the really cool in-camera focus stacking for shooting macros. Or the way that I can watch long bulb exposures develop in my viewfinder. Don't think that camera makers haven't adapted, believe me, they have.
Yeah, I looked at several reviews of that lens and they were uniformly "meh". I keep saying that the Olympus 12-200 f/3.5-6.3 got much better reviews, pair that with an E-M5 Mark III and you might be happy.
The United States of America is, and ought to be, dissolved. If you know a republican, they are your enemy. Kill them! Or submit. The choice is yours.
Pick a side.
You can make an argument that there is a practical ergonomic maximum to how large a democracy can be, perhaps France or Germany sized.
After all that spamming of the Texan Tip site, I'm sure a catnap is in order.
Yeah, I heard that Ken Paxton gave his niece a ride to AUS so she could fly to California for a you-know-what!
Surely it was immaculate. It's happened before!
I don't know anything about expensive cameras. The priciest camera I've ever owned is my iPhone. But, whatever happened to Canon? I was under the impression Canon had become a very popular and well-regarded brand. Is this no longer the case?
Still there, still popular, still the leading seller in the "real camera" space. And for Kevin, the do make some well regarded, if expensive, superzoom lenses. Don't know if there is anything in the RF mount yet, though.
Canon controls 47.9% of the camera market, Sony 22.1, Nikon 13.7. (From Imaging Resource, 8/9). Don't know why people think Nikon is the dominant camera maker, but they're wrong, and you are right.
Hopper says - "That MY cardboard box" .
Sorry, but told you so. There just ain't any vacation zoom lens that's good enough for a serious photographer. For an APS-C or larger sensor, anyway. The RX10 series lenses are phenomenal, but the secret of their design is the smaller, 1" type sensor those cameras use. As one of the other commenters remarked, the only interchangeable lens systems that can compete are the micro four thirds cameras from Olympus and Panasonic.
You hit the nail on the head there!
Yep. The damn 12-100/4 (equivalent to a 24-200 in old money) turned out to be a great lens for general use for me. Personally, I wouldn't go any super-er on the superzoom scale. But damn, this is a great general purpose lens.
Interesting. My cognitive dissonance (that Nikon should have been notably better) wants an explanation for this. I think it might be...
Lenses have to be made to match sensor size, of course, and it's imaginable that Nikon has done a poor job of matching the lens to the sensor (especially in a cheaper kit lens, which it sounds like that is).
And my almost-but-not-entirely evidence-free feeling is that Nikon has sacrificed quality in the past 10 years of the cell phone photography onslaught. (While Canon has mostly tried to attract people to higher quality larger cameras, I think.)
Could be some combo of some of those factors. At the same time, sounds like Sony is making a lot of really good cameras.
"And my almost-but-not-entirely evidence-free feeling is that Nikon has sacrificed quality in the past 10 years of the cell phone photography onslaught. (While Canon has mostly tried to attract people to higher quality larger cameras, I think.)"
Not even close. They make large, sophisticated, expensive camera and lens models just as much as Canon does in terms of product mix Their lens set is on par with Canon's. Their cameras and lenses end up on top or or high up in reviews as much as Canon's, keeping in mind that the big three tend to leapfrog each other in technology and new products. (At any one time one of the three may seem to be ahead in terms of exciting new products that cause the latest buzz.)
The problems Kevin ran into were that:
-Nobody makes the superzoom he really wants for APS-C or larger cameras. The closest you can get are the 28-300mm lenses from Canon and Nikon. In this *particular* case Nikon aimed for the consumer crowd while Canon went upscale (that implies nothing about the overall strategies of both companies). That's in contrast to the usual situation where these two companies mostly try to match and copy each other in their product offerings.
"Lenses have to be made to match sensor size, of course, and it's imaginable that Nikon has done a poor job of matching the lens to the sensor "
This lens was never intended for this sensor. It's a full-frame lens that Kevin had to use an adapter on so he could attach it to the crop-sensor camera.
The lens was introduced in 2010 for full-frame cameras. The sensor came out in its current version (with PDAF pixels incorporated) when the Z50 was introduced in 2019. It's a crop sensor, so effective lens resolution is cut in half. A quality lens can still give good results in that situation, but this is a cheap consumer-level lens. It also sounds like his copy was defective since one whole side was blurry.
The poor performance of the sensor is a mystery. Possibly noise reduction was turned off in the Z50 and left on in the RX10. This chart https://www.photonstophotos.net/Charts/RN_ADU.htm (click on the Sony DSC-RX10M4 and Nikon Z50 lines on the right to populate it) shows that this Nikon should have a lot less noise than this Sony. That's backed up by plenty of reviews.
Nevertheless, Kevin got the results he did. I kind of expected that this Nikon lens would give so-so results but I'm disappointed in his Z50 results. Still, those need to be considered with the differing results of others such as here: https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikon-z50-review/5.
The basic read on that lens in the reviews was that it was "meh" (in review speak, it sucked). I am surprised at the noise results though, the Nikon should have been much better. But there are a zillion settings on these things that could have led to suboptimal results.
True. One thing I forgot to mention is that the Canon equivalent is 60% longer and weights over twice as much (3.67 lbs., not counting the camera). It's not the kind of thing you'd want to haul around all the time just in case a photo op shows up.
This just shows the practical difficulty of trying to scale up the RX10 experience to a much larger sensor. In theory it can be done but in practice it's not going to work well.
The lightweight Nikkor super zooms do get fuzzy at the far end of zoom. But t'is the compromise between quality, cost, and weight; not many people want to lug around a lens that weighs 5+ pounds.
I think most ppl who stick w/ Nikon do so b/c they have both manual and digital cameras and lenses from Nikon, and once you're in the system, you don't really want to switch.
Just under two years ago, I was looking to buy myself a nice camera. I seriously looked at the Sony RX-10 IV, but eventually decided to go with the Sony Alpha 6600. The kit 18-135 lens is pretty good, and then I added a fixed 30 (from Sigma), and then got deals on Sony's 16-50 power zoom, and for more reach Sony's 55-200.
Your trials got me really interested in long-zoom interchangeable lenses, and I discovered that Tamron is coming out with an 18-300 zoom for Sony's E-mount later this month, and for Fuji's X-mount later in "the fall". If the reviews are better than "Meh..." I'll ask Santa Clause to slip one into my stocking. No word on the lens being available for Nikon's Z-mount.
Definitely get the Sony RX-10 IV repaired. The camera is still selling for 3x the repair cost on the second-hand market.