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Nikon Z6 III review: A worthy upgrade for most smartphone camera users
Summary
Nikon Z6 III works well as a straight-shooting semi-pro camera but it won’t appeal to professional photographersBy now, it’s perhaps futile to speak about the impact of smartphones on digital cameras. The proliferation of smartphones has happened in line with the advancement of increasingly compact lenses and sensors, and algorithm-supported image processing. In such a world, the role of standalone digital cameras has become more niche and targeted. Interestingly enough, on the same breath, the market for full-frame, interchangeable-lens, mirrorless cameras has continued to increase in India. With refinements to its body, intuitive ergonomics and a crisp overall package, the Nikon Z6 III, priced at ₹2,47,990, is one of the most well-heeled semi-professional cameras that you can buy today.
Important context: for most casual buyers, the need for a camera such as the Nikon Z6 III arises out of discretion. Today, hobbies are no longer what they used to be—thanks in no small part to dwindling attention spans. As a result, if you’re looking to purchase a camera, it is most likely a passive hobby for you. In such a world, the key challenge is to convince buyers that the Nikon Z6 III will beckon you to use it more often than not.
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The Nikon Z6 III’s biggest win is that it gives you a simplified usage experience. If you’re keen on rebuilding your long-lost hobbies, the Z6 III’s fully-automatic shooting mode gives you an almost point-and-shoot photography experience.
What aids the camera is in-body image stabilisation—a common feature for cameras at this price bracket, but one that’s still often reserved for flagship models, and not mid-range ones. This lets you shoot without needing a tripod, be it late evenings or at the crack of dawn.
At such times, the fully-automatic mode gives you the ability to shoot 20-megapixel photographs with mostly-excellent dynamic range and depth of colours. For technical context, Nikon has equipped the Z6 III with a new, partially-stacked image sensor, and the camera is capable of shooting 14 frames per second (fps) with the mechanical shutter. Even with the electronic shutter, you get great rolling shutter performance. The full-frame sensor uses its full width to shoot 4K videos at 60 fps, and if you’re okay with cropping into the sensor, losing some depth for additional resolution or frame rates, you can even push it up to 4K video at 120 fps, or an impressive 6K at 60 fps.
What does this mean? Simply put, in most situations, the Nikon Z6 III is a versatile camera that produces inherently great photographs. Even if you’re shooting in the widely-standardised ‘JPEG’ format, you’ll get results with great detailing in colour tones, depth of details in shadows, and contrast. In the real world, this translates to excellent photographs even in the most contrasting of situations—such as a sunny day out at the beach, the setting sun at a hill station, or a splendour of colours in the upcoming four months of the festive season.
The videography credentials also set the Nikon Z6 III apart. The quality of videos exceeds the overall standard of videos that most content creators want, even for YouTube. Natively-shot 60 fps content at 4K resolution captures ample depth of colours for you to consider this as a professional camera that will be good enough for at least half a decade, or maybe even more.
The Z6 III also manages body heat very well, which means that you can easily shoot for two hours without needing to stop—even at 42-degree Celsius ambient temperature and 70% humidity in the middle of a mango orchard.
The camera also gets a new electronic viewfinder (EVF). With a 5.76-million-dot resolution, the EVF does well in absolutely any situation that you throw at it. This is also one area where, at least on paper, the Z6 III edges ahead of its rivals from Canon and Sony.
What does the Z6 III do wrong? For one, if you are a professional video producer, you will notice some trade-off in dynamic range, which translates to lesser details of colours, shades and shadows especially in high-contrast scenes. You will also realise that Nikon is yet to match Sony’s LUT (light and colour) profiles and their tonal accuracies—although the Z6 III makes up for this with great rolling shutter performance. The latter simply means that if you are shooting sporting events, you won’t end up with blurred images that miss acute moments of movement.
The Z6 III’s wireless smartphone connectivity platform, called ‘SnapBridge’, continues to remain more or less the same as what it was nearly a decade ago—which is unfortunate. The simplest connectivity medium is through the ‘AP Wi-Fi’ mode—where you follow on-screen instructions both on the camera and the SnapBridge app, to sync the camera with your phone.
Transferring photographs and videos from the camera to your phone works simply enough once the connection is up and running, but reconnecting a day later isn’t as straightforward. In a world where smartphones have simplified user interfaces to a great extent, it’s time that camera-makers take the smartphone world more seriously.
If you are a professional, you’ll likely want to look at Sony’s a7R range, or Nikon’s Z8/Z9 series, for better dynamic range, LUT profiles and faster shutters. For everyone else, the Z6 III could prove to be strategically key to Nikon’s ambition of crossing ₹1,000 crore in annual revenue this fiscal.
