p.1 #1 · Nikon Z8 with fw 2.0 for portraits - any improvements?
Has anyone installed 2.0 already and tried shooting a series of portraits with 50, 85 and/or 135 lenses yet?
I've done some shooting on the Z8 when it came out, and read a lot of reviews and feedback, and it seemed that critical sharpness on the Z8 wasn't always up to expectations, e.g. focus was sometimes just a bit off from the iris. Of course not in the majority of the cases, but more often than on e.g. Sony's or Canon's top models.
I am curious if that has improved with the FW 2.0?
p.1 #2 · Nikon Z8 with fw 2.0 for portraits - any improvements?
Z9's been like that forever. The Z8 didn't receive any AF enhancements the Z9 didn't get with 4.1, so highly doubt it's fixed on the Z8 and not the Z9.
FWIW shooting single shot dramatically improves this small annoyance. I personally don't like shooting single when doing portraits, but it's there if you NEED it. Always plenty of keepers shooting burst at even slow rates.
p.1 #3 · Nikon Z8 with fw 2.0 for portraits - any improvements?
RoamingScott wrote:
Z9's been like that forever. The Z8 didn't receive any AF enhancements the Z9 didn't get with 4.1, so highly doubt it's fixed on the Z8 and not the Z9.
FWIW shooting single shot dramatically improves this small annoyance. I personally don't like shooting single when doing portraits, but it's there if you NEED it. Always plenty of keepers shooting burst at even slow rates.
I had Z5 and sold it because of this issue. I didn't have any noticeable issue with Z8 and 50/1.8 and 28-75/2.8. I even shot a sequence that my daughter biking towards me using 400/4.5. I had most of them in focus or didn't notice any OOF issue. I still shoot with A1 and can't find any difference. You may get some OOF shots with either camera.
Anyway what you are saying, you can shoot in AF-C, but single shot have more consistency?
p.1 #4 · Nikon Z8 with fw 2.0 for portraits - any improvements?
Jemini wrote:
I had Z5 and sold it because of this issue. I didn't have any noticeable issue with Z8 and 50/1.8 and 28-75/2.8. I even shot a sequence that my daughter biking towards me using 400/4.5. I had most of them in focus or didn't notice any OOF issue. I still shoot with A1 and can't find any difference. You may get some OOF shots with either camera.
Anyway what you are saying, you can shoot in AF-C, but single shot have more consistency?
Thank you
Sorry, should have clarified, AF-S + single shot is nearly bulletproof. AF-C for whatever reason seems to be the issue. I'd say tack sharp eye keeper rate is like 80% in AF-C.
p.1 #5 · Nikon Z8 with fw 2.0 for portraits - any improvements?
RoamingScott wrote:
Sorry, should have clarified, AF-S + single shot is nearly bulletproof. AF-C for whatever reason seems to be the issue. I'd say tack sharp eye keeper rate is like 80% in AF-C.
Hmm, that doesn't sound great It's almost impossible to find a child sitting idle!. Anyway I'm happy with the result I'm seeing. My be my camera is 'faulty' ..
p.1 #6 · Nikon Z8 with fw 2.0 for portraits - any improvements?
Jemini wrote:
Hmm, that doesn't sound great It's almost impossible to find a child sitting idle!. Anyway I'm happy with the result I'm seeing. My be my camera is 'faulty' ..
Like I said, small annoyance with an easy fix if the subject allows for it, but still plenty of keepers in regular AF+C + burst modes.
p.1 #7 · Nikon Z8 with fw 2.0 for portraits - any improvements?
I've been shooting my fast toddler pre-2.0 with 135mm 1.8 lens wide open - I reckon the hit rate was already around 90% if not higher, so I can't see how it will be worse with 2.0.
p.1 #8 · Nikon Z8 with fw 2.0 for portraits - any improvements?
My fastest lens at the moment is an adapted 85/1.8G and at least my copy has no trouble nailing the iris at F1.8 consistently in AF-C . If it misses it's usually my fault. Subject matter is my 2 nieces running around and occasionally my friends' kids. There will always be the odd frame missing critical focus trying to shoot unpredictable action at such wide apertures but at least with that particular combo there are no issues I've been able to detect. My one niece has bangs that sometimes partially obstruct her eyes and that doesn't seem to confuse the camera either. FWIW I haven't noticed a difference with human AF before or after FW 4.1 in that regard (Z9). I wouldn't expect any difference with the Z8 and FW 2.0 either and to my knowledge Nikon didn't mention any human eye AF tweaking in the changelog.
I wish I had more fast lenses to test but this is the first time I have heard of someone having a problem. You are never going to get the same keeper rates shooting action at F1.2-1.8 or whatever as you are with slower lenses. I actually find all the brands do a really good job with eye AF on humans, I can't say I've noticed much of a difference having used the R3, R5, and most of the Sony bodies.
p.1 #10 · Nikon Z8 with fw 2.0 for portraits - any improvements?
I have noticed an improvement - I think - but read on because the whole situation is a bit funny to me.
I got my Z8 early this past spring and thought it worked pretty well. In mid summer I got the 70-180 Z lens - my first native Z lens - and thought that with the Z8 the AF was amazingly accurate and the lens to be the sharpest I'd ever used. By November, I was feeling a bit less happy with the AF and was finding it very inconsistent (on both the 70-180 and another lens of mine), especially in lower light. I also noticed a weird AF behavior in that using the wide area AF modes with subject detection tended to give me low accuracy for AF on people's eyes - it would say they were in focus but they'd be extremely soft or often just plain out of focus - but if I used the full area AF the eyes would be in focus much more consistently. It was still far too low, but it was better. With wide area modes I'd get <50% in focus when the eye box was solid green. With the full area I'd get 70% or so in focus with the eye box solid green. Meanwhile, doing it with the single point AF and no subject detection was >90% in focus.
Then, as the winter wore on I started to find photos from my Z8 to be weirdly lacking in sharpness and also increasingly noisy/grainy in a way that even LR's denoise wouldn't clean up. This really confused me because I was taking photos at lower ISOs in better lighting with less noise (or grain; it was hard for me to classify which) than I'd seen in lots of past photos but the past photos would clean up to near perfection in LR's denoise while anything I was taking now come out of denoise looking hardly any better than they went in. I was seriously starting to consider switching brands, even as a bit of a Nikon loyalist, because it all started to make some of the stereotypical anti-Nikon complaints seem pretty real to me.
When the 2.0 firmware was released earlier this week, I first backed up my settings and then updated the firmware. I then restored my settings and verified that they did go back the way I had them - so nothing has changed in terms of how the camera is configured.
However, almost immediately I started to notice the AF being more accurate and the photos having that nice "high-fidelity" look I would have expected and had been used to when I first got this camera/lens combo. I didn't say anything at first because I wanted to test it more. I still wouldn't say I've tested enough to be certain anything's really changed, but in what playing around I have done it really does feel like a different camera, like suddenly the AF is nailing things the way it did when I first got it and like the photos have an appropriate amount of noise and that noise can be cleaned up in processing again. I can now go into whatever mode I want and photograph my kids, for instance, and their eyes are sharp and shiny almost every time. I can see the texture in their skin instead of a kind of very vaguely "oil painting" sort of lower texture.
This has me pretty confused because I am positive nothing has changed settings-wise and because I know that while this firmware is an improvement it isn't as if the previous firmware was so bad as that there should be this difference. I saw earlier today how Thom Hogan had pointed out that apparently the previous firmware wasn't always accounting for AF-fine tuning properly so I went and checked to see if maybe I'd had that turned on before and so now it was just being applied correctly, but no, it wasn't - and it certainly wasn't on when I first was getting great results last summer, either.
Just something to think about. It really makes me wonder what the heck changed, what the update fixed and how it fixed it, and how to make sure it doesn't happen again!
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