WARNING - There’s nothing artisic or thoughtful here, just straight gear talk… You have been warned.
I’m pretty fortunate to use the gear which I do, I’ve been around long enough that while photography isn’t my primary source of income it does allow me to play with some pretty cool toys. The fact I work in a camera shop even more so.
I use a Nikon Z9, Nikon’s flagship mirrorless camera which is special because it doesn’t have a mechanical shutter, now I’m not going to get overly nerdy here but basically using an electronic shutter around LED lighting; such as those found at music venues is bad because of the risk of banding.
I’ve shot literally tens of thousands of images using my Z9 and have very rarely experienced very noticable banding. That was till I shot at a particular venue in Birmingham’s city centre a few weeks back. I was stuck. Nikon allows fine tuning of the shutter speed to help mitigate any banding issues but by the time I had found a shutter speed which worked the lighting had already changed and a hardcore kid had already crowd killed me several times over. I was forced to use incredibly slow shutter speeds to get around the banding issue but I then ran the risk of getting nothing but motion blur; I had to make the best out of a bad situation.
The following week I found myself at the same venue but this time I had come prepared, I had got my hands on a Canon R3; Canon’s flagship camera which sported a very useful mechanical shutter. I also figured it would be cool putting the Z9 and the R3 practically head to head knowing how the Z9 had faired the previous week. First of all, the fact the R3 has a mechanical shutter was amazing as it relieved all of my banding problems, being considerably lighter than the Z9 was a massive bonus too. That autofocus though, it was good but it just wasn’t as stable or accurate as my beloved Z9, since speaking to a Canon rep however, it turns out that the body was running on older firmware and may have been the cause of the sluggish autofocus - looks like I need to get my hands on another R3 and put it to the test. Anyway, I posted a photo of the camera online while at the gig and called it a night.
Enter Sony.
I received a message from a rep who seemed shocked that I wasn’t shooting my regular Nikon so I explained my situation. They mentioned that it would be cool to hear my opinion on their flagship, the Sony A1 now that I had experience with the competition, how could I refuse? We agreed a date which would line up with Polyphia performong at the O2 Institute and while not being the most energetic of acts, it would still give me the oppurtunity to test the A1’s autofocus and image quality in a low light setting. Just in case they ever read this, massive thank you for loaning me the camera! So what can I say about the A1? That menu system, yeah not great and the autofocus while very solid and easily on par with the Canon R3 - I still don’t think it’s as good as the Nikon Z9. That image quality however, bravo Sony. That sensor is unreal, the amount of information you can pull out of the files is insane and the level of detail it retains is extraordinary, this is very likely helped by their incredible G-Master 24-70mm F2.8 II which was a joy to use.
So will I be trading my Nikon Z9 in and taking the leap to move to Canon or Sony? Not at all.
Is it beneficial to try new things to realise the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, if you have the oppurtunity then yes absolutely.
Hope you didn’t mind my ramblings, camera gear isn’t the sexiest of subjects but the gear you use can sometimes be the difference between getting the shot and missing entirely.
