Nikon Z6 III and the state of internal RAW

Perhaps the most anticipated midrange mirrorless camera of the year, the Nikon Z6 III launched today June 17, 2024 at 5am Pacific Time to a broad audience of enthusiasts and professionals alike.

Nikon Z6 III

6K60 N-RAW, 6K30 ProRes RAW

New Partially Stacked 24.3 MP Sensor

4000 nit EVF

Flippy screen

$2500

RAW

Internal RAW video recording in both N-RAW and ProRes RAW is the most sought after feature that thankfully became realized following months of rumors. For Dynamic Range and Rolling Shutter data we will wait for the results from our friends at CineD.

Internal RAW video mirrorless hybrid cameras as of June 2024.

• Nikon Z9, Z8, Z6 III

• Canon R3, R5

• Panasonic GH7

No 32-bit Audio

Earlier this month on June 6, Panasonic released the GH7 that with an external unit can record 32-bit floating-point audio to internally recorded video on SDXC/CFexpress Type B cards. Unfortunately, the Nikon Z6 III sticks to 24-bit audio.

Bright EVF

Those who photograph mid-day know all too well the eye fatigue of your eye adjusting too quickly from a dim EVF to extremely bright sun and back. With a brighter 4000 nit EVF there is now less luminance difference.

Price

$2500 body or $3100 with 24-70 f/4 S kit lens (a $400 savings from the $1000 lens list price).

Future

Never too early to start thinking about cameras to come, here are some thoughts on what Nikon may/could release:

Z9 II / Z8 II: If Nikon decides that there are other important factors besides pushing higher megapixel count, we may see 14-bit RAW video and 16-bit RAW photo with a new 45 MP sensor and Dual Expeed 7/ Single Expeed 8 processor. Depending on the RED acquisition terms we may even see 16-bit RAW compressed internal video capabilities.

Z7 III: Unlike the Z6/7 and Z6/7 II releases, Nikon decided to not launch a Z7 III alongside the Z6 III. Though I have not seen the sales numbers, the Z6 range always seemed to garner more attention than the Z7, especially after the Z9 and Z8 unveilings. Besides a smaller form factor, a Z7 III with 8K60 N-RAW, 4000 nit EVF and partially stacked 45MP sensor would give slim reason to purchase a pricier Z8 instead. We may See an 8K30 N-RAW cap and $3000 price tag just to keep a line in the sand,

Z6 IV: Same 24MP resolution with full stacked sensor & global shutter. Too much to ask? on the current timeline we won’t see the Z6 IV until 2028. Looking at camera development from this perspective, it would be rather disappointing if global shutter wasn’t more widespread by our next decade.

Handling desaturation

Pixelmator 3.5.8 handles desaturation differently than Adobe Photoshop 25.6. Within PS, there’s the option of handling color with either the Adobe ACE Engine or Apple CMM Engine, whereas Pixelmator relies only on Apple CMM. Fortunately, switching between engines in Photoshop does not affect output.

The example below shows blocks of pure Red, Green and Blue on the bottom half and completely desaturated versions of them on the top half. With Photoshop, desaturating concludes with a middle grey value of 127 in the 8-bit sRGB color space and gamma.

Photoshop: Adobe ACE Engine & Apple CMM Engine

Oddly, Pixelmator desaturates each R, G, B square to a different middle grey value. Perhaps a fluke or perhaps to mimic the response our cones have to each wavelength - there’s no written evidence either way.

Pixelmator: Apple CMM Engine (presumably, since the application also relies on the Apple RAW engine.)

YouTube AV1 update March 2024

Official support for AV1 is now available on youtube.com —> Settings —> Playback and performance --> AV1 Settings. ‘Always prefer AV1’ is only recommended for chips with AV1 Hardware accelerated decode including:

• Apple M3 and A17 Pro (iPhone 15 Pro)

• Samsung Galaxy S24 (Exynos 2400)

• Pixel 8 (Tensor G3)

• Intel Core Ulta, Core 14th Gen

• AMD Ryzen 7

With the exception of AVC/HEVC 5K resolution when the iMac 5K was released, YouTube only supported up to 4K HDR in Safari under macOS, limiting 8K HDR to AV1 within Chrome. Now, up to 8K60 HDR AV1 is hardware accelerated with Apple M3 and takes virtually no toll on battery life or CPU usage.

RAW Engine Noise Reduction

RAW photos are as the name implies, an unprocessed form of an image at its most primary. Since these files need an engine to create a visible rasterized photo, you can imagine that just as there are many different photo editing Apps (Photoshop, Pixelmator, Lightroom etc…) there are many different RAW engines. This study will focus primarily on the handling of noise.

Right off the bat we see how drastically each RAW engine handles the same file. Capture One and Affinity Photo have their own custom built RAW engines that allow completely turning off both Luma and Chroma Noise Reduction while the built-in macOS RAW engine (which Pixelmator Pro also uses) has a preset amount reduction that cannot be modified.

Capture One: heavy grain and random speckles of different colors prove that no Luma or Chroma Noise Reduction is being applied. *Note: by default a small amount of Luma and Chroma noise reduction is applied but was disabled specifically for this test.

macOS Preview: The built-in Preview App applies strong Chrominance reduction as seen by the complete continuity of green across the leaf without dotes of variously colored noise, while Luminance reduction is about medium considering a grainy pattern is still thankfully visible.

macOS Quick Look: When you click on an image and tap space bar an enlarged window of the photo shows up; this is what Apple calls Quick Look. You would think this would be the exact same processing as the macOS Preview App but clearly that's not the case. The Apple development team has decided that customers want a squeaky clean image completely void of noise, which makes sense from a compression standpoint because file size is kept at bay but at the complete loss of any and all texture. The 1/3 stop less of exposure (darker image) could also be a tactic to keep noise down or simply a processing setting inconcetsincy.

Conclusion

Complete noise control of a RAW still image can only be had through a custom built RAW engine such as Capture One, Adobe Camera RAW or Affinity Photo.

Extended ISO

The following examples refer to the results of examining the behavior of still photos of the Nikon Z6 (Firmware 3.6) at 14-bit uncompressed RAW 6048 x 4024 developed in Capture One 16.3.2.32 and RawDigger 1.4.7 on macOS Sonoma 14.1.2.

Highlight Recovery

To achieve the same light quantity, shutter speed was adjusted accordingly by half step increments. Looking at highlights outside the window, we can see ISO 400, 200 and 100 preserve the same amount of detail when pulling down exposure by 4 stops in Capture One. Extended ISO 50 ‘Lo 2.0’ shows clipping at around 1 stop earlier as seen in the lower right hand image, cutting a significant amount of dynamic range.

Note the lack of detail blown out around the house roofs, not simply the lower white point.

It would be easy to conclude now that Extended ISO has no benefit, but we must now consider noise levels in the shadows.

Shadow Recovery

First we must completely disable Sharpening, Noise Reduction and Lens Correction in Capture One to achieve an unaltered RAW file (Base Characteristics must be applied; the Nikon Z6 ProStandard ICC Profile and Film Standard Curve were chosen).

After rising exposure by 4 stops the shadow noise difference between Extended ISO 50 and even ISO 100 is significant.

Conclusion

1) Pushing and pulling an image by + /- 4 EV is not practical in real world terms and a photo is generally considered incorrectly exposed if such edits are necessary, therefor these examples are issued more to illustrate a point. That said, also in the real world are times where a client enjoys a photo even though it’s rather under/overexposed and you must do whatever it takes to recover it because the scene content itself is captivating. In these scenarios you’ll take every bit of dynamic range / low noise headroom as one can get.

2) Images are not viewed at 400% zoom, so even though noise levels seem significant at these magnified levels, they are all but indistinguishable from each other while viewing scrolling through your phone at 100%.

3) Go take a meaningful photo.