Nikon Zr is coming

[Andrew Reid]

How about the original Sony a1?

The Z8 is a bit of a bargain, but out of the two I regret selling my a1 more, because it was smaller, lighter, and here's the kicker - better colour science. Which I'd never thought in a million years I'd say about a Sony. You also save a lot of card space by shooting in the upgraded 8K H.265 mode that looks as good as N-RAW for a quarter of the file size. E-mount saves you further money on glass and adapters as well.

If the OG a1 is similar in price to that Z8 with 24-70 bundle, I'd be tempted to go for the Sony and stick a nice small, but cheap, vintage 35mm on it.

I'd then pair that with a little Micro Four Thirds camera, maybe a good old GX80.

[BTM_Pix]

40 minutes ago, Andrew Reid said:

How about the original Sony a1?

Around £2300 so not a massive amount in it.

[Ken Ross]

On 11/16/2025 at 2:11 PM, ND64 said:

I wish someone in Nikon or RED explain what they did and what these codes actually do. NRAW show less purple noise at extreme underexposure but colors are all over the place. R3D NE is in a pool of purple noise, but colors are intact. 

Since the sensor is dual gain, below a certain ambient light level you should switch to the higher gain setting, ISO 6400. When you do that, presto, the noise is either gone or greatly diminished. 

[ND64]

Nikon is going to add RED profiles to their image recipes. So any of recently released Expeed7 cameras can use that for both still and video.

Flexible Picture Controls that you have to use to make these recipes doesn't support LUTs or curves. I wonder how close to RED colors they can go with that limited set of tools. 

[Ilkka Nissila]

2 hours ago, ND64 said:

Nikon is going to add RED profiles to their image recipes. So any of recently released Expeed7 cameras can use that for both still and video.

Flexible Picture Controls that you have to use to make these recipes doesn't support LUTs or curves. I wonder how close to RED colors they can go with that limited set of tools. 

Curves are available in the advanced settings when creating custom picture controls (which you can the upload as recipes). 

[Andrew Reid]

On 11/17/2025 at 11:43 AM, BTM_Pix said:

Around £2300 so not a massive amount in it.

Blimey if ever there was a GAS curing end-game camera it's the a1 for that price.

It has the spec to last until about 2050!

It's smaller than the Z8, more nimble ergonomically and has better colour science (I am not joking).

[Andrew Reid]

5 hours ago, Ilkka Nissila said:

Curves are available in the advanced settings when creating custom picture controls (which you can the upload as recipes). 

I've been using Flexible Picture Controls in the NX software, have made some Fuji emulations for my Nikon Z f.

The latest processor Nikon cameras - Z6 III, Z F, Z8 and Z9 are the only ones that support the Flexi colour profiles.

You get plenty of control - custom curves, HSL, colour grading for shadows, mids and highs.

You have to be really careful with it though, because all the colour processing seems to be done in 8bit.

It has a somewhat brittle processing pipeline, presumably designed for speed as they have to work at 4K/120p for example on a mid-range cam.

It is not a patch on what Panasonic has done with Real-time LUTs.

But it's a start and you can get some nice results.

So far all the RED colour science and codec stuff from Nikon has a faint whiff off BRANDING EXERCISE about it.

It's not really quite authentic. R3D on the Z R is basically just NRAW.

And the LUTs are just, well... RED branded colour grades.

You can do all that yourself on a Z8 with not a RED badge in sight.