Nikon has published a 30-second ad spot that teases its forthcoming flagship camera and while not much was revealed in the short commercial, a quick glimpse of the rear LCD teases that it won’t be like every other on the market.
Most of the new teaser is focused on visuals that aren’t the camera, but what little there is that focuses on the forthcoming Z9 puts the new rear viewfinder on center stage. The commercial shows how it can be tilted up and down like a standard tilt screen found on many Sony cameras — up for shooting at low angles and down for when shooting with the camera above the head — but the final few frames of the video show that it can also tilt inwards, a feature that hasn’t been common in mirrorless cameras or DSLRs.
Tilting inwards towards the right hand of the shooter has multiple benefits. Instead of requiring first needing to flip out and over and flip around like a vari-angle screen found on the Canon R3, this type of screen can do it in one motion. The first camera that comes to mind that had a similar feature might be the Pentax K1, a DSLR that had an unusual claw-like attachment from the LCD to the camera and allowed it to move at unusual angles — including the ones seen in Nikon’s above ad.
The unusual nature of this screen is probably why it was taped up in the photos seen of the Z9 at the Tokyo Olympics: Nikon did not want to show its hand.
While screens like this are unusual and useful, it alone is usually not enough to sell a camera. Luckily, Nikon isn’t putting all of its eggs into that basket. Nikon has said that the Z9 will use “groundbreaking technologies,” has been confirmed to feature a stacked CMOS sensor, will feature a new image processor and will be able to capture video in up to 8K. The camera is also expected to feature a 45-megapixel sensor, and some reports even expect somewhere between 120 and 160 frame per second burst shooting performance.
While the camera has technically been “announced” through a development notice released in early March, nearly all of the details behind the Z9 remain under wraps. Nikon has not provided an expected timeline for when all features will be fully revealed, but most expect that to happen sometime this fall.
Author: Jaron Schneider
Source: Petapixel
