I Was Asked A Strange question, Which You Can Learn From If You Are Looking For A New Camera

This week I was asked the strangest question when I posted my latest portrait shoot with our model Mark. The question was a first for me to hear, but thinking about it, in a round about way it is asked by many people, a lot of the time. 

I was asked “how and why do you work with different generation cameras?“. Now, at first I didn’t think much of it, but then of course I realised, my Nikon Z6ii is an older Expeed 6 processor camera, and my Nikon ZF is the newer Expeed 7 processor. In theory, this means that my Nikon ZF has better autofocus, faster operation and more features. 

My answer was quite honest, when photographing almost everything, from people events (weddings, portraits, events etc), to architecture, and wildlife and more, I don’t really think about how old my camera technology is (and let’s be honest, it’s not really that old!).

For some people, they have an idea that the latest and greatest cameras (like the Nikon ZF) is light years ahead of cameras with processors a generation before. While, on paper and in dedicated tests, this is accurate (the latest cameras are faster with better autofocus, you can not deny this), however, in reality, in the real world, both my Nikon Z6ii (released in 2020 and still having minor updates) and my Nikon ZF (released in 2023 and still having huge updates) work effortlessly together and you rarely, if ever see a difference.

Both cameras hit focus, both cameras have great dynamic range, both cameras have great buffers for the task in hand and more importantly, both have extremely beautiful image quality. You can feel the difference if you look for it, but you are usually too busy taking photos to notice a nano-seconds difference in speed etc. Of course, there may be specific scenarios such as bird and wildlife photography where the newer cameras find the subject faster or their autofocus is more sticky, but I’ve never thought my Nikon Z6ii is not up to the task!

Conclusion

Since writing this article, and sitting on it for a while, I’ve seen videos of far more famous photographers than me (well, YouTube photographers) discussing why they are not upgrading to the latest Sony camera (Julia Trotti for one), and their sentiments are very similar to mine. Technology has come along so far, and so fast, that the latest cameras on paper and in marketing seem like they are light years ahead in performance, but in reality and in real use, they are not.

---

You can find all the latest articles and blogs on my homepage here.
My main photography social media page is my Facebook One Camera One Lens Photography page.
Nikon Recipes for the Z system can be found here.
You can find a complete list of my gear here.