Nikon Z50 First Impressions.

[OldMacs4Me]

I bought this camera primarily to speed up digitizing a huge whack of 35mm slides, B&W negs and colour negs. I chose to go with the 50mm ƒ-2.8 macro and the 18-140mm zoom. Preferring a single lens to cover my ordinary shooting range.

I have an old Epson scanner which does really well with correctly exposed slides and it does reasonably well with over exposed slides. Falls short with negs especially those outside of the perfect exposure range. First results are in. With slides the camera works best using the Natural color setting with contrast backed off a step. Bracketing can go a long way to preventing the need for a reshoot.

Slides such as this one which go from very deep shadows to finely detailed highlights benefit from dropping an extra notch of contrast in camera and still require some post image tinkering. They come out substantially better than via the scanner.

Well exposed 35mm slides like this come out of the camera right on the money. Same is true of the scanner, but those from the camera are just a shade crisper, significantly faster and have a pixel count of ~3600x5400 vs the scanner at ~2400x3600.

This slide was probably close to 2 stops under exposed and did not scan very well. I was pleased with what I was able to do from the camera copy.

Over exposed slides do come out better from the scanner.

I was never pleased with B&W negs via the scanner. They took way too long and required too much work post process.
What I am seeing from the camera I really like. Future scans I will do on the Standard setting with no contrast adjustment. This was Ilford FP-4 souped in 2-step D-25. I used the same reduced contrast Natural setting that works well with slides. In the future I will revert to standard setting as I added a fair bit of contrast post image.

Same image as above just cropped in.

At this point I am still working to find the starting point for color negs.

 

[OldMacs4Me]

The Ugly

I doubt that any camera on the market is perfect in anyones eyes. Here are the two issues that I found most disturbing with the Z50.

Auto bracketing, requires a menu dive to set it up, then a second dive into the iMenu to go from single frame to multiple. Getting out of bracketing is again a 2 step menu dive. Much easier on the Lumix.

Leveling. Most modern cameras come with some sort of tip/tilt indicators. Of my 3 cameras this feature is clearest on the Z50. However it only works when shooting horizontally not when pointed straight down. This has me using a target level when setting up for slide copies, and a different camera altogether for hand held table shots such as this.

 

[OldMacs4Me]

So tonight I was able to crash through roughly 60 B&W and Color negs in about an hour. Still have the post image work ahead of me, but that seems about the same or a bit easier than with the scanner.

Another of the squirt boat shots, this time with the camera set at normal contrast. Still had to bump the contrast but I prefer working from the higher contrast setting. Second shot is just a crop of the first.

And my first real attempt from a color neg. Not a picture I would brag about, but the camera copy is coming in head and shoulders above the scanner when working with 35mm color negs.

 

[apostolosdt]

Interesting post. Could you elaborate on the setup used?

 

[OldMacs4Me]

Interesting post. Could you elaborate on the setup used?

Thanks.
Copied over and lightly edited from the 'Let's Talk About Film' thread.

This is my 'Red-Green' slide copy set-up. The light source is a Kodak 6x8 light panel, purchased in 2022(?) when I digitized my 4x5 negs. The slide mount/light mask is made from four layers of black art foam and is a bit more than 1/4" in thickness. Raising the slide from the light source keeps a spec of dust on the light panel from showing in the copy. The book was needed to raise the light panel, as the arm on the tripod head was too long. The match stick was needed to make the arrangement perfectly level. I used a bullseye level to make it easy to check level in both directions at the same time.

The tripod is a 70s Gitza Tatalux. Purchased because it was light enough to carry on extended hikes and sturdy enough to support my 4x5 field camera. The tripod head is from my big 60s era Slik tripod, and is rock solid. I got it cheap but it was too bulky and heavy for my needs. NOTE: The Gitza was always headless as the 4x5 had a rotating back and eliminating the head also eliminated many dollars and almost 2 pounds. Also Note: If I were doing this professionally I would want vernier control of the tripod center.

The camera is a Nikon Z50 (APS-C) coupled to a 50mm Nikkor ƒ-2.8 Macro lens. The front of the lens is about 4 inches from the slide. Again I used the bulls eye level as Nikon thoughtfully made the horizon level only work when shooting parallel to the ground rather than pointed straight down. An absurd omission on what is an otherwise superb camera. I tried both manual and auto focus and was getting better results with less work letting the camera do the focusing. That said occasionally I have to move focus point away from center dead center. I set the aperture to ƒ-11 and ISO to 200 and let the camera pick the SS. I am using 5 step bracketing giving me EBVs from +1 to to -1.66. That's probably overkill for negs.

FWIW I do my shooting at night with zero ambient light.

NOTE: This could also work well as a table top set up by simply using the camera back in the vertical plane and working from the other side. Also not seen in the pic is the kneeling pad that makes this entire set-up reasonably comfortable.

Final Note: I have since built a second mask for film strips. Again using the art foam but the the top layers guiding the film strips and keeping them sorta flat, are made from black heavy duty art cardboard. It's just a bit thicker than a film strip. I have since found a better base to raise the light panel.

 

[apostolosdt]

Thanks for all these details. Very useful post. By the way, I don't do slides anymore, but I've got some good ones; I'm too lazy to scan them myself, I guess.

 

[AlmightyKang]

Interesting thread.

I have a Z50. Very nice little camera. Has gone around the world with me for the last couple of years. I also have a large box of negs I need to scan.

The camera itself does a somewhat respectable job of what I ask of it, to the point the D750 went on ebay and the money got spent on plane tickets instead. Mostly has the Nikkor Z 28mm f/2.8 prime stuck on it which is a shockingly good lens for so little money.

Up Butser Hill last weekend

 

[squawk7000]

Very interesting and encouraging.
I have an old 55/3.5 AI micro-Nikkor and extension tube (PK-13?), so might put it on my Z6ii and give it a go.
One thought might be to then tether the cam to a laptop and use Lightroom

I’ll never know until I try it

 

[OldMacs4Me]

Thanks for all these details. Very useful post. By the way, I don't do slides anymore, but I've got some good ones; I'm too lazy to scan them myself, I guess.

I have very few slides as big prints was always my film interest. However my mom left me a very large supply of them. The results I am getting will allow me to dispose of those slides once I get them all digitized. What I am finding encouraging is that I am getting results that will allow me to digitize and sometimes print old negs and slides much more efficiently than via the scanner.

 

[OldMacs4Me]

Very interesting and encouraging.
I have an old 55/3.5 AI micro-Nikkor and extension tube (PK-13?), so might put it on my Z6ii and give it a go.
One thought might be to then tether the cam to a laptop and use Lightroom

I’ll never know until I try it

Not my style, but I do see the benefits of going the tethering route. By all means let me know how that goes if you give it a try.

I'm not familiar with that lens. I gather it does not focus down to 1;1 on its own? If it goes to even 1:1.4 you would still have a respectable 12MP image after cropping.

As an aside: Before buying the camera, I made sure it could all could go back were I not fully satisfied. I still have 2 weeks to return it, but that ain't gonna happen. I did argue with myself about spending more to get the 105mm macro, but decided to try the 50 and exchange if that did not do the trick.

Thankfully my setup does allow me to remove the card without disturbing the camera. That makes it possible to do a quick test run just to be sure my tinkering with settings is doing the job.

 

[squawk7000]

The 55 micro-Nikkors only go to 1:2 on their own, the PK-13 ring takes it to 1:1

not sure when I can try it out, but will post when I do.

I also have a box of family negs from the 1930s and later. Some I’ve never seen printed before. That itself is a journey of discovery.

 

[AlmightyKang]

On that I bought some random plate negatives off ebay a few years back. Still haven't got around to processing them. Motivated now - thanks for that!

 

[Allen_Wentz]

I have very few slides as big prints was always my film interest. However my mom left me a very large supply of them. The results I am getting will allow me to dispose of those slides once I get them all digitized. What I am finding encouraging is that I am getting results that will allow me to digitize and sometimes print old negs and slides much more efficiently than via the scanner.

I did a very similar thing ~20 years ago with the Nikon D2x, 105mm lens and a carboard box, but mostly used the results for inputting analog film into digital databasing. The process as you point out is far faster than scanning. Originals and their D2x captures were simply numbered, with the original film archived, with originals pulled and scanned for any high quality printing or ad submittals.

Your setup is similar but much higher quality than mine was. ;~)
Even though apparently we have the same Gitzo tripod, mine a lot more beat up:

I strongly suggest archiving your original film rather than tossing it. A) because tech improves; e.g. my D2x had ~12 MP but today your Z50 has ~21 MP and my D850 has ~46 MP. B) because all-analog film printing still provides the very best results for one-up work. IMO the pic of the orchard with pickup truck deserves a nice analog print.

Edit: IMO (pricey) drum scans by a competent operator still far exceed what we can achieve with a digital camera and lightbox. Note also that inexpensive slide copy attachments like Nikon's ES-2 are available, but I have not used one.

 

[OldMacs4Me]

Your setup is similar but much higher quality than mine was. ;~)
Even though apparently we have the same Gitzo tripod, mine a lot more beat up:

A no frills tripod that is definitely my favorite. Doesn't matter what they look like they get the job done. Mine gets very little use since the 4x5 went into storage, With todays smaller, lighter cameras coupled with the high ISOs that my Lumilux and even my little Oly TG-6 can use, almost all of my shots are hand held. Otherwise the light weight Slik Traveler can easily handle all three of these cameras, as long as I make sure the wind doesn't catch it.

The Z50 takes the ISO aspect to a new level. ISO 6400 shows minimal noise and for certain subjects I would even be willing to use 12,800. Having a long time hatred of grain I've set the ISO limit to 1600, but that's more or less personal taste.

As to keeping slide originals, there may be a dozen or two worth preserving. Thankfully 90+% of moms were on Kodachrome and have suffered almost no age degradation.

Did the post image processing on the color neg roll this afternoon. Once I had the routine down it went quickly. Results are certainly superior to prints a lab would have given me had I printed the roll back in 2004. It is important to look for the exposure where the histogram is closest to dead center.

 

[AlmightyKang]

I like to keep mine well under 6400 if I can. Noise is bearable but visible. 1600 or less is good.

Following is a 6400 on the Nikkor Z 28mm f/2.8 (good lens!).

 

[bunnspecial]

I'm not familiar with that lens. I gather it does not focus down to 1;1 on its own? If it goes to even 1:1.5 you would still have a respectable 12MP image after cropping.

I'm not sure I follow that math...

A 24mp sensor(like the Z6) is nominally 4000x6000 pixels.

If you have a lens that reproduces at a 1:1.5 ratio, that means that a 24x36mm slide will use an area 4000x2666 pixels on the sensor(really less when you account for the mount, but we'll ignore that for now)

That gives 10.7 megapixels, not 12mp.

Of course, as said, without an extension tube all the manual focus 55mm Nikon Micro lenses only go to 1:2, which translates to 6mp on a 24mp sensor.

 

[OldMacs4Me]

I'm not sure I follow that math...

A 24mp sensor(like the Z6) is nominally 4000x6000 pixels.

If you have a lens that reproduces at a 1:1.5 ratio, that means that a 24x36mm slide will use an area 4000x2666 pixels on the sensor(really less when you account for the mount, but we'll ignore that for now)

That gives 10.7 megapixels, not 12mp.

Of course, as said, without an extension tube all the manual focus 55mm Nikon Micro lenses only go to 1:2, which translates to 6mp on a 24mp sensor.

My mistake, thanks for pointing it out. To use half of the sensor would require a 1:1.4 close-up ratio.

I've edited the original post.

 

[OldMacs4Me]

I like to keep mine well under 6400 if I can. Noise is bearable but visible. 1600 or less is good.

Following is a 6400 on the Nikkor Z 28mm f/2.8 (good lens!).

View attachment 2336368

The tables for the Z50 show that dynamic range, aka latitude, drops off past ISO 3200. The two shots I've done at 3200 showed very minimal noise. Even so I like to limit to 1600 for that slight margin of safety. But if lighting or shutter speed demands, I am more than willing to go higher.

I am lucky in that mom had me doing target practice with a .22 long before I ever owned a camera. The same breathing techniques apply to both. Even in my advancing years, I can hand hold a camera steady at fairly slow shutter speeds. 1/15th sec is easy peazy with a wide angle lens, and that's without the aid of VR. Of course faster shutter speeds are sometimes needed especially when the subject is in motion.

 

[AlmightyKang]

The tables on the Z50 show that dynamic range, aka latitude, drops off past ISO 3200. The two shots I've done at 3200 showed very minimal noise. Even so I like to limit to 1600 for that slight margin of safety. But if lighting shutter speed demands, I am more than willing to go higher.

I am lucky in that mom had me doing target practice with a .22 long before I ever owned a camera. The same breathing techniques apply to both. Even in my advancing years, I can hand hold a camera at fairly slow shutter speeds. 1/15th sec is easy peasy with a wide angle lens, and that's without the aid of VR. Of course sometimes faster shutterspeeds are needed because the subject is in motion.

Interesting to know that about the dynamic range. Will bear that in mind.

I drink too much coffee to shoot under 1/100. I tend to carry a Manfrotto mini tripod around all the time now - that seems to stave off the shakes. Also cheaper than beer to counteract the caffeine!

 

[OldMacs4Me]

This was shot at ISO 3200, 50mm, ƒ-11, 1/250sec. Resized.
A bit of horizontal cropping but no vertical crop. Color as it came from the camera. Slight sharpening applied in Preview.

This is cropped from the first image, again slight sharpening.

This at 100% resolution.

 

[OldMacs4Me]

Battery Life. The other night I copied a roll of B&W and a roll of color negs. The camera back display was on almost continuously for an hour and because I was doing 5-step brackets that was about 300 frames. The battery started out with a fresh charge and still showed all the bars when I shut it off.

 

[AlmightyKang]

Yeah very temperature dependent that one. The batteries crap out in the cold fairly quickly. I can get perhaps 150 shots out of one below zero and it's complaining for 1/3 of that time and requires a lot of power cycling or it dumps quickly. I keep a couple of batteries inside my fleece then.

Then again I go to really weird and cold inhospitable places.

Z50 shot (unprocessed)

 

[OldMacs4Me]

Yeah very temperature dependent that one. The batteries crap out in the cold fairly quickly. I can get perhaps 150 shots out of one below zero and it's complaining for 1/3 of that time and requires a lot of power cycling or it dumps quickly. I keep a couple of batteries inside my fleece then.

Then again I go to really weird and cold inhospitable places.

I can recall that even with the Titanuium shutter on the Nikormat, that I kept the camera tucked inside my parka when hiking at -30°F. Using a cloth shutter in those temps was begging for a trip to the repair shop.

I could step outside at -37°C and see how many shots I get. Please forgive me for refusing to do so.

 

[bunnspecial]

High ISO performance has probably been the biggest gain that's been seen in the past decade as far as camera performance.

Nikon's 20mp DX sensor(AFAIK the one in the Z50 is a refinement/evolution of the one that first showed up in the 2015 D500) is superb in this department. In fact it's impressive considering that the pixel pitch of it is nearly the same as the 45mp sensor that Nikon leans on pretty heavily in their full frame cameras these days.

It's really a shame that the 20mp FX sensor of the D5 and D6 is likely not long for this world. The EU USB-C charging mandate I expect will kill off the D6 since I don't THINK it can charge in camera(even though the current gen charger for the EN-EL18 batteries is USB-C). When the D5 was first released, people raked it over the coals because DXOMark measured its base ISO and dynamic range as worse than the D4 it replaced. What everyone conveniently ignored was that the small tradeoff of a little more noise at low ISO(and both are still pretty darn clean) traded the D5 basically matching the D4 from about 800-3200, and then running away above there a couple of stops well past where the D4 gives up. I consider the D4(and the Df, which I've had a lot longer, used a lot more, and has the same sensor as the D4) to basically be maxed at 12,800, while I'll crank the D5 up to 51,200 if I need to. With f/2.8 VR lenses, I can usually get away with still keeping it to 12,800 max, but I'll go there if needed and 51,200 is at least as good if not a bit better than 12,800 from the D4. I've never used my D5 at 102,400 other than cranking it up there to try it, but I'd use it if I didn't need to crop and/or print large. That to me is mind boggling.

Granted too regardless of high ISO performance, I LOVE this sensor. It's subtle, but it renders color much differently than the 45mp sensors. I felt like I was often tweaking my D800/D810 files, and the D850 just made me spend more time tweaking. I feel like I'm often manually tweaking white balance image to image(even under consistent light like studio flash) and playing with the mid-tone exposure. My D4 and D5 I can often just breeze through, crop as necessary, and they're just perfect with maybe an occasional exposure tweak. If I need to adjust white balance, often one global adjustment will do it.

I should also say that the 24mp sensor in the Z6 and Df looks to be nearly as good up to 12,800, but the charts I've seen I think drop off there. I had a D600 years ago, but I also sold it a few years ago. I do remember liking the results, but also generally used it in good light so don't remember how I ended up. I've been toying with picking up another one of them or maybe a D750, but it also strikes me as a silly purchase now that would be better served by a Zf or Z6/ii . The D3x, which is relatively new to me, gives me colors I absolutely love but its noise performance is also very much remininiscent of the D2x, although unlike the D2X it's maybe tolerable up to ~1600.

Regardless of all of this too, if you have an Adobe CC subscription, it's worth trying the new(ish) AI noise reduction. It does an amazing job to my eye of keeping what detail is there, unlike the older system which really was just targeted blurring. I've used it in particular to great effect with my X-T5, which can get ugly at 12,800(as a 40mp DX sized sensor). If you don't have decent-ish hardware backing it up, though, you might find it's not pleasant to use. My 2015 15" Retina(iGPU only), which I use for mobile photo editing for its screen size and how much storage I've put in it, could take nearly 15 minutes until I added an eGPU(which cut it to around a minute). My 2019 5K iMac will take about a minute from rendering the inital preview to completing running on the internal RX570, or about half that time on an external RX580.

 

[AlmightyKang]

I can recall that even with the Titanuium shutter on the Nikormat, that I kept the camera tucked inside my parka when hiking at -30°F. Using a cloth shutter in those temps was begging for a trip to the repair shop.

I could step outside at -37°C and see how many shots I get. Please forgive me for refusing to do so.

Yeah I certainly wouldn't want to go out there at -37. I think I've had this out to about -10 and that was too cold to take photos. Used my iPhone then instead 🤣