New firmware updates for the Z50, Z5, Z6, Z7 today

Ton14

Nikon just released new firmware updates for the Z50, Z5, Z6, Z7 mirrorless cameras, most important for me:

- Improved eye detection performance for Auto-area AF and Wide-area AF (L) !!!
- Increased the refresh rate for the focus point displayed during face/eye-detection and subject-tracking AF.
- Improved face/eye detection performance and the visibility of subjects in pictures taken using an optional flash unit.

This morning I quickly installed this firmware 3.40 on my Nikon Z6 and did a quick small test.

First impression with my setting when I want to follow or lock focus:
AF selector to "Auto-area AF" with AF-C and the AF activation (A7) to on, the "lock on" and hold the point seems improved to me.

I am curious about all your findings.

photobunny

My Z6 found eyes that where much smaller in frame than before. Quite a great improvement. I isn’t going to replace my upcoming Z9, but it’ll let the Z6 continue to be a great second camera for a while longer until the Z6iii

mhedges

My Z6 is updated. Haven't really had a chance to try it out much yet but I should be able to give it some use this weekend.

mhedges

Matt Irwin has video up with some quick comparisons. Looks promising.

Searcy

I updated my Z6 and the focus lock seems better. And I must say that I'm impressed that Nikon will push this much support to a nearly 3 year old camera. I didn't expect that.

mhedges

Agree. And I wonder if this implies a significant update to the vII models is coming soon. Seems like with v3.4 the v1s are now very close to vII performance and I can't see Nikon allowing that to be the case long term.

PB_PM

Ran the update last night, hopefully I'll get a chance to test it out soon, if it ever stops raining.

WestEndFoto

Tuesday PB_PM.

Searcy

mhedges said:

Agree. And I wonder if this implies a significant update to the vII models is coming soon. Seems like with v3.4 the v1s are now very close to vII performance and I can't see Nikon allowing that to be the case long term.

No, me either. At this point I bet thay have something big coming for the Z6ii and Z7ii.

I do need all these American YouTube guys to stop saying "zed" though.

photobunny

Isn’t it a good thing if Americans are speaking English? Aren’t some of them Canadian so they wouldn’t say zee instead of zed anyway?

Searcy

photobunny said:

Isn’t it a good thing if Americans are speaking English? Aren’t some of them Canadian so they wouldn’t say zee instead of zed anyway?

Nooooo, if you don't say "aluminium" or "shedyool" you can't call the Z a "zed". My world.... my rules.

PB_PM

You live in a small world then, most English speakers, outside the US, around the globe say zed, like it or not.

Searcy

PB_PM said:

You live in a small world then, most English speakers, outside the US, around the globe say zed, like it or not.

That's fine so long as their aren't Americans pretending to be Brits or Canuck or Kiwis or Ozzie's. If you're American, you say "Zee" that way God intended.

First practice shots with the new update and my new 85mm 1.8S

mhedges

Tried it out at a soccer tournament over the weekend. Definitely a big improvement in how fast it grabs faces or eyes, and the box for eyes is smaller. I was using Dynamic Area AF exclusively for games but did shoot some in Auto area (face /eye) and it seemed to do OK but I need to go through them.

Searcy

Yes, I shot about 1000 photos at a burlesque show on Saturday night ( I haven't been cleared to post any of them) and I'm amazing at how fast it was locking faces and eyes in a sea of faces and bad lighting. Lot's of faces and eyes and lots of fast, unpredictable movement from the dancers means I have to shoot a lot to get anything interesting. Also, when I got home and started looking at the images I was impressed by the low number of out of focus shots I ended up with.

This is a massive improvement to the Z6 that greatly helps with the type of photography I do.

Ton14

The way I use AF now is changed for many things. My camera is on Auto Area and FN1 activates the AF point in the middle, set it under U1. When I switch on the camera I also press the FN1 button (muscle memory), recompose the shot is easy now.

Indeed a massive improvement to the Z6, AF is faster.

mhedges

Yep its really impressive how much improvement they were able to make. More than I expected, for sure.

DaveyJ

I have NOT updated my very heavily used Z50 yet.

DaveyJ

The Z 6 II needs a firmware improvement in the worst way!

ggbutcher

When they re-architected the processor layout for the II cameras, I wondered about how the codebase would be managed. Just speculation, but methinks the reason we haven't yet seen functionality of the recent 3.4 update in the II cameras is that refactor...

PB_PM

Or Nikon took their time back porting new stuff to the first gen Z bodies and there is nothing new for the second gen ones.