In practice, does the Nikon Z9 really reliably manage the promised 20 fps including AF and AE tracking and can it maintain the speed for more than 1,000 RAWs?
How great are the losses in image quality that I have to accept with the new compressed RAW format?

Question

In practice, does the Nikon Z9 really reliably manage the promised 20 fps including AF and AE tracking and can it maintain the speed for more than 1,000 RAWs?
How great are the losses in image quality that I have to accept with the new compressed RAW format?

Accepted Answer

this question is still too early as everything is still pre-production and not yet fixed, so there will hardly be any reviewers who will respond to it.

Answer

The bottleneck will be the CFexpress memory card. If you use a slow one, you will not reach the promised 1000 in series. Nikon used the ProGrade CFexpress Type B 1700 Cobalt. What is important is not the MAXIMUM write speed, but the speed at which it can write PERMANENTLY.

To paraphrase: you don't need a 100-metre sprinter but the best marathon runner.

ProGrade promises a sustained speed of up to 1400MB/s for the "Cobalt" cards (available in 325GB and 650GB). Competitor Angelbird promises a permanent write speed of 550 MB/s for the 256GB card model and 1000 MB/s for the 512GB, 1TB and 2TB cards. I have not found any information for the SanDisk cards.

In general, I would still be cautious about ordering CFexpress cards if it is not the ProGrade CFexpress Type B 1700 Cobalt mentioned by Nikon. First I would make sure that other suppliers are compatible with the Z9! The SanDisk Extreme PRO should work. I just saw it in a Z9 video on YouTube.

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Question about Nikon Z 9

In practice, does the Nikon Z9 really reliably manage the promised 20 fps including AF and AE tracking and can it maintain the speed for more than 1,000 RAWs? How great are the losses in image quality that I have to accept with the new compressed RAW format?