Nikon Z9 Review

Nikon spent the early mirrorless years behind and then shipped the camera that put it level. Removing the mechanical shutter entirely was the gamble, and the stacked sensor reads fast enough that banding and skew almost never appear, which means no moving parts to fail, no shutter count to worry about and complete silence in a room where a shutter would be unwelcome. Autofocus recognizes people, animals, vehicles and aircraft and holds them across the frame with a reliability Nikon had never previously managed.

Twenty frames a second in full raw, 8K recorded internally, and a run of firmware updates that kept adding capability for years afterwards instead of saving it for a new body. The compromises are physical. It is large and heavy, with an integrated vertical grip you cannot remove, and the viewfinder trades resolution for a feed that never blacks out, which some photographers notice the moment they raise it. It launched a thousand dollars under the equivalent Sony, and that is a large part of why professionals moved.