Nikon Z6 III Review | Photography Blog

Ease of Use

Nikon has used pretty much the same body design for the Z6 III as the Z6 II, which doesn’t come as a great surprise in a mature market where upgrades are less frequent and more incremental.

Measuring 138.5 x 101.5 x 74 mm (5.5 x 4 x 3 in.) and weighing 760 g (1 lb. 10.9 oz.) with battery and memory card, fitted, it is a few mm wider and deeper and 45g heavier than its predecessor, mainly to accommodate the chunkier hand grip, which we think is definitely worth the trade off for the slightly better handling that it offers.

Otherwise you’d be hard-pressed to to tell the two cameras apart side-by-side, with the external control layouts being virtually identical – it’s inside the camera where the majority of the improvements have been made.

Burst shooting rates and buffer capacities have been greatly improved in this new Z6 model. The Z6 II was no slouch, offering 14fps rates and a buffer of 112 raws or 200 JPEGs. The Mark III takes things to another level, though, now being capable of shooting at 120fps (10MP DX-format JPEGs), or 60fps (24MP full-frame JPEGs), or 20fps (up to 1,000 24MP full-frame RAWs), all using the electronic shutter, or 14fps with the mechanical shutter.

In addition, the Z6 III also boasts Pre-Release Capture, a great feature that makes it easier to capture the decisive moment even when shooting at 120fps. When activated, the camera can buffer images up to 1 second before you fully depress the shutter button. Burst shooting then starts when the shutter is half-pressed and the buffer will retain up to 4 seconds’ worth of frames after fully pressing the shutter.

There is one important caveat when using this mode, which applies to all the Nikon camera that offer it to date. Pre-Release Capture is only available when shooting JPEGs, not RAW files, whereas the rival Canon EOS R6 II supports both JPEG and RAW formats for its equivalent feature.

On a more positive note, the Nikon Z6 III can shoot at 60fps at full resolution in the Pre-Release Capture mode, something that no other Nikon camera can match, including both the Z8 and Z9 (they both reduce the resolution to 19 megapixels).

Backing up the improved burst shooting and making the Z6 III much better suited to wildlife and sports photography is the revamped auto-focus system which is very similar to the one found on the flagship Z8/Z9.

The 493-point phase-detection AF system covers the full sensor area and AF calculations are conducted at up to 120fps to keep up with the fast continuous shooting speeds.

3D Tracking AF inherited from the company’s DSLR cameras helps the Z6 III to track fast-moving subjects, with the camera using a single AF point to track whatever’s underneath it while you half-press the shutter button.

It also inherits most, but not all, of the subject recognition modes that are available on the Zf, Z8 and Z9, with the notable exception of a dedicated bird detection mode which is part of the more general animal detection mode.

When paired with an F1.2 lens, the Z6 III boasts AF sensitivity that means it can auto-focus down to an incredible -10EV, even when not using the special Starlight AF shooting mode.

In terms of AF performance, the Z6 III represents a big improvement when compared with the Z6 II, getting it right a lot more frequently than that camera did and making it much easier to recommend for anybody that shoots a lot of moving subjects, such as wildlife or sport.

The in-body image stabilization system has been significantly improved with the Z6 III now offering 8.0 stops of 5-axis image stabilisation built into the camera’s body, up from 5 stops on the Z6 II, plus there’s electronic-VR for video recording. The optional Focus Point VR feature stabilises the area around the active focus point when shooting stills.

The Z6III’s video capabilities have also gained a significant upgrade in the four years since the release of the Mark II version.

The new model offers 12-bit 6K and oversampled 4K RAW (N-RAW and ProRES RAW ) recording internally up to 60fps for N-RAW and 30fps for ProRES, plus regular 4K at up to 120fps (1.5x crop) and 10x slow motion up to 240fps in Full HD.

Internal recording is also supported with 10-bit color and 4:2:2 sampling in the ProRes 422 HQ codec and 4:2:0 sampling in the H.265 codec at 5.4K 30p and 5.4K 60p.

The maximum recording time is an impressive 120 minutes, despite the absence of a cooling fan or other heat-dissipating design.

As with its predecessor, Nikon has opted for a chunky and solid design which shrinks down all the vital elements of the larger Z8/Z9 models, without it being frustratingly small to use. 

The body of the Z6 III is still replete with plenty of dials and buttons which all have enough space to breathe, and we’ll go through those in more detail as we progress through this review.

It feels very well-built and has a premium-feeling textured covering around the hand-grip and rear thumb rest, which helps to both make the camera feel comfortable and secure in your hand as well as adding to the general feeling of quality. 

Most of the buttons and dials are found on the right hand side of the camera, particularly those that you’re likely to use frequently. That means you can make almost all of the main changes to settings using just your right hand and conceivably even use the camera one-handed if you so wished.

Positioned on the left of the top plate, you’ll find the camera’s shooting mode dial. Here there’s all the usual manual and semi-automatic modes, (PSAM), as well as fully auto, and three slots for user-customised settings. 

The latter three modes (U1-U3) come in very handy if you’re often shooting a particular type of subject, such as sports or action, and want to quickly flick to a certain group of settings that you’ve already configured.

Just underneath the mode dial on the rear of the camera, you’ll find the newly relocated burst shooting button, which has swapped places with the playback button, and the delete button.

Moving over to the right-hand side of the top plate and first of all you’ve got the LCD display, which shows you all the key settings, such as aperture, battery, remaining shots, drive mode and shutter speed. It’s a great way to quickly ascertain if you have the settings you want selected, without having to turn the camera on and check the rear screen.

To the right of the screen, there’s a large unmarked dial which you can rotate with your thumb and is used to adjust different settings depending on the shooting mode you’re in – for example in shutter priority mode, it will control the shutter speed. You can also use it in conjunction with one of the other buttons – such as ISO – to make adjustments.

Toward the front of the top plate, at the top of the grip, you’ll find the Off/On switch, as well as the shutter release button. This is surrounded by a dedicated video record button, an ISO button and an exposure compensation button.

At the front/top of the hand-grip is another scrolling dial, which again controls different settings depending on the mode you’re using – for example in aperture priority mode, it adjusts the aperture setting.

The rear of the camera is where you’ll find the majority of the buttons. Starting at the top, you’ve got a display button which you can use to adjust how both the screen and the viewfinder displays – for example, you can switch off the live view feed altogether and just show settings on the rear screen, and you can switch on and off a histogram and horizon level. In the viewfinder you can toggle on the level, histogram and display around the frame.

Around the display button, there’s a switch which you can use to move between stills mode and video mode. It’s quite a stiff switch, so it’s unlikely you’d do this by accident and end up in the wrong mode.

To the right of this button/dial combination is the AF-on button, which you can customise to allow for back-button focusing if you prefer to activate AF in that way. This means that when you press the shutter release, it won’t attempt to refocus again, which is useful for focusing and recomposing, or for photographing quick moving subjects.

Underneath the AF-On button, there’s a joystick. This comes in extremely handy for moving the AF point around the frame, either while composing via the screen, or while composing via the viewfinder.

Unlike some other cameras on the market, you can’t use the touchscreen while shooting through the viewfinder, so it’s very likely you’ll be using the joystick for this purpose. You can also use the stick to move around either the quick or full menu.

You can access a quick menu by pressing the “i” button underneath the mode dial. Here you’ll find a group of settings which you’re likely to use frequently, such as Picture Control, Flash, Release mode, AF-area mode, metering, and so on. You can navigate around this menu either by using the joystick, the directional keys or by touching on the setting you want to change.

You can then use the scrolling dials to adjust the setting as required. If you find there are settings in this menu that you don’t use all that often, you can customise the “i” menu in the main menu, swapping out any settings you don’t use for ones which you do. Another way to access the quick menu is to tap the “i” displayed on the camera screen, too.

Underneath the “i” button is an unmarked four-way navigational pad, with an OK button at the centre. You can use the directional keys to move the AF point around the screen, as well as navigate around images in playback, or bring up information about said images. The OK button can be used for menu navigation, but also for functions such as resetting the AF point to the centre of the frame.

Underneath the navi-pad is a button with a magnifying glass on it, which you can use to zoom into the scene you’re photographing – it’s particularly useful for checking critical focus, especially when using manual focus.

Directly underneath it there’s a zoom out button, too. You can also use these buttons in playback to check areas of the scene. To the right of the zoom in button is the main menu button, where you’ll find a vast array of settings, those which you’re unlikely to change on quite as regular a basis as those settings found in the quick menu. 

There are several pages to move through, but they are reasonably well-organised into a set of different folders, such as Playback, Photo Shooting, Movie Shooting, Custom Settings, Setup and a Retouch menu. 

There’s also a “My Menu”, where you can save any menu settings which you access frequently, to save you scrolling through pages of menus to find the exact setting which you need.

You’ll find the dual memory card slots behind a door which doubles up as the rear thumb rest. There’s one slot for XQD / CFExpress, while the secondary slot accepts SD format cards. Given the smaller size of the cameras it presumably wouldn’t be possible to put two XQD shaped slots here, so it’s a good compromise to have the smaller format alongside the more rugged / faster format.

There are a number of ways you can set up the secondary slot – you can either have it as a backup slot, which makes a straight copy of the first card as you’re shooting, you can have set up as “overflow”, so it only comes into play when the first card is full, or you can set up both cards to record different formats. So, you could have the XQD card slot record raw files, and the SD card slot record JPEGs, or one could record stills, and the other movie.

Two things which have changed since the previous version are the rear LCD screen and the electronic viewfinder. The Z6 III now has a much higher-resolution 5670k-dot OLED viewfinder with a refresh rate of 60fps, plus 4000-nit brightness which is 33% brighter than the flagship Z9. Another first on a Nikon camera is the EVF’s wide (DCI-P3) colour gamut which displays more life-like colours with no colour banding.

You can set the viewfinder to switch on automatically as you lift the camera to your eye (the default setting), or you can switch it to so it’s permanently on (and the rear screen is not / displays only camera settings), or you can even set it to permanently off if you prefer. 

A button on the left-hand side of the viewfinder controls all of these settings, while there’s a diopter dial on the opposite side of the finder for adjusting the focus of the viewfinder. 

Also upgraded on the Mark III version of the Z6 is the rear screen. It’s still a 3.2-inch, 2.1m-dot TFT touch-sensitive screen, but has now been changed from a tilting up/down design to a more versatile fully articulating design that can be flipped out both to the side and forwards/backwards. This is much more useful for shooting selfies or recording videos to camera and makes the Z6 III appeal more to vloggers.

On the left hand side of the camera is where you’ll find all the ports housed underneath two rubber flaps, including a headphone and microphone jack, a full-size HDMI port, a remote control port and a USB-C port which you can use for charging the camera. One small improvement is that the camera’s external mic input can now be used as a line-level input for pro-quality sound.

The Z6 III retains the ability to charge the camera while it is recording stills/video, which could be useful or videographers looking to extend the recording times. Battery life from the EN‑EL15c rechargeable Li-ion battery is quoted as 390 stills using the LCD screen and 340 using the viewfinder according to CIPA standards.

A new Power Battery Pack, the MB-N14, is also available which be used for vertical shooting as well as to increase shooting time with two EN-EL15c batteries housed in the grip.

Image Quality

All of the sample images in this review were taken using the 24.5 megapixel Fine* JPEG setting, which produces an average image size of around 9Mb.

Noise

The base sensitivity of the Nikon Z6 is ISO 100 but you can go down to ISO 50 (L1.0) if you wish. At the other end of the scale, the highest native sensitivity of the Nikon Z6 is ISO 64000, but boosted settings including ISO 102400 and ISO 204800 are also available. Here are some 100% crops which show the noise levels for each ISO setting, with JPEG on the left and RAW on the right.

JPEG

RAW

ISO 50

ISO 50

ISO 100

ISO 100

ISO 200

ISO 200

ISO 400

ISO 400

ISO 800

ISO 800

ISO 1600

ISO 1600

ISO 3200

ISO 3200

ISO 6400

ISO 6400

ISO 12800

ISO 12800

ISO 25600

ISO 25600

ISO 51200

ISO 51200

ISO 102400

ISO 102400

ISO 204800

ISO 204800

File Quality

The Nikon Z6 III has two different file options – Raw and JPEG – with three compression options available for Raw and 6 for JPEG. Here are some 100% crops which show the differences between them all, with the full image size shown in brackets.

Fine* JPEG (9.7Mb)

Fine JPEG (7.7Mb)

Normal* JPEG (5.8Mb)

Normal (5.4Mb)

Basic* JPEG (2.7Mb)

Basic (1.5Mb)

RAW Lossless (27.7Mb)

RAW High Efficiency* (17.4Mb)

RAW High Efficiency (11.3Mb)

Active D-lighting (ADL)

D-lighting is Nikon’s dynamic range optimisation tool that attempts to squeeze the full dynamic range of the sensor into JPEGs. Active D-lighting works “on the fly”, before the in-camera processing engine converts the raw image data into JPEGs. The available settings are Off, Low, Normal, High, Extra High 1 and Extra High 2, plus an Auto mode.

Off

Low

Normal

High

Extra High 1

Extra High 2

HDR

The Nikon Z6 III’s HDR Mode captures three different exposures and combines them into one, retaining more shadow and highlight detail, with an Auto mode, and four different strengths.

Off

Low

Normal

High

Extra High

Picture Controls

Nikon’s Picture Controls are preset combinations of sharpening, contrast, brightness, saturation and hue. All 31 different Picture Controls can be tweaked to your liking, then saved and transferred to other cameras.

Auto

Standard

Neutral

Vivid

Monochrome

Flat Monochrome

Deep Tone Monochrome

Portrait

Rich Tone Portrait

Landscape

Flat

Dream

Morning

Pop

Sunday

Somber

Dramatic

Silence

Bleached

Melancholic

Pure

Denim

Toy

Sepia

Blue

Red

Pink

Charcoal

Graphite

Binary

Carbon

Multiple Exposure

The Nikon Z6 III’s multiple exposure mode allows you to take between two and ten images and merge them into a single photo in-camera.

Sample Images

This is a selection of sample images from the Nikon Z6 III camera, which were all taken using the 45.7 megapixel Fine* JPEG setting. The thumbnails below link to the full-sized versions, which have not been altered in any way.

Sample RAW Images

The Nikon Z6 III enables users to capture RAW and JPEG format files. We’ve provided some Nikon RAW (NEF) samples for you to download (thumbnail images shown below are not 100% representative).

Sample Movies & Video

Product Images

Conclusion

Whereas the Z6 II felt like a rather incremental upgrade of the original version that launched two years earlier, the new Mark III is much more the true successor to the 2018 debutant, taking Nikon’s mid-range mirrorless camera forwards in veritable leaps and bounds.

It’s also a more than viable alternative to the more expensive Z8 model, offering enough comparable features and performance (and even a few extra ones) in a smaller, lighter body at a lower price-point, clearly making it the better choice for a lot of users.

In our Z6 II review we commented that “it’s still not a camera that would be ideally suited to capturing fast action or moving subjects – meaning that Nikon still doesn’t have a mirrorless camera to rival its own DSLRS when it comes to this type of work. It also doesn’t have a camera which truly rivals other mirrorless manufacturers including Sony and its arch-nemesis, Canon”. Ouch!

Nikon must surely have listened to both us and other independent sources, however, as the same criticism can certainly no longer be levelled at their prosumer offering.

With a wealth of improvements to burst shooting rates and buffer size, auto-focusing speed and reliability, class-leading IBIS and the excellent electronic viewfinder, the Z6 III is eminently well-suited to capturing both stills and video of wildlife, sports and anything that moves quickly, something that couldn’t be confidently said about its predecessor.

The official price has gone up by around £$500 since the £2000 launch of the Z6 and Z6 II, bringing the Mark III directly in line with the Sony A7 IV and the Canon EOS R6 II, both of which are slightly older but still very serious rivals.

You also need to consider if really you need the Z6 III if you already have a Z6 II, or, as the latter camera is still on sale, if you’re contemplating picking one up for the first time. If budget is a big concern, you can save a hefty chunk of cash by either sticking with what you’ve already got or plumping for the previous, but not yet discontinued, model.

Overall, though, the shiny new Z6 III is a compelling all-rounder that quietly and confidently delivers 90% of the features and performance that the majority of its target audience really need – which is high praise indeed!

Main Rivals

Listed below are some of the rivals of the Nikon Z6 III.

Review Roundup

Reviews of the Nikon Z6 III from around the web.

Specifications

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