One of the things you have to learn about the Internet is that trolling, click-baiting, speculation and all the other non-fact bits coming from people who are desperate to be heard from tends to come with the extremes.
We had a perfect example of that this past week, when dueling competitor-vested interests started promoting two different notions:
- From the Sony-vested crowd we got: “the Z8 is using year-and-a-half old technology.” Technically, any new product that’s launched has technology that’s more than a year old, because you don’t invent a new technology and then, voila, ship it. Only a small handful of products to date have stacked image sensors with blackout-free viewfinders, and only one from the Sony ship that this complaint was heard being yelled from.
- From the Canon-vested crowd we got: “the R1 prototypes are out in the wild in Japan.” As it turned out, this was really just an R3 that someone had put a video cage around, which made it look different. The real thing that was observed was the insecurity of those rooting for Canon, as they currently have the fewest pixels of the top pro body crowd, which apparently is making them nervous. That’s despite most of those posting this new rumor probably don’t own even an R3 in the first place.
In both cases, a vested interest in deriding a perfectly fine camera was present: it makes the poster feel better about their own choices, apparently. There’s nothing particularly wrong with a Z8. It has its pluses and it has its minuses, just like any other digital camera that’s come out in the last three decades.
Of course, what comes around goes around. If the Nikon crowd wanted to retaliate they could simply say “the ZV-1 Mark II doesn’t even match the lens Nikon threw away five years ago” or “Canon has taken the same camera, changed a letter and added 50 to its name.”
I don’t get all the hoopla, and what purpose it serves. It’s not as if everyone is changing camera brands every year, let alone incrementing at every model. What seems more likely is that everyone these days just feels like they have to complain about something. And to do so in the loudest possible voice, with no relationship to reality.
If a Z8 isn’t for you, it isn’t for you. I’m already on record as saying that Nikon’s marketing for the Z8 is not particularly good, and totally off kilter with many loyal and long-term Nikon customers. Nikon is going to have a difficult time persuading their own D850 users to buy into a Z8, so I fail to see how Sony A7 or Canon R5 users feel at all threatened.
Moreover, none of these complaints seem to have anything to actually do with photography. Here’s a challenge for you: the Z8 is a camera, it takes photographs and records video. In what specific way does it fail to take photographs and record video? I can actually answer that question with a couple of answers, but interestingly, I have yet to hear anyone else mention those things.
In terms of my own photographs and videos, no the Z8 doesn’t fail at all, it just gives me everything I was using for the past year in a smaller package. The rest of the camera world has turned into a bunch of kvetchers.
