Purchased a Z8 recently. Shot this beautiful Tigress famously called " Collarwali" inthe Moharli Core Zone of Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve in Central India.
at smaller jpg sizes it may seem similar but the 58/1.2 actually has shallower DoF (even if you step closer with the 50/1.2 to match magnification) and you cannot actually trust the focus peaking at default magnification at f1.2 near MFD!
All from this morning at the park. I got a very late start and was only there for an hour. I wanted to get out and give firmware 5.3 a try. I wasn't there long enough to really give it a good workout but from what I see so far it seems AF is quicker to get on the bird, I guess the acquisition is faster or more accurate. Only used Wide Area Large initially to lock on then Auto Area for the rest. Happy so far but need more time!
I could finally test the 5.3 FW extensively in the last 2 weeks and I could notice some nice AF improvements, including a big improvement in AF tracking of fast moving subjects against busy backgrounds when combined with focus limiter feature. Here are my observations so far:
Overall, the AF tracking/ stickiness and eye detect seems to have improved especially for birds. The AF holds on to the subjects nicely when tracking birds.
Animal eye detect has also improved compared to the earlier versions but it is still not 100% reliable. e.g. For tigers, the AF hardly used to grab the eyes or anywhere near the head but in my recent trip, there were several instances where the eye detection for tigers worked really well and even when it didn't, the AF box was much closer to the head
3D AF is really handy when the camera doesn't detect an eye or head and it holds on to the subject very well..looks like I will use this more often now vs single point AF
AF transition from sky to green/ foliage background and tracking against busy backgrounds used to be a big challenge on the Z AF system and I see some big improvements especially when focus limiter is turned on, as explained in the next pt
The biggest improvement I saw was how amazing the AF worked (Both the initial acquisition as well as tracking) when focus limiter is used wisely. I was photographing wire tailed swallows and was amazed at the consistency and how big my hit rates are now vs in the past. In the past, I solely relied on wide-L without subject detect to photograph swallows and it was quite a challenge as the camera more often grabbed the background, even if there was minimal clutter or vertical/horizontal lines or bright objects. Using larger custom wide boxes didn't help either as I noticed the probability of getting an AF lock back then was much higher by using a relatively smaller AF box, which is Wide-L. With Wide L, it was a bit difficult to keep erratic flying swallows within the box and still track the bird in the EVF....With FW 5.3 and focus limiter set carefully (meaning start with avoiding infinity first and then adjust the distances depending on what distance the bird activity is), I was blown away by the AF acquisition and the way the camera tracked these fast flying swallows in Auto Area AF. The camera was able to even track the fat flying swallows throughout the frame.
All the images below were shot using Auto area AF and focus limiter set between 15 meters to 4 meters using Z9 and 400mm f2.8 S TC lens, all at 400mm
