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I have been contemplating (again) returning to using a real camera on my motorcycle travels and ended up doing a little comparison on my recent Cooktown ride of a new phone Vs a very nice camera.
By comparison I mean how each works for me on a motorcycle tour and is it worthwhile for me to purchase another camera – not some in depth review which you can find of these devices elsewhere.
What prompted this was how terrible some of the images from my iPhone 12 Pro Max taken in Colombia and Spain were – in particular ones where vegetation was mushy or where details seemed to be completely lost. Previously the photos I got from my phone had been acceptable but recently the phones internal image processing was making a mess of things or the phone might have become damaged.
Above is one of many photos where the vegetation has been turned to mush.
Two riders in the Colombia ride group had real cameras and seeing their excellent photos got me wondering should I get another camera. But one of those guys was a magazine editor with a reason to lug around his DSLR and the other with a mirrorless was someone not bothered to carry a swag of camera gear in his backpack. This blog cannot publish high resolution images and I dislike having any sort of bag weighing me down while riding.
Come the end of financial year telcos had phones on sale and big trade in dollars so I upgraded to a new iPhone 15 Pro Max. Having absorbed too much misinformation on social media I was not expecting much of an improvement however the phone was a big step up in photo quality so I shelved the new camera idea. But recently I obtained a Nikon Zf with compact 26mm f2.8 lens to evaluate.
The Nikon Zf is a beautiful camera. It is also a wonderful tactile experience. I would like to have one just to hold and gaze upon it’s dials occasionally – but it’s worth too much for that and needs to be compelling for me to own.
An important item for me on a camera is the EVF. I sold my Canon GX1M3 which was almost the perfect moto-tour camera except the dioptric adjustment did not magnify enough. My eyesight back then was 2X and now has slipped to 3X but fortunately no issues with this on the Nikon EVF. It’s 3.75 million dot screen is large and bright. Not as good as the EVF in the Olympus OM-1, but far better than the tiny obsolete 2.36 million dot EVF’s that Fuji Film are still sticking in cameras.
Features wise I found the Zf lacking. For the price it should at least include hand held super resolution shot with compilation in camera and Live ND like the Olympus OM-1. The way camera manufacturers push back on computational photography has surely contributed to their own downfall IMO. But then Japanese in many fields are noted to focus heavy on new hardware and less on software. Faxes are still standard office equipment and literally nothing can be done online in Japan. But I digress.
You get 8 stops stabilization which is amazing and means the camera can be handheld in low light but I think they should still include super night photo stacked shot like phones have. Oddly my older cameras like the G1XM3 had that 6 years ago and many scene modes, sweep panorama and in camera photo styles. The Nikon has none of those features. The Zf is not part of Nikon’s professional range so why not include features for a person wanting to step up from their phone. Why not also include film simulation in camera like Fuji have made so popular.
This is the first full frame sensor digital camera I have ever used. I must admit I previously never thought there could be such a big difference in image quality from M4/3 and APS-C but with Nikon’s latest processor and colour science from the Z8 the images look superb. Some of that is the 26mm f2.8 lens which the very talented photographer Alik Griffin called A Little Miracle.
However the new iPhone is also impressive. Whilst small it’s sensor is 48 megapixel, double the megapixel count of the Nikon. By default it down samples to 24MP jpeg’s incorporating a lot of in camera computational enhancements or I can choose to shoot 48MP jpeg’s or Apples Raw Max format images with one touch which are about 75MB and offer a decent amount of data for recovery in post processing but still benefit from some computational assistance.
26mm POV on both devices. I shot this scene in a few file formats on both.
The image I chose to publish is a crop from the Apple Raw Max file. Once converted to a jpg and resized for the blog there isn’t much in it between the devices in harsh light like this. The camera has far better lens and can resolve more detail but you need to be viewing the photo in 4K to see that not 1K thumbnail like this and higher resolution photos cause the blog to grind to a halt despite using a CDN and other image delivery speed enhancements (which unfortunately sometimes lower the image quality further). I wish everything supported the HEIC photo format which is higher quality than jpg but smaller file size.
At Cooktown the photos I chose to publish were all from the phone as I wanted a very wide POV and the iPhones sweep panorama mode delivers those in high resolution averaging 8K. With the Zf it was a case of shoot a few images then join them together on the computer later and the problem I always have doing that is I am never sure if I will get framing right or join lines or differences between the images being joined. With the phone I can look before I leave the location and know I have a good image captured.
When it comes to size the there is no contest but in an effort to give the camera a good shot I purchased a hip bag like I have seen many Japanese riders use. I have wanted to try one of these for years anyway.
The Zf fitted inside fine but for me was too heavy. It is great to have the camera right there at your side and wish I had got one of these bags when in Japan for it would have been perfect for the smaller lighter cameras I had there.
I’d love to have a Zf with me on tour if there was an easy way to carry it. It’s far too big for a jacket and if in my rear seat bag that takes too long to unpack and get out and put back. Too valuable to place in a tank bag. I did that in Japan twice with cameras and both times I believe the shaking caused damage. Modern phones now have similar issues being shaken. Even panniers might shake a modern camera like this too much. I would not want to test that and I hate wearing backpacks or anything over my jacket that restricts the air vents or weighs my jacket down.
The iPhone besides fitting in my pocket is convenient in other ways. Whilst I have a decent tripod when it came to photographing the Millstream falls the phone still won because I could use an app (Spectre) to get a Live ND effect to blur the water and hand hold the phone high to clear the shrubs when I ventured off the main trail to get this angle. There was no place to set up my tripod to use the Zf.
I can’t make a strong case for me buying a Zf for my intended use however I enjoyed my limited time with the camera, especially the tactile experience. If I was a street photographer or travelling by car/train it might be different but I have no desire to hang up my helmet yet and by the time I might do that phones will be even more advanced than cameras.
So instead of buying a Zf I updated my 2nd smaller tripod from a worn out original ‘Quik Pod’ to a new high quality item from Ulanzi made in aluminum. Additionally I got a Bluetooth phone remote shutter release and a phone clip on filter holder that holds my existing filters.
A circular polarizer filter remains a handy item for landscapes in some conditions and whilst you can boost foliage and skies in post processing you cannot create all the benefits this filter provides in certain scenes after the shot. Whilst I don’t do much street shooting now I used to enjoy it a little in Japan as there was so many interesting scenes and had been experimenting with black diffusion mist filter. I also will dig out my star burst filter as the iPhone lacks a way to do narrow aperture like f16.0 f22.0 and that filter might be fun to play around with at night.
I’d love to see a new compact camera released but the chances of that happening are miniscule. The sole model still being produced is the Fuji X100 which is bit bigger than a compact but regardless it’s fixed 35mm lens is not wide enough for me. I played with every previous generation of the X100 in Yodobashi camera Yokohama for hours and never got its panorama mode to work reliably.
If I was making content for others then I’d be a Youtuber and have various action cams however I just publish things for my own records and for that purpose a diary with photos and words works best for me i.e. blogging. The new phone and my Theta X provide a bump in image quality from my old phone and the Casio FR-100 I’d been shooting on bike photos with. Along with some recent tweaks to the way photos display here it should combine to a lift the blogs image quality a little which will make me happy.
