09. May 2023 · Categories: Photos

With Nikon expected to unveil the Z8 tomorrow, I wonder whether we will see an automatic HDR feature.

With a full electronic shutter you no longer have any vibrations that could impact on image quality, and with a shutter speed up to 1/32000 and a below 4ms full sensor readout, we can now take two exposures in one go, without movement that would make combining the images too hard. The bandwidth and memory size is there to store a handful full sensor readouts in memory, so we can first read out just the raw data, with absolute minimal delay between shots, and then process all captures in the group at leisure. That headline 20fps would still be 8 pairs per second, fast enough to apply this automatically when the camera detects potentially blown out highlights. Ideally I would love to use an automatic 5 shot approach to highlights, capturing fast-slow-fast-slow-fast sandwiched to get highlight data that can be even better combined with the main shot. That might be pushing it a bit much with 3.5ms sensor readout, but it is an aspirational goal when we get the readout speed down to 1ms.