Nikon's Zf full-frame camera puts speed and video power in a retro body

Nikon has unveiled its latest full-frame camera, the 24.5-megapixel Zf with retro style and technology borrowed from the company’s high-end Z8 and Z9 cameras. With a new sensor and processor, it promises powerful features like 14-fps max shooting speeds, advanced AI autofocus and 4K 60p video. At the same time, it’s a highly manual camera with a lot of old-school touches and multiple colorways, all designed to touch that vintage-loving nerve. 

The body and handling emphasizes manual controls, with no less than five dials on top to control shooting mode, video/photo/B&W, aperture, shutter speed and exposure compensation. It also has a pair of shooting dials front and back and a D-pad style controller, but no joystick. The “grip” is just a small ridge. With all that, the Zf really does look like a an old school Nikon film camera — right down to the chrome-plated shutter release button.

Nikon's Zf has speed and video power in a retro package
Nikon

The Zf’s magnesium-alloy body is smallish, but not very light at 710 grams (Sony’s A7 IV is 659 grams). It does offer “high dust- and drip-resistance” though, Nikon says. 

The high-resolution 2.1-million-dot vari-angle touch display fully articulates for vlogging and selfies, while allowing touch function controls and focus point selection. For astro shooters, it has a “Starlight view mode” that boosts display brightness in dark scenes. Meanwhile, the OLED viewfinder has a decent 3.68-million dot resolution and 0.8 times magnification.

It has two card slots, but with a serious caveat. One is a high-speed UHS-II card slot, but the other is a UHS-I microSD slot — the only model with that combo as far as I know. The battery is a weak point, offering only 380 shots on a charge, compared to 580 for the Sony A7 IV. Other features include a USB 3.2 Gen1 port with charging support, mic/headphone ports and a micro HDMI connector. 

Nikon's Zf has speed and video power in a retro package
DIXIE_DIXON2022 for Nikon

Inside, it has a backside-illuminated (BSI) 24.5-megapixel sensor and Expeed 7 processor borrowed from the high-end Z models. That gives it autofocus powers inline with the Z8, including Nikon’s 3-D tracking plus AI-powered subject detection that can find people, dogs, cats, birds, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, trains and planes. It’ll even detect far-away faces that take up as little as 3 percent of the frame’s longest side. 

As for image quality, the standard ISO range of 100 to 64,000 promises good low-light capability, and it has a pixel shifting mode that boosts resolution up to 96-megapixels for static scenes. In line with the retro styling, Nikon has a dedicated black & white mode (with its own dial setting), that enables multiple monochromatic settings ranging from flat to high-contrast “Deep Tone Monochrome.” 

It can hit 11fps shooting speeds in RAW mode (14fps with JPEGs) in electronic shutter mode (Nikon doesn’t list specs for mechanical shutter) and offers a reduced-quality 30fps JPEG-only mode with a pre-burst option to ensure you won’t miss a shot. The five-axis IBS (or vibration reduction, as Nikon calls it) reduces shake by up to 8 stops with a supported lens. Stabilization can be linked to the focus point, rather than just the center of the image as with most systems. 

Nikon's Zf has speed and video power in a retro package
Nikon

On the video side, the Zf can record full-frame 4K at 30p from a supersampled 6K image, or 4K60p with a DX (1.5 times) crop, along with 1080p/120p. Video can be captured with 10-bit H.265 recording, which will give users better color fidelity and more options in post. However, H.265 files require a powerful computer, meaning you might have to convert them to another format for editing. 

Based on the specs, the Nikon Zf looks like a solid camera that can compete against models like Panasonic’s S5 II and Sony’s A7 IV. However, it sets itself apart from those models based on its retro styling and manual controls, which should appeal to a certain segment of buyers. The Nikon Zf arrives in October 2023 at a competitive $2,000 price for the body only, or $2,240 with the retro-styled Nikkor Z40 f/2.0 SE lens. If you want one of the other colors (Indigo Blue, Sepia Brown, Bordeaux Red, Sunset Orange, Moss Green, StoneGray), you’ll pay $2,100 for the body only. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nikons-zf-full-frame-camera-puts-speed-and-video-power-in-a-retro-body-092033908.html?src=rss

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Max will offer free live sports streaming until March 2024

Max has revealed that it’s giving subscribers access to live sporting events for free — for a limited time anyway — confirming a previous Bloomberg report about the offering. The streaming service formerly known as HBO Max will launch the Bleacher Report (B/R) Sports Add-On tier on October 5. It will give audiences access to all the live sporting events airing on Warner Bros. Discovery’s linear networks, including NBA, MLB, NCAA, NHL and US Soccer matches. The add-on is launching just in time for MLB’s National League Division Series, the regular NHL season and NBA Opening Night.

Subscribers in the US will be able to enjoy the add-on at no additional charge, whether they’re paying for the ad-supported or the ad-free membership options, until February 29, 2024. After that, they’ll have to start paying $10 a month for access. In its report, Bloomberg said that the company discussed using the March Madness college basketball tournament as a selling point for the new product. The tournament begins shortly after the promo period ends and could be compelling enough for fans to pay for the add-on for at least a couple of months, seeing as it ends in April. 

In addition to live game coverage, the sports add-on also gives viewers access to all of WBD’s live pre- and post-game programming. They’ll be able to watch video-on-demand content, as well, including Bleacher Report’s highlights, sports documentaries and vodcasts featuring sports personalities and athletes. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/max-will-offer-free-live-sports-streaming-until-march-2024-074445038.html?src=rss

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NVIDIA’s DLSS 3.5 brings upgraded ray-tracing to Cyberpunk 2077 this week

Ahead of dropping the paid Phantom Liberty expansion next week, CD Projekt Red will release a major update for Cyberpunk 2077 on September 21. The patch will overhaul a lot of the game’s systems, switch up the skill trees and make other sweeping changes. There should be a significant visual upgrade for many PC players as well. As of Thursday, Cyberpunk 2077 will be the first game to support DLSS 3.5, the latest version of NVIDIA’s upscaling tech.

DLSS 3.5 has a feature called Ray Reconstruction, which uses AI to upgrade the ray-traced elements of a game. According to NVIDIA, it “replaces hand-tuned denoisers, which resolve sampled rays in a scene, with an NVIDIA supercomputer-trained AI network that generates higher-quality pixels in between sampled rays.”

The company trained DLSS 3.5 on five times the volume of data it fed into DLSS 3. NVIDIA claims the latest version can pinpoint different ray-traced effects to both make more intelligent decisions about factoring in temporal and spatial data, and to “retain high frequency information for superior-quality upscaling.”

You don’t necessarily need to have a 40-series GeForce RTX GPU to see the benefit. While only those graphics cards support DLSS 3, the latest version of the tech will be available on all RTX GPUs.

In the case of Cyberpunk 2077, Ray Reconstruction will help to deliver “an even better, more immersive, more realistic experience,” NVIDIA claims. That’s due to upgraded quality and clarity of reflections, more accurate global illumination and more dynamically responsive lighting, the company says.

You’ll be able to try out DLSS 3.5 in more games this fall. Along with Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, it will be soon available in the likes of Portal RTX and Alan Wake 2.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nvidias-dlss-35-brings-upgraded-ray-tracing-to-cyberpunk-2077-this-week-174447575.html?src=rss

Can Microsoft's Surface PCs get out of their rut?

I’m not sure when I found myself expecting disappointment from Microsoft’s PC hardware. Maybe it was when the Surface Pro X arrived with a gorgeous design, but a woefully undercooked Windows-on-Arm experience. Or perhaps it was when the company gave up on the intriguing dual-screen Surface Neo, following the underwhleming launch of the Surface Duo (effectively killing the Courier concept twice). I do know that last year’s Surface Pro 9 5G — an Arm-based PC that had no business wearing the “Pro” badge — was the last straw.

Even though Microsoft managed to make the dream of a hybrid tablet PC come true, the company’s Surface business has been in a rut for years. And, really, there’s not much hope in sight.

Perhaps that’ll change once we see Microsoft’s latest batch of devices during its New York City event on Thursday. But given that this week kicked off with Surface mastermind Panos Panay leaving the company, there’s a good chance there won’t be much to get excited about. The most recent batch of rumors, via DigitalTrends, suggest we’ll see a (much-needed) Surface Laptop Studio 2, Surface Laptop Go 3 and Surface Go 4 unveiled this week. We’d also expect to see the requisite Surface Pro updates with Intel’s most recent hardware, without much of a design refresh.

Panos Panay, corporate vice president with Microsoft's Surface division, holds the new Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet computer during a press conference May 20, 2014 in New York.Microsoft unveiled the Surface Pro 3 tablet at an event in New York on Tuesday, as it attempts to fuel interest in its struggling tablet line amid increasing competition. The Intel Core-powered tablet measures 0.36 inches thick, boasts a 12-inch screen and weighs just under 2 pounds. AFP PHOTO/Stan HONDA        (Photo credit should read STAN HONDA/AFP via Getty Images)
Former Microsoft executive Panos Panay demonstrating the Surface Pro 3.
STAN HONDA via Getty Images

Microsoft kicked off 2023 by admitting that Surface sales had tanked during the 2022 holiday quarter, which dovetailed with a massive decline in the broader PC market. Since then, the company has been noticeably quiet about its device plans. In contrast, Apple has been steadily refreshing its computers with its latest M-series chips, and it made a huge splash with the Vision Pro, a bid for spatial computing and mixed reality that’s far ahead of what the HoloLens 2 offers.

Part of Microsoft’s problem is that the initial pitch for the Surface — a tablet that can be your laptop! — just seems tired now. In 2012, it was honestly exciting to see Microsoft kick off an entirely new PC form factor. The company managed to turn the Surface Pro tablets into devices we could recommend, and it spurred on PC makers to develop their own hybrids. But at the same time, ultraportable laptops got lighter and more powerful. Why bother juggling a flimsy keyboard and kickstand on your lap when you could be far more productive on an XPS 13?

It didn’t help that Windows never became a truly tablet-friendly operating system. The Surface was developed with Windows 8 in mind, but users hated the Start page and the shift away from the traditional desktop. Windows 10 was a hasty apology for all of Windows 8’s mistakes. Since then, Microsoft has treated touchscreens as an afterthought, always secondary to the holy keyboard and mouse/trackpad.

Surface Pro 9 with 5G
Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

While I enjoy the flexibility of using touchscreens for scrolling and doodling on Windows laptops today, I wouldn’t be caught dead using the Surface Pro 9 without its keyboard. Windows tablets also don’t make much sense when the iPad and cheaper Android tablets exist. Both Apple and Google are also pushing to make their platforms better for general computing and multitasking. That’s effectively taking the opposite approach from Microsoft: Turning tablet platforms into PCs, rather than trying to shove Windows into slates.

Surface Pro 9 with 5G

Industry observers agree that Microsoft may have to reconsider its PC strategy. “I think Surface needs to get back to its roots and consider what is the ultimate Windows experience for hardware and software on a PC,” said Anshel Sag, Principal Analyst at Moore Insights and Strategies. “I think that definition has changed with the growth of AI.”

For Microsoft, going back to its roots might involve a stronger push into Windows on Arm compatibility. The company has made significant progress since the disastrous Surface with Windows RT, but using last year’s Surface Pro 9 5G made it clear the experience could be better. Emulated apps like Chrome were noticeably slower than typical Windows PCs. “It doesn’t really feel like Microsoft has taken this [Windows on Arm] challenge seriously until maybe a year or two ago,” Sag said. “Now it has, but it’s undoubtedly behind, and I think that’s going to cost its OEM partners and growth potential.”

Surface Pro 9 with 5G
Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

It’s also hard for Microsoft to generate much excitement around its devices when it consistently stumbles with new releases. The Surface Laptop Studio was a genuinely cool attempt at crafting a more powerful Surface with a tilting screen, but it was underpowered due to its quad-core CPU. (It was also meant to replace the Surface Book, another concept that died because Microsoft became trapped by its design decisions.) The Surface Duo was a potentially more sturdy dual-screen concept than a true foldable phone, but software and performance issues held it back. (Its sequel wasn’t much better.) Samsung, meanwhile, managed to transform its Galaxy Fold from a nearly unusable beta to something we actually like.

Instead of expecting to be delighted by Microsoft’s PC and mobile hardware, I’ve learned to expect compromise and heartbreak. To its credit, Microsoft has churned out some hardware that can appeal to mainstream shoppers. The Surface Laptop is still a fetching ultraportable, and the Laptop Go was a noble attempt at crafting an inexpensive-yet-premium laptop. But the whole point of the Surface was to change the face of computing. Microsoft can’t manage that if it keeps getting in its own way.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/can-microsofts-surface-pcs-get-out-of-their-rut-175518777.html?src=rss

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