What It's Like to Shoot Stills With the Nikon ZR

The Nikon ZR puts RED's raw video format, 32-bit float audio, and a 4-inch screen into a body with no viewfinder, so most of the conversation around it stays on codecs and cinema workflows. If you shoot both stills and video, the more useful question is whether it's a camera you'd pick up on a day when there's nothing to film.

Most coverage of the Nikon ZR treats RED raw as the headline. Pav SZ argues that focus points at the wrong feature. To test the hybrid label, he took the camera to a local food festival with the NIKKOR Z 35mm f/1.2 S and spent a few hours using it only for photographs. He set a simple standard: a hybrid camera should make you want to take pictures as much as it makes you want to roll footage. He came back with images he loves and credits the experience of shooting with it more than anything on the spec sheet. A test like that tells you more about the ZR as a stills body than any codec chart could.

He expected to hate the missing electronic viewfinder. He needs glasses for close work, and taking them on and off every couple of minutes while shooting on the street isn't practical. The 4-inch LCD changed that. It's bigger and brighter than the screens on most cameras, and the only squinting he did came from leaving his glasses in his pocket. He set autofocus to a zone, moved it with a fingertip or the joystick, and let Nikon's detection handle the rest. After a while, he stopped thinking about the viewfinder at all. The dedicated photo/video switch on the top plate also gets attention. Nikon could have buried stills mode in a menu, and he reads the physical switch as a clear statement of how the company expects the camera to be used.

On video, he disagrees with the idea that RED raw is the only format worth recording. The ZR also records N-RAW, ProRes RAW, ProRes 422 HQ, H.265, and H.264. He'd spend most of his time in H.265 with N-Log, since the files are far smaller and still leave plenty of room to grade. Color looks the way you'd expect from Nikon, natural and rich, with skin tones that need little work in post. Face detection and subject tracking stayed reliable enough that he never had to think about them. If you're coming from stills, that spread of options lets you start with lighter files and save raw for the jobs that call for it.

The ZR joins a growing group of cameras built around a rear screen instead of an eyepiece, including Sony's FX3 and ZV-E1, Panasonic's Lumix S9, and Sigma's BF. It arrived about a year and a half after Nikon announced its acquisition of RED in March 2024, which is how RED's format ended up in a Nikon body that sells for $2,199.95. Screen-first shooting affects your technique more than your image quality. Holding the camera at chest or waist height makes you less conspicuous on the street, and people often react differently to someone glancing down at a screen than to someone with a camera pressed to their eye. Zone autofocus with touch repositioning fits that style well. You frame a little loosely, watch the scene with both eyes, and let detection lock on. A big, bright screen makes this easier than it was on older EVF-less bodies with small, dim displays. If you already compose everything on your phone, the adjustment is smaller than you might think.

Handling gets its own look. The grip feels too shallow with larger lenses, and he fixed that in about five minutes with a SmallRig cage for the Nikon ZR, which adds a chunkier grip and extra mounting points. The body itself is simpler than a typical Nikon. There's no D-pad. You get a joystick, three customizable buttons on the top plate, and a touchscreen that controls almost everything without a trip into the main menu. The front and rear command dials are still there, and the menus match recent Nikon bodies, so nothing feels foreign. He used the touchscreen far more than he expected, with the quick menu always on screen and the full menu one tap away.

His thoughts on who the ZR fits, who should look at a different Nikon, and what he'd like future firmware to add are all in the video above.