The Internet experts are at it again, and this time Nikon is in their crosshairs.
The much-awaited Nikon mirrorless cameras, the Z6 and the Z7, were released last week after much hype. However, within hours the Internet was abuzz with claims Nikon had a substantial failure on their hands. These experts were claiming Nikon's new mirrorless cameras could never be used by any respectable “professional” photographer. One person stated in the comments section “...this is almost unforgivable.” Unforgivable? All of this because Nikon decided to include one memory card slot.
I'm not trying to advocate for or against the latest Nikon release or any camera release for that matter. I'm advocating for consumers to decide what is right for them based on their reasoning that is based on their own needs.
Well, at least not all of the Internet experts have lost their minds. The lead video by Matt Granger along with the video below by Daniel Norton attempt to address the hysteria with logic, something that doesn't get many page views. To claim that the number of memory slots contained in a camera determines the level of photographer who will use a particular camera is pure nonsense. I dislike using the word “professional” to describe the talent of a photographer but for this article, I will since that is how most of these experts are referring to photographers that will not use this camera because of the number of memory card slots.
The claims that a professional photographer must have two memory cards because they would never risk the loss of data by using only one card is nonsense. How long have these so-called experts been photographing? My goodness, what did photographers do in the film days? Or the first days of digital photography when cameras only came with one memory card slot? Did they refuse to photograph because of the fear of losing data? Sure dual card slots can be used as a backup and reduce the risk of data loss, but to say that this is an absolute must for “professional” photographers is a complete cow fertilizer claim. These people who are claiming a one slot camera is a failure are now off looking for the next nonsense topic to get page views. They attempt to justify their claims with subpar logic and are no help to real photographers of any skill level.
Do yourself a favor and evaluate your own needs in a camera and buy the camera that fits those needs, not a camera because some person on the Internet says the camera is only for certain types of photographers.
OMG THANK YOU!!! Finally, someone acknowledges that dual cards slots have more than one benefit!!! People only ever talk about card failure when it comes to dual slots.
actually i would rather just select photos like i used to do on the 6d. but nikons dont have this feature.
Deleting photos on a card is good way to corrupt your files.
never ever had a problem with that. my only concern is indeed deleting something by mistake (that already happened 1 out of 1000 times)
Some days I don't even put a card in my camera, tethered up to a computer. The amount of card slots is a personal preference and losing one slot was a great way for nikon to shrink the size of the camera. If they included a second slot people would complain about the grip being too big. XQD cards are very reliable and I see no downside to having just one at a time.
I doubt that any Nikon users that haven't jumped ship yet would have complained about the grip or the camera being too big even if it was the size of a full DSLR. I think with the slew of smaller options already out there, anyone who cared about their camera being small probably jumped ship a while back.
Man, all this has seriously buried the lead in all this - the new lens mount system and what that can mean. But, single faster, more reliable XQD slot vs. 2 old SD card slots is the only thing I hear about from 90% of the 'bloggers'. Getting clicks is the business I guess.
I am frankly more interested in whether or not Nikon will share the Z-mount with lens makers like Sigma, which seems unclear to me at this point.
No they will not because Nikon considers itself to be an optics company first, they believe they make the best lenses already.
^ I'm in agreement with Felix here. I highly doubt that Nikon will be sharing Z-mount specs with 3rd party manufacturers.
That may well be the case, which then begs the question: Have Nikon done enough to stop 3rd parties from reverse engineering the mount?
It's honestly not that hard, strong encryption doesn't require serious computer power any more.
I don't think that they don't want 3rd party manufacturers to be able to make lenses. I think they just want them to do a crap job of it so that people will want the Nikon lenses and continue to build it up in their minds that OEM lenses will always have superior quality, AF, etc.
Personally, I think it would be a mistake for Nikon not to open up the mount to third parties given the fact that Sony has done so and, as a result, you've even got companies like Zeiss making AF lenses for their system with great results. I know that Nikon wants to target the premium market with premium prices, but with the quality of 3rd party glass these days, it's becoming increasingly more difficult to justify paying OEM prices and I don't think consumers are going to appreciate protectionist policies that will cripple their options. To do so would be a display of insecurity.
Back in the film days, we didn't have a choice. In the early digital days, professionals were very slow to adopt DSLR's into their workflow compared to enthusiasts and once again, there wasn't a wealth of options. As times change, so do expectations—not just those of photographers, but of clients as well.
Plenty of photographs got lost back in the day due to rolls being ruined in the development process. I know first hand because I saw it happen while working in a lab. Photographers couldn't do anything about it back then, but I can guarantee you that if you could have developed a camera that shot redundantly to two rolls at a time, it would have been adopted by many professionals to mitigate risk.
Certainly, there will always exist some sort of chance for failure on some level. Your car and all of your possessions in it can blow up on your way home from a job. You could be robbed at gunpoint and have everything on your person stolen. Blah blah blah... Part of being a professional is mitigating the risk to make sure that you're delivering the product that you're being paid to deliver. Having redundant card slots is a small, but very useful way to mitigate a great amount of that risk.
Sure, the chance of failure of any individual card is minor. I could say the same thing about hard drives. Would all of these people advocating for using single card slot cameras professionally also advocate using only a single hard drive for their images with no back-up strategy as well? The likelihood of all of your photographic equipment being stolen is similarly pretty low if you're being responsible with it, but would all of these people advocate for a professional not to carry insurance on their equipment? The likelihood of your being responsible injury to person or property is also pretty small for most responsible photographers, but would you advocate for a professional to not carry liability insurance?
Redundancy is insurance for your data. If you call yourself a professional, you should be doing whatever is reasonably within your means to increase that redundancy, whether it's carrying a back-up camera and lens to every job, making sure you have 2-card slots writing redundantly on each camera, making sure that you're keeping multiple copies of all of the data on your hard drive and in your archives across various devices in different locations, etc.
So no, none of this is strictly NECESSARY and plenty of professionals make money without practicing good backup strategy or carrying insurance, but I would say that those professionals are not acting very professionally when they make those kinds of conscious choices—particularly if it's well within their means. At a $3400 price point, having 2 card slots is definitely within your means so to make a conscious choice to pay that kind of price for a product that doesn't have it is an irresponsible decision from a professional standpoint.
I get that this may not apply to certain situations such as shooting tethered, but I would hope that if you're shooting tethered, you are also actively backing up the hard drive that you are sending those photos over to with a a redundant RAID setup.
I don't have two cards.
Good for you. I genuinely that hope you never suffer from a card failure. Some of us are more paranoid than others, I suppose.
Not paranoid, Michael, prudent. If you're a pro shooting for a client and you don't do all that you can to ensure that your client gets what he/she paid for, you're not being professional, not by any stretch. Whether it's a portrait shoot, real estate, or especially a one off event, being equipped to perform at peak level in paramount.
Seems some people just think that what makes a poor choice for them, is a general truth, and it applys to everyone. Not likely. Unless other person shoots exactly just like you (not likely), your opinion doesn't matter to anyone else. So... choose whatever works fo you, or weight the pros and cons and make a decision. Nikon Z's should work for some folk, I'm sure.
And by the way, why are Photographers listening to Youtubers regarding photography tools? I prefer to hear opinions from working pro's, and being able to ignore them the same.
You're right up to the point that my opinion about being a wedding photographer and doing all that you can to ensure success is mitigated by the fact that you disagreed with my opinion about 2 cards when your one card failed and you missed a part of a wedding. Remember, there is not one card made today that is guaranteed not to fail....very important.
In that case, if you were shooting like me (two card camera) there's a very good chance that you would have never lost that bit of wedding data.
All I'm saying is that in this time in photography history, there are too many options for pro shooters that have two card slots for that extra insurance to not do so. Well, unless you don't particularly care if a card fails and you have to tell a bride and groom you missed such and such because you didn't do all that you could do to produce a top flight product.
And this isn't about a landscape shooter or portrait shooter that can have that Phase One with one card. It has a failure, and these types of shoots can be rescheduled. Weddings, on the other hand.....
So I assume you only started shooting when the first camera with two slots was introduced?
When we had only on slot, we adapted to that reality, we used smaller cards, changed cards more often, we made sure our information was safe and reduced the risk of loosing information to a minimum (I'm sure you've done this at some point, if you said no to my first question). But that doesn't seem to be very professional. Professional is relying in your camera to do that for you.
It seems people are just unwilling (or too lazy) to go back to the old ways (which I don't think is necessary) even if the camera that makes you do so, has something in other way that makes your images better, or your use of your tool better. That, to me, doesn't make any sense. Specially when it's been anecdotally shown that XQD cards are more reliable than any SD or CF cards.
We shot with one card (one roll of film) because it's all we had, read, no other choice. Now that we do have a choice to ensure that our clients get the very best that we can provide, it makes no sense to CHOOSE to tempt fate with one card when a two card option is available.
Anecdotally or not, XQD cards are not guaranteed not to fail. Granted, not all professionals require the redundancy of two cards, but for those that would benefit from that extra insurance, it defies logic that a professional would leave his/her professional reputation in the hands of the weakest link in the chain of data protection.
I didn't say XQD didn't fail, just that they seem more reliable.
My point is that anyone, as a working professional will always do whatever is needed to ensure that will deliver the work to the client, and should do that if your camera has one slot or two, and that will be different things for each case.
Also, choosing your tool is exactly that, each professional weighs his/her needs, and if one slot is a big deal, choose another brand that has what he/she needs. Now saying that a camera is a failure in the general sense, just because it doesn't have that one feature that one needs, doesn't make sense, wouldn't you agree?
For sure all memory can fail, including the camera buffer. True redundancy extends beyond having two memory slots.
What an incredibly sexist/genderist/whatever-else-ist question! 😁
I wonder what percentage of wedding and sports photographers use the second slot as continuous storage vs back up? I do Architecture for a living and just keep a 128gb card to back up the main card. However, I still use my A7Rii heavily with only a single slot. Granted, I do not shoot many irreplaceable moments like a wedding, etc.
Every wedding shooter that I've ever spoken with shoots to both slots redundantly. A lot of it seems to come down to not wanting to potentially cross psychotic couples on a very stressful day of their lives.
As for sports shooters, it's a bit more complicated. Some of the ones that I've spoken with are shooting RAW to one card and JPEG to the other to be able to pass off the JPEG's quickly to an editor for posting. Others shoot redundantly and the editors know to just pull the JPEG's and still others are shooting so much burst that they use overflow. I think it depends a lot on the level of the sport that you're dealing with and the workflow of the media team involved.
These are, of course, the ones that aren't wired up via ethernet or Wi-Fi to transfer the data in real-time as might be the case in some high budget professional settings.
" A lot of it seems to come down to not wanting to potentially cross psychotic couples on a very stressful day of their lives."
Probably the best way to describe what it would be like to explain why a wedding shooter lost part of a wedding.
My son is a wedding photographer and carries two 5DIVs and when he started his business, it was two 5DIIIs. His second uses a 5DIII as well. Having two cards in each camera makes losing a chunk of the wedding a lot less a possibility. It's being prudent.
jb
Most two card systems have a inherent flaw, something no-one points out especially in the case of the SD cards, one slot will be UHS-I and the other is UHS-II so using both cards will be crippling the camera. This happens with the 5D III when you're shooting burst you'll hit the buffer for the SD card first then the CF card (which is usually faster). This is why I shoot with one card despite having two. Even the X-Pro I use suffers from slow down due to have two different SD card speeds.
The other factor is cost, having two XQD card slots, the circuitry and the processing power to write to two cards may be prohibitive. Then there is licencing fees...
I've done thousands of shoots in the 16 years I've shot digital, even with the Micro-HD drives and never lost data. Even if the card failed there was a good chance of recovery as most times it's just the file system lost it's file tables rather than a controller failure. Is it nice to have two cards? Yes, I've used both slots on my camera (RAW to the fastest, jpg to the second) for clients who wanted fast images during events but out-with that never used them due to speed penalties.
The point is that in your example, you may only lose a part of a shoot, but it could be the most important part of a shoot. If your shoot requires you to burst for long enough that your buffer kicks in, maybe your using the wrong camera.
The only sports I shoot is an occasional tennis tournament. I can't remember a time that I hit the buffer (5DIII and now 5DIV). But I'm not shooting for Tennis Magazine, either. If I were that sort of photographer, I'd be using a 1Dx.
Try shooting editorial with one card slot :). With a celebrity. And than loose some files... sayonara work as a photographer :).
But for real, I had a latest best most expensive sony memory card fail in a sony a7r3 in the middle of a shoot, JUST LAST MONTH!. I dont know what happened... the camera refused to work with it, it either said it was full, or just refused to read it. it was not full though. it worked after proper formatting... but last 5 shots were lost. Gladly they were on the back up card. last time I lost some files was like 3 years ago, was much more scarier... a whole day of shooting. With one slot. Will never do that again. But luckily I had time to revive the sd card, lost around 15 precent of files. The client did not find out.
So there is a feeling it will never happen to you, but it may some day. It hopefully it will be nothing serious. Cause professional work sometimes involves a lot of money and time.
Tethering is the same. If your work is precious - backing up is just common sense.
There is no much discussion to it. Two card slots is not better, its more reliable.
Maybe its ok for some peoples work. But not for me. Z7 or any camera with one card slot is ok as a back-up camera. For b-roll kind of shooting.
Losing a roll of film at the lab ( which was a very rare occurrence in my experience ) was minor compared to losing an entire card which contains the equivalent of many rolls of film. Even in my 30 years of film photography I practised redundancy, alternating between two backs on the RZ67 and having the rolls processed on separate runs, or dividing 4x5 sheets into separate batches for processing.
On larger shoots, especially those that would be difficult or impossible to re-shoot, I always keep one set of exposed cards in my pocket, the other in the camera bag. I would feel quite uneasy using a single card camera for professional work, and would never buy one in future.
agree
2 cards is absolutely expected in ANY pro setup - I do know of photographers who have had failed/ broken cards where a backup saved them, and I shoot events for a wire service where I hand off 1 (of my 2 cards) to editors periodically for upload- with 1 card slot I would not have my own copy. This is simply NOT a grey area with our current bodies- & a sign that the Z7 is a good first body for Nikon- but I’m not replacing my D850 until the next set of releases! A PRO anticipates failures/problems and prepares for them. ( That’s why ALL aircraft that carry passengers for hire must have TWO engines!)
This is utterly ridiculous. What happens when you use a camera with one slot and then change to another with a two slot. Do you become a pro when using the double slot and revert back to a hobbyist with the single? I think photo vloggers have run out of things to say.
We shall see what the "market" thinks of Nikon's decision to have only one card slot. This debate could go on forever. Sure, before we had digital, we had film. And many "working" photographers lost entire shoots because of a film malfunction or errors during processing. That was terrible when it happened.
Digital made that less of a problem because it gave us data, which can be duplicated and stored, prior to "processing". But, then there was still the possibility of data corruption prior to storage.
Along came the duplicate card slots!! And now, photographers had another safety net, another way of ensuring that data was saved and protected. NO, it's not perfect. But there are fewer ways of the data being corrupted than with film, or with one card slot.
So why the f*ck would any strategically minded camera manufacturer in 2018, step backwards in the evolutionary process and produce a camera with only one card slot on a camera that targets "working photographers?"
The answer could only be cost or space. (Am I missing one?) To date, nobody has made a single convincing argument for why Nikon designed this new camera with only one slot, EXCEPT to save money or space.
You cannot possibly argue (or if you did, it would be nonsensical) that Nikon designed this new camera with only one card slot because of how confident they are that using their camera eliminates any possibility of the data becoming corrupt. And that's precisely because it is NOT always the camera's fault when data is corrupted.
Their new camera has one card slot. That could doom it's success. Only time (and Canon's new mirrorless launch) will determine whether that happens.
Sorry but the single card slot is basically my only gripe with the Mirror-less cameras. They have the technology why not just incorporate it into the new mirror-less cameras? Maybe in the Z8?
I'm sure that they eventually will just like Sony eventually did. In my case, I won't say that the single card slot is my only gripe with Nikon's mirrorless system, however. The fact that they're releasing a high end $3400 body as their first camera, but at the same time, releasing low end f/1.8 primes and f/4 zooms as their first lenses is mind-numbing to me.
Previews from the pre-production models also seem to suggest a number of other issues—the biggest of which is focusing—that Nikon will need to sort out as well. Granted, pre-production models are not the same as fully released products, but if they're less than a month away from shipping these things, it's probably safe to say that the firmware that they will ship with is not all that far off from the cameras that they're sending out to people to do these previews.
Also, WTF is with the idea of having a battery grip that has no controls for portrait shooting on it?
It's like the person making the decisions at Nikon is on an LSD trip or something with some of these choices...
i don't need no stinkin memory cards. i shoot on faith. jesus take the wheel!!
This whole conversation / debate / rant about one-vs-two camera card slots and the purported reliability or durability of various types of memory cards is sort of silly. But I think I'll contribute anyway.
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1. Failure.
The chance of failure for any digital storage medium is greater than zero. It might be very low, but it's greater than zero. And memory cards can fail in a couple of different ways - physical failure and file table corruption or read/write errors.
So maybe you get lucky and never lose any data for your entire time using cameras. Congratulations. Maybe you're unlucky (or careless, or you abuse your cards, or you unknowingly purchased a crappy counterfeit card) and you do lose data. Either way, you are only a sample size of 1 and so are statistically insignificant. Your anecdotal experience does not indicate a trend, so please don't make sweeping generalizations like "SD cards are flimsy".
For what it's worth, SD cards are actually pretty durable. That doesn't mean they never fail, but they can survive being bumped around and dropped. Like many SD cards, the SanDisk Extreme Pro is rated to survive up to 72 hours in 1 meter of salt(!) or fresh water, can withstand temperatures ranging from –13 ºF to 185 ºF, and is immune to airport X-rays. [ thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-sd-card/ ]
Like every other digital photographer, I'm playing the odds. I'm risk averse so I carry two cameras, each with two card slots, and plenty of extra cards on top of that. Despite the low chance of card failure, I feel the need for in-camera file redundancy. Maybe you don't. It's up to you, and I'm not going to tell you how to make that decision. Shooting a job with one memory slot does not make a photographer less professional.
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2. Client optics.
Frankly, I think it can look bad to a client to not have in-camera data back up. Just my opinion. Again, shooting a job with one memory slot does not make a photographer less professional, but your client might not agree.
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3. Sharing data with others.
I shoot lots of events like weddings with two cameras, and each camera has two memory card slots. For me, having two slots is important because I work for other photographers. At the end of a gig, they get one memory card to take home, and I get the other so we each have a copy of the job.
I don't have to upload 60GB's worth of event photos to the cloud (which takes forever if I can even keep a stable network connection long enough), or bother with going to the post office to mail a USB flash drive (which takes days, and may or may not get lost in the mail), both of which are aggravating, and cost me TIME and MONEY.
The immediacy and convenience of handing over a memory card to my colleague at the end of the night is PRICELESS. I'm certainly not interested in doing my job with a camera that has only one slot.
Personally, I wish the Nikon mirrorless cameras had two SD slots instead of one XQD slot. Because of that (and other reasons I won't bore you with here), I will not buy a Z6 or Z7 to use for paid event work.
Having said all that, your mileage may vary. Your tolerance for risk is up to you, and you'll make your purchasing decisions accordingly.
2 card slots are definitely a handy addition but surely a wedding photographer can just swap out cards regularly during the day so at the worst 1 to 2 hours worth of data is lost.. also carrying something like a my passport pro means you can backup on the fly in seconds.
Although I admit I don’t know if such an option is available for the XQD
The key to shooting a Wedding is to "capture moments" which only appears once and then is lost forever. Losing 1 to 2 hours will be an absolute disaster. What happens when that 2 hours loss covers the Ceremony?
Also, shooting a Wedding is stressful enough. Why would I subject myself to constantly changing memory cards just to justify Nikon's decision to only put in one card slot for their cameras?
I'm sorry, those point don't make any sense.
"Did they refuse to photograph because of the fear of losing data?" No, they did it because they had no alternative.
Now photographers have alternatives to make em more reliable for the client, why would I pass on that opportunity especially if removing the 2nd slot doesn't give me anything in return?
Car analogy is like a manufacturer releasing a new car without AC and people saying "What's the problem? Did people refuse to drive without AC in the last 50 years?". No, but simply because having a car with no AC is better than having no car at all, however why would I choose the car without AC if it doesn't really offer anything more than the car that has it and for a similar price? That's the big problem.
I was honestly expecting Fstoppers to be wiser than publishing such silly stuff as Granger's rant about card slots... Is just ridiculous a camera at this pricepoint not having data redundancy. Do professionals need redundancy, obviously yes... anyone sane would want redundancy... you should eventually make an article about how on earth any sane person who care about his work wouldn't find redundancy as a default feature in 2018 ...
Even phones have a backup system for photos. Why would you not have a solution for cameras. I use 2 cards for even vacation photos. Once you shoot with the security of 2 cards you don't want to go back to single card. Had a SanDisk fail on me the other day.
Surely the answer here is two cameras, two cards in each, tethered to two laptops each with two drives, oh but then there’s only one photographer, better get a second one of those...
Card failure does not happen often, however that one time that will happen can be proved to cost us wedding photographers much more than the difference in price of a dual card camera model. It happened to me twice since 2003.
I do not get it how people try to convince us otherwise. Would you feel the same travel with a single engine airplane?
If there is a choice I will choose double cards. Both Nikon and canon mirorless seem to fail in this department.