Today I did a ISO comparison with the Nikon Z9 compared to the Nikon Z6II and Nikon D850. I’ve been using my old D850 a lot for astrophotography and have been very pleased with its ISO performance.
When I got my Nikon Z6II about a year ago I found it to outperform my Nikon D850 regarding ISO. That was expected since it has a lower resolution. So now that I’ve got my Nikon Z9 I thought it would be interesting to see how it performs against both the Nikon D850 and the Nikon Z6II.
I did 4 exposures with each camera, each exposure was 60 seconds long and was taken using ISO 1600, 3200, 6400 and 12 800. All the exposures was done in room temperature with lossless RAW 14-bit format. All photos was exported through the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw with all noise reduction turned off. I increased the exposure compensation with a value of +3 on each photo to make the noise more visible.
Nikon D850
Nikon Z6II
Nikon Z9
As a conclusion we can see that the Nikon Z9 seems to perform really good, almost on par with the Nikon Z6II and much better than the Nikon D850. I need to do further tests to see the performance out in the field but this first quick test looks really promising.
