With the Nikon Z 6II hitting the shelves this week, I finally took the plunge to switch to a full-frame camera. Previously, my workhorses had been two cameras with smaller APS-C sensors: a Nikon D5100 that I got 7 years ago (and that I used to capture the Z 6II in the image below) and a Fuji X100T that I like to use for travel, added 6 years ago. Some of the pictures I took over the years with those cameras are on my Flickr.

Obviously a lot of progress happened over those years, so I have to play some catch-up with all the new bells and whistles. A couple of observations. Raw support in Lightroom does not work yet since the model just came out, and trying to import raw NEF files from the camera results in the import failing. An annoyance with LR is that it refuses to import JPEGs if there’s a raw NEF file of the same picture. It will try to import the NEF instead, which fails. JPEGs aside, Nikon’s free Capture NX-D tool can read the raw files and convert those to huge TIFFs. Another option I found for now: Luminar 4 happily reads the NEFs and has decent basic editing features. Hopefully Adobe comes out with an update to Camera Raw soon, so that the Z 6II is fully supported in LR as well.

Among the nice new features compared to my aging D5100 is wireless transfer of new pictures to a computer. Well, it would be a nice feature if the software on the PC-side, the Wireless Transmitter Utility, would not be so fickle. The camera often fails to connect. Restarting the NkPtpEnumWT3 service on the PC appears to alleviate that—for at least one transfer.

I won’t cover the picture quality as there are plenty of blogs and articles about that already. However, please find below for your enjoyment a snapshot fitting current events taken with the Z 6II. Those ICs are 70HC161 four-bit counters, originally used for my VGA project.