The Nikon ZR Can Record 6K 59.94p for More Than 2 Hours Despite No Active Cooling
Nikon says that, based on internal testing, it expects the Nikon ZR to be able to record continuously for up to 2 hours and 5 minutes in 6K resolution at 59.94 frames per second in R3D NE at an ambient temperature of 25 degrees Celcius, despite the fact it is a very small camera with no active cooling.
When Nikon announced the ZR earlier this month, there was one factor that stood out as much as the low asking price and enormous feature set it offered: the lack of a fan. For several years now, competitor cameras have integrated various active cooling technologies to deal with the increased heat that the combination of shooting high resolution and high frame rate bring. Panasonic, Canon, and Sony all have implemented their own methods for cooling and they work well, but somehow Nikon was able to create a camera that is not only smaller than many of the competitors, but also exclude the need for a fan.
“As you can imagine, it was very difficult,” Noriaki Mochimizo, ZR Project Manager, tells PetaPixel during an interview at the IBC Conference in Amsterdam earlier this month regarding the ZR’s development and its ability to eschew a fan.
“We used magnesium alloy for the front, top, and back covers. These heat dissipating sheets are placed in such a way as to efficiently dissipate heat from components (such as the image sensor and image sensor engine) through these metal covers, which is how long video recording became possible,” Mochimizo adds.
The company says that in internal testing, it was able to continuously record 6K video at 59.94 frames per second for 2 hours and 5 minutes at an ambient temperature of 25 degrees Celcius (which is about 77 degrees Fahrenheit). Nikon did not provide any further specifics into how it performed its internal testing, but PetaPixel will verify these findings in its forthcoming full review of the ZR. Still, even if the test was performed in an optimal environment, such as indoors at standard ambient temperatures, that’s remarkable for a camera as small as the ZR and without the assistance of a fan.
“Since this ZR has the compact body, it was very difficult to achieve this if we used the same thermal pathways as the existing model cameras, such as Z8 and Z9. By having new heat dissipation pathways, we were able to achieve this level of performance despite the compact size,” Mochimizo says.
Not only can the camera record for such a long time, it has slightly better dynamic range than the Z6 III, which uses the same sensor.
“We optimized the essential dynamic range of ZR to integrate RED color science and the base ISO and R3D NE codec records data by allocating the sensor’s dynamic range from highlights to shadows and achieves the wider dynamic range,” Satoru Takeuchi, Section Manager of 3rd Development Section & 1st Development Department, adds.
Image credits: Nikon
