Sometimes the best test for a camera isn’t a controlled setup it’s just going for a walk and seeing what comes back.
I took the Nikon ZR out for a walk through Milan with what’s become my favorite lens for exactly this kind of shooting: the Nikon 40mm f/2. Small, light, and honest no zoom to hide behind, just you deciding where to stand. The whole rig body, lens, everything comes in somewhere around 600-700 grams. For context: I grew up dreaming about RED cameras, the kind of gear that used to mean rigs weighing several kilos, rigs that needed a whole cart to move around. Carrying RED RAW capture in something you can sling over one shoulder for an afternoon still doesn’t quite feel real, even having used it plenty by now.
Everything was shot in 6K at 25p. I came home with 56GB of footage from one walk which sounds like a lot until you get into DaVinci Resolve, color the clips, and export to H.265. What started as 56GB of RAW came out the other side at 2-3GB, something like a 20x reduction, with basically none of the quality lost in the process that actually matters for delivery.
On the image itself: put a RED-derived Film Bias LUT over the footage, a few quick adjustments, and the color comes alive almost instantly. Noise is essentially invisible even where I’d expect to see it. Shadows stay clean and pull-able without falling apart. Stabilization is decent but not exceptional if you’re doing anything more demanding than a walk, a gimbal or tripod is still the smarter call, but I wanted to stay as light as possible for this one, and the trade-off was worth it.
Audio-wise, the ZR records 32-bit float internally, which on its own removes a category of problem (clipped audio, gain-staging panic) that used to require a separate recorder to avoid.
Put it all together RED RAW, 6K, 32-bit float audio, in a package this light and this portable and you’ve got a genuinely excellent camera for street work in a big city, or honestly anywhere you don’t want to be carrying a full production kit just to capture something real.