At this point, I would like to commend Nikon for a fantastic technical performance with the Z6 II's shutter mechanism. To create a mechanical shutter that can shoot at 14 frames per second, matching the speed of the Nikon D6's significantly larger professional DSLR, is impressive. The sound produced by the shutter is pleasant and muffled, and there is an electronic shutter for completely silent shooting. However, it should be pointed out that the 14 frames per second burst speed has its limitations; you can't use 14-bit raw, probably because of the required data throughput, and you have to be in Single Point AF mode.
Of course, for all its shooting speed, the AF has to be able to keep pace, which is where the dual processors come into play. Shooting in the more conservative 12fps Continuous High mode, I took a sequence of images of an incoming Black-headed Gull. land on water with mixed results. I will add a big caveat that shooting birds in flight is a great skill and I don't pretend to be an expert. Shooting in wide-angle AF (L), which looks at a wider area than a single point I found that the first 4 images in the sequence following the seagull were in focus, but then there was a jump to the next seagull in the frame. The other seagull was the only other object in the frame, and the two seagulls were separated by water in the image.
I have no doubt that if I were more skilled I would have better results in single-point AF mode, but my shortcomings are not the point of this story. What impressed me was the speed with which the AF switched subjects. In a single frame, the camera told the 24-200mm f/4-6.3 lens to focus back on the seagull in flight. In fact, it jumped between the two seagulls several more times as part of the sequence. The moral of the story is not that I'm still not very good at shooting birds in flight, but that the Nikon Z6 II has the AF speed to keep up with a bird in flight. my erratic hand holding. Fine-tune the AF settings, use a better telephoto lens, and put the Z6 II in the hands of an experienced wildlife photographer and I have no doubt that the AF will do the trick. And as I said before, I still feel there is room for improvement on this system as Nikon gets more feedback and continues to improve it.
With double the processing power, the data produced by the camera can be moved more efficiently. This increased the buffer from 35 12-bit raw frames in the Z6 to 124 in the Z6 II. This is of course dependent on being able to write to a fast enough memory card, with Nikon citing this data using a CFexpress card. However, given that it equates to holding down the shutter button for around 9 seconds at the highest frame rate, the buffer should prove more than sufficient for keen shooters using a UHS-II SD card rather than the faster CFexpress card.
As you would expect at ISO 50 or ISO 100 there is no luminance or color noise visible, in fact, images look very clean up to ISO 800. At ISO 1600 we start to see a hint of luminance noise and its reduction. At ISO 6400, there is a slight loss of detail due to luminance noise reduction, and this is the highest setting I'd like to use regularly. ISO 12800 is certainly usable, but fine detail is lost and some color noise creeps in. Maximum native ISO 51,200 has a waxy appearance with loss of detail and patches of luminance noise visible where it is preserved. Extended +1 and +2 settings should be avoided, especially the latter; luminance noise and its reduction decimated the image, and color noise is still visible in some places.
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