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Colorado Adventure and Editorial Photographer

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Z6/7 playback modes and issues

July 4, 2019 • Gear Talk

I just returned from a grueling assignment in Alaska for a tourism bureau, over 10,000 images and a week of shooting…in a state where it never gets dark in the summer!  Really, I love this assignment, Alaska still feels like home even though we don’t live there anymore.  We had five cameras with us on this shoot…3 D850s, Z6 and Z7.  We used them all…loved the D850s for fast action shooting and long lens work.  And we loved the Z cameras for walk around tourism images and wide angle landscapes.  We shot a lot of aerials on this shoot, and the in camera body stabilization is very useful in the Z6/7 for these images. Towards the end of the shoot I noticed our Z6 was acting funny when I was trying to review images on the LCD.  There are four screen modes on the Z camera:

Automatic: the camera will turn off the LCD preview if it senses your eye in the viewfinder

Viewfinder Only; the camera turns off the LCD entirely so you can only use the EVF.

Monitor Only: the opposite of the above…EVF turned off, only can see the LCD display

Prioritize Viewfinder: similar to a DSLR, only the EVF is active unless you push a button to active the EVF for playback or a menu display.

I started to notice that I couldn’t get my LCD screen to playback except when it was in Monitor Only mode.  I normally shoot in Prioritize Viewfinder mode, but the LCD would not turn on.  But the fix was simple…I had to clean my viewfinder.  The EVF is so sensitive that the dirt and dust in my viewfinder was telling the camera that my eye was there, so no LCD playback was possible.  But once I cleaned the viewfinder off, everything worked perfectly.  So if you are having any playback issue on your Z camera, start by cleaning the viewfinder.

I’m happy to report that even after solid 14 hour days shooting we still only needed one battery in the Z6/7 to last out the day.  And another feature we really liked was using image review in the viewfinder when we were on snow.  It was so bright out we couldn’t see the LCD well, but EVF playback was like using a loupe on the LCD…very handy.

 

Happy 4th of July!!!

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