Nikon Put a Price on the Viewfinder, and It Is About 300 Dollars

For nine years my right eyebrow did half the work. On the news bodies I carried in Gothenburg the rubber eyecup went grey and shiny where it pressed, and after a long day there was a faint ring around my eye that the picture desk could read like a timesheet. I thought about that ring all week, because the camera the whole wire wrote about is the one that takes it away.

Nikon announced the Z5IIC on 24 September, and the idea fits in a headline. Amateur Photographer's said the maker drops the price and the viewfinder together. It is the Z5II with the electronic viewfinder taken off and the top plate made flat. CineD's announcement piece lists what stayed: the same 24.5-megapixel backside-illuminated sensor, the EXPEED 7 processor, and N-RAW video recorded straight to an SD card. Camera Decision adds the 7.5-stop stabilisation and the American price, 1,399.95 dollars for the body. In Germany Photografix put it at 1,550 euros, and heise Foto expects it in shops from the middle of October.

Two days before the launch, Nikon Rumors reported that the new body would undercut the Z5II, which it listed at 1,697 dollars. Do the subtraction and the window comes to about 300 dollars, a little under a fifth of the camera. Last week I wrote that the viewfinder was what the 1,200 dollars between the ZR and the Z8 bought. That was a comparison between two different cameras. This week Nikon ran the cleaner experiment, one body with the eyepiece and one without, and printed its own answer on the price tag. Not all of the 300 is glass and a small screen, to be fair. Digitalkamera.de noticed that the touchscreen was pared back as well.

Since the viewfinder is the whole argument, here is what it does. An electronic viewfinder is a very small screen behind a magnifying eyepiece, shaded from daylight by your own face. When you hold a camera to your eye it rests on your two hands and your head, and your head is a steady thing to lean on. At arm's length it rests on your hands alone, at the end of two long levers, and the rear screen has to compete with the sun, which the eyepiece never does. That is why news photographers kept looking through cameras long after the screens on the back got good. It is also why stabilisation matters more on a body without a finder, and Nikon kept all of it here.

The reviews spent most of their words on who the camera is for. Photo Review writes that it was designed for people buying their first mirrorless camera, with automatic shooting modes to match. Photografix names smartphone switchers and content creators. The Phoblographer called it another street photography camera and answered the objection before anyone could raise it: the influencers, it said, will tell you it is not a real camera because there is no viewfinder. The Verge's headline suggested you might not miss what Nikon removed, and pointed out that Nikon waited five years to turn the Z5 into the Z5II, then a year later made a version of it with less inside.

Here is the number I keep coming back to. At 620 grams, Camera Decision notes, it is the lightest full-frame Z camera Nikon makes, with a grip deep enough to carry a big zoom. Put it next to its rivals, though, and the same site found that among the Sony A7C II, the Canon R8 II and the Lumix S9, the one without a viewfinder is the heaviest. DPReview's review headline says it without irony: capability over compactness. Its subtitle adds that not much besides the viewfinder was cut. The grip and the stabilised sensor stayed, and they weigh what they weigh. Taking the eyepiece off saved money. It did not make a small camera.

None of this makes it a bad camera. The day before the launch, DPReview compared the Canon R8 II against the Z5II and called the Z5II its current pick at that price. The new body inherits a good parent. The hands-on from Photoscala reads the same way from the other side: no viewfinder, but EXPEED 7 and N-RAW.

The Japanese press had the detail I was waiting for. Digital Camera Watch reported the camera as announced overseas on the 24th, flat-topped and recording N-RAW internally, and added a line the English sites did not carry: Nikon has said nothing about a release in Japan. So the camera the whole wire argued over is, for now, not one I can walk ten minutes to Shinjuku and pick up. I have not put a card in it and I will not pretend I have.

The accessory makers had no doubts at all. By the 27th SmallRig had a cage, an L-shaped grip and a baseplate priced and announced, and Field Made had released labels for it. A cage on a camera bought for being simple is a small joke the market tells every year, and every year somebody buys the cage.

DPReview gave a whole segment to the reaction and titled it, fairly, people had a lot of feelings. Mine are modest. For someone arriving from a phone, arm's length is already how a photograph gets taken, and the 300 dollars stays in the pocket. For someone who learned on an eyepiece, the missing window gets paid for later, at dusk, on a slow shutter, when the hands start to drift.

I still have one of those Gothenburg eyecups in a drawer in Tokyo, split along one side, from a body I sold long ago. It fits nothing I own. It would not fit this camera either, which has nowhere to put it, only a flat top plate where the hump used to be.