D4s or Z6ii

[Welshy74]

Looking at adding another body to go with my D500. Narrowed it down to a D4s or Z6ii. Can get them both for roughly the same price with the D4s with only 4k actuation. Shooting field sports mostly through winter so low light at times can be an issue. Anyone used both for similar shooting??

 

[toohuge]

I'll be following this closely.... for reference I use a D500 and D5... that said, I really miss the eye-af that the mirrorless bodies afford for portrait work etc. and good as both the D5 and D500 are re. AF, I'm not entirely sure the Z6ii will be significantly worse. Furthermore, I will not miss the AF finetuning issues of DSLR's!

I haven't shot the D4s, but did have a D4 and I found the AF performance to be pretty poor in comparison with the D5/500

I'm hoping someone with more real world experience will chime in.

 

[Seba]

Shooting field sports mostly through winter so low light at times can be an issue

I'd be going for the D4s. Have had a couple at work and have always liked them. Still have one as a remote camera now. In fact, the boss asked us to hand in old D4s's a while back, for a possible trade in, I had one that was in great condition that was used as a remote camera, was gutted to see it go. Would take it back in a heart beat.

Tough cameras, will take a beating in all weather, will happily get knocked about and keep going.

I just think that the Z6ii plus the FTZ (assume you'd be running with one) wouldn't match the D4s in awful conditions.

 

[Toggerman]

I shoot a lot of football league and rugby union and started off last year with a Z6 and Z6ii, a 400mm with FTZ and 70-200 S. I've loved the Zs for everyday shooting, events and motorsport. With the field sports I struggled a bit. Af first I put it down to rust as I had a long hiatus from field sports, but after a while I got fed up of the shots I was missing due to misfocussing. I saw a D5 really cheap and pounced on it. It was such a dramatic difference that I now have 2 D5s for the field sports .

With the Zs I found the AF would drift around and not be consistent. I tried all the different AF modes and played with the settings loads and nothing really improved it. With the D5s I set it up with similar settings to what I used before, 3D tracking and so on, and haven't changed anything since.

The Zs were good for about 95% of the time, but the D5 hasn't yet put a foot wrong.