The Nikon ZR gets surprisingly close to a real RED camera (for a lot less money)

If you shoot video professionally, there’s a good chance you’ve salivated over a RED camera at some point. RED has long been one of the top choices for big-budget productions, offering a combination of image quality and flexibility that’s unrivaled by most consumer cameras. They’re also wildly expensive, topping out at around $45,000 on the high-end, putting them far out of reach for most everyday projects. But now, Nikon is promising to take the most unique part of RED — the file format that powers its incredible imagery — and offer it at a fraction of the price.

The $2,200 Nikon ZR is full of features tailored to video shooters. It has a big and bright touchscreen, the ability to record audio with an unmatched level of dynamic range, and enough sensor-level image stabilization to skip a gimbal for a lot of tasks. But its most notable feature is its ability to shoot a version of RED’s R3D file format. It’s a cut-down variant called R3D NE that’s specifically designed for use on Nikon cameras. It’s not as powerful, compressing some data that a dedicated RED doesn’t. But for people willing to deal with the limitations, access to RED’s color pipeline and distinct highlight rolloff is wildly compelling.

This is the first camera Nikon has made with RED since acquiring the company in 2024, and if the two brands were hoping to turn some heads, I’d say they delivered. The question now is: just how close does it get to a real RED?

A little less R3D, a lot less money

R3D is a video format called compressed RAW, which stores almost everything the sensor collects as metadata while still maintaining a manageable file size. This means settings like white balance, ISO, gamma, and color space can be changed in post with effectively no loss in quality. This is both useful for making strong creative decisions after you shoot, or for saving your footage when conditions aren’t ideal. I have strong memories of filming smartphone hands-on videos in terrible lighting conditions many years ago, just to see my (now) Waveform Podcast cohost Marques Brownlee publish a perfectly corrected version of the same scene after shooting on a RED camera. Put simply, R3D is a cheat code.

The R3D NE format that the Nikon ZR supports is unfortunately not the same R3D that dedicated RED cameras use, but a modified 12-bit variant (down from the more detailed 16-bit version on RED’s higher-end cameras) built around Nikon’s sensor and processor architecture. This is because the ZR uses the same 24.5 megapixel partially stacked sensor as the Nikon Z6III, not RED’s own sensor and specialized chip for compression acceleration. In practice, this means R3D NE is more similar to Nikon’s N-RAW file format from a compression standpoint, and it is definitely more taxing on my computer than RED’s traditional R3D files. At 6k 24p, the ZR’s R3D NE files can spin up my fans while editing, while R3D files I shot on a RED V-Raptor at 8k 24p cut like butter.

That said, the R3D NE files from the Nikon ZR look extremely similar to the R3D files from the RED V-Raptor. R3D NE still uses the iconic color pipeline, IPP2, that’s been on RED’s own cameras since 2017, offering extremely smooth highlight rolloff, great color, and an almost film-like tonal response. Compared to standard R3D files, the ZR’s R3D NE files look almost identical, save for a slight green cast, most likely caused by the different color response from Nikon’s Expeed sensor.

One major difference between the two cameras is how they handle ISO and noise. On a RED, ISO is simply metadata that tells the program how many stops brighter or darker to display the image, but doesn’t actually bake in analog amplification at the time of capture. This means as long as you protect the highlights while shooting, you can change the ISO in post with minimal changes to noise or dynamic range.

On the ZR, changing the ISO directly changes noise and clipping, because R3D NE bakes in sensor gain before compression. This means changing the ISO in post on the ZR will quickly show more and more noise. Nikon tries to get around this by forcing you to shoot at one of its two native ISOs — either 800 or 6400 when recording R3D NE. This results in a clean image, but it gets noisy if you need to make serious exposure adjustments in post. The image looks great if you control your exposure with an ND filter or your aperture, but you definitely have less exposure control than you would with a dedicated RED.

Even with the limitations, it’s fantastic just how much of RED’s power Nikon has brought down to this far cheaper camera. If you’ve always wanted access to RED’s color science and image characteristics, the ZR will get you most of the way there. The limits really come down to your ability to expose your scene correctly while shooting. You’ll still have the ability to radically adjust things like white balance and color space after the fact. Still, if you mess up exposure, you’ll have more trouble easily saving your image than you would with a dedicated RED.

The opposite of RED hardware

Another big reason people want RED cameras is their modularity. RED’s cameras start with just the “brain,” a big box with an image sensor, processor, and a whole lot of inputs that you can plug things into. The cameras are so stripped back, and so designed around modularity, that they need a variety of additional accessories like a monitor and handle just to be usable.

On this metric, Nikon has gone in the total opposite direction. The ZR is practically the opposite of a RED camera — something that has so many features built in that you can shoot high-quality footage with nearly zero add-ons.

The first example of this is the ZR’s 1,000-nit, 4-inch fully articulating touchscreen, which practically removes the need for an additional monitor. The touchscreen articulates 180-degrees and looks great outside, though if you have something plugged into the mic jack you’ll have trouble articulating it all the way around. Unfortunately, the ZR doesn’t offer RED’s famous “Traffic Light” and “Goal Post” onscreen exposure tools, which are helpful for making sure you don’t clip your image — something even more important on the ZR than a traditional RED — but it’s super sharp at 3.07 million dots and supports DCI-P3 color for a more accurate representation of what you’re capturing.

Another one of the ZR’s impressive integrated features is support for recording 32-bit FLOAT audio from the internal microphone, digital hotshoe, or mic jack. The ZR is the first camera to do this, and honestly, this is a huge deal. 32-bit audio is very difficult to clip, allowing you to capture a wide variance of loudness without your audio being ruined. Traditional shooting setups require a separate audio recorder to record 32-bit FLOAT, and the ability to record it internally can reduce the size of your kit even further.

This all exists inside a body that’s very compact and light, at just 1.4 pounds. Nikon achieved such a slim and light profile by using a fanless design, which is unusual for such a capable video-focused camera. It also manages to include 7.5 stops of in-body image stabilization, which is something you won’t get in any of RED’s own cameras.

The ZR is not without its faults, of course. The tripod thread is too close to the battery/media storage door, making it difficult to swap batteries or storage while on a tripod. The camera uses Micro HDMI instead of full-size, and a single CF Express Type-B slot and micro SD slot make backup recording nearly impossible if you’re shooting at high quality. I also found the joystick to be a bit small and mushy, and there’s a frustrating 125-minute cap on recordings that limits the camera’s use in long interviews.

Still, at the end of the day, the Nikon ZR is pretty much what Nikon promised: a $2,200 ticket to shooting RED-like files. It’s an incredible value for prosumer video shooters. Nikon has been outpaced in the video space for about a decade now. The ZR is the kind of camera a company makes when it’s looking for a comeback.

Photography by David Imel