Nikon spent decades being the company photographers picked for stills and video shooters mostly worked around. The ZR flips that. It's a 25MP partially-stacked full-frame body built around video first, and its headline trick is real: internal 6K RAW recording in three formats — Nikon's own N-RAW, Apple ProRes RAW, and RED's own R3D NE — at a price, $2,200, that undercuts dedicated cinema cameras by thousands of dollars.
The Expeed 7 processor drives 8 stops of 5-axis in-body stabilization plus electronic VR for handheld video, 32-bit float audio recording that makes clipped audio nearly a non-issue, and a 4-inch, 1000-nit rear screen bright enough to judge exposure outdoors. At 6K/60p, footage grades against high-end RED cinema camera output more easily than anything else in this price range, and autofocus — historically Nikon's weak spot against Sony and Canon — actually keeps up with moving subjects here.
It's not a cinema camera in a full-frame trench coat, though, and the compromises show where you'd expect. There's no built-in electronic viewfinder, so anything shot in bright daylight leans entirely on the rear screen. Battery life falls short of a full day's shooting without spares. And H.265 clips need close to a second of lead-in before bitrate settles, which is a real problem if you're chasing a fast-moving shot rather than rolling ahead of it.
Next to a Sony FX3 or Canon EOS C70 — the compact cinema bodies it's clearly aimed at — the ZR undercuts both on price while matching or beating them on RAW video quality. For anyone who wants RED-grade footage without a RED-sized budget, this is the camera Nikon wasn't expected to make.