My argument is not that this is what some professionals need, but rather that compared to the proportion of users who rely on this and for which the lack of a second card slot is a strict exclusion criterion is much, much smaller compared to the tempest in the tea pot that got stirred up. For Nikon, this is mostly a marketing problem, and an avoidable one. It would definitely have been better if they simply had included a second card slot.
As far as I understand, the new memory card type is more robust and faster than SD cards.
Of course, it is more robust if you have data on two cards. But two questions here: how many people actually use dual card slots this way? (At least on my D7000 I can configure them to e. g. use one until it is full and then the camera switches to the other.) And is it worth the trade off of slower operation? (Thom Hogan claims that this is the reason why Sony disables the second memory card slot by default.)
You are incorrectly assuming that memory card failure means catastrophic memory card failure where you lose all files in the process, but that is not the only way to have data loss or a memory card malfunction. There are plenty of other failure modes where e. g. only one or two images are corrupted or you can no longer write to the card but still read from it. I have had some intermittent failures that were actually caused by the camera that apparently wrote out data structures incorrectly, and a reformat of the card resolved the issue. (That seemed to have happened particularly often when I swapped memory cards between my Nikon dslr and my second camera.)
But in my experience the biggest source of data loss is the stupid human that is just typing this message to you
(And yes, my dslr has two memory slots
)
I think accurate assessments of probabilities matter here: catastrophic memory card failures that have not been caused e. g. by an accident or human error are much rarer than 0.1 %. So the question is what the best strategy is to mitigate such problems. If you shoot e. g. weddings professionally or go on safari in Africa to take photos of animals in the Serengeti for a magazine, you
must have (at least) a second body, that's much more important than having a second memory slot.
I don't think that's accurate: I don't think body wise Sony's offerings are one or two generations ahead, I think the two are pretty much even. And where one is ahead, I don't think it really matters for the vast majority of shooters. Does it matter than the Sony manages 10 fps instead of the Z7's paltry 9? Or that the Nikon has 3 more megapixels? Any of these difference will be overshadowed in practice either by things that are personal preference (e. g. how a camera feels in your hand) or by things that are not well-reflected by specs (say, better optics for the EVF). Of course that is much more of a problem for Nikon than for Sony, because Nikon has to make a pitch why the Z-series is
better, and the only (rather big) saving grace is that Nikon will happily sell you dslrs.
When it comes to AF performance, for example, I don't think the competition is Sony, but rather in house, the D5 and D850 are still much faster at focussing than mirrorless cameras. Sony seems to be best-in-class when it comes to eye detect AF, but also Sony's other competitors don't seem to be on par here.
Nikon's biggest downside compared to Sony is the rather small lens line-up, and that was clear from the very beginning — if you change lens mount, you will have to live with a small lens line-up for 3-5 years. Fuji had to pull through that, and it did so, because it released very idiosyncratic cameras that had its own unique appeal.
(Just as an aside: I have no interest in buying a Z-series camera, even if I had money, I'd probably switch to Fuji's X-series cameras.)
Nikon has been using Sony sensors for many, many years now in AFAIK most of their cameras. What's new about that? If you compare Nikons to Sony cameras that use the same sensor you nevertheless see differences in image quality which are solely due to how the raw data from the sensor is processed.
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I have so many batteries it is a chore to keep them all charged.
I think this is a very good point: you have failure without catastrophic data loss, perhaps due to abuse. Think of salt water ingress because you carelessly changed memory cards on a boat. This may fry your entire camera. (I am speaking from experience here.)
Just to be super clear: even though I think the number of people impacted by this is quite small, given that even Nikon's prosumer dslrs sport two card slots (my D7000 does), it is really a strange omission. If I had to speculate, perhaps it was too complicated to build a camera with two
full speed? Just imagine you are a pro, and because one of the card slots is slower (just as it seems to be the case now), and your new Z7 only manages 4 fps instead of the advertised 9 when you write to both cards simultaneously. (Thom Hogan just wrote substantially slower in case of the Sony, but didn't quantify that. Does any one know?)
But in 2018 that seems like an engineering problem with a clear solution.
That doesn't make much sense to me: the major differences are in software, such as eye detection AF, and I don't think Sony would fork that over even if Nikon offered to pay ¥¥¥¥¥¥¥ for it. Similarly, Nikon wouldn't want to share its image processing algorithms.
Nikon has the camera hardware bit down, so I don't think that becoming an OEM would solve any of their problems. Instead making their own hardware allows them to play to their strengths: the Z6 and Z7 look like and are operated like their dslrs (for the most part). They know how to make great glass, and the 55 mm diameter mount with short flange distance gives them a leg up compared to the competition (at least in terms of potential, not saying that every Nikon lens has to deliver on that).
Great observation, Sony had to go upmarket and pull newly found loyalists along. Nikon is trying to skip this step with their decision to start with highest-end cameras. I would have expected that they release something a little cheaper with more niche appeal first, learn their lessons and implement the feedback in their high-end cameras that come next. Fuji did this with the X-Pro 1 and then the X-E1. They also released two extremely well-regarded lenses alongside, which convinced some people to stick to the system.
