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.
Image quality from the Nikon ZR at 800 ISO.
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.
The Nikon ZR (left) vs. the RED V-Raptor (right) at 2500 ISO. The ZR shows more noise in the shadows.
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