The sense of falling into a well of detail you get from an 8 x 10 contact print is something too few people experience.

Thanks Les, i concur.
In the early 1980's, I visited a traditional b&w supplies shop in London to buy some Selenium toner.
For me, it was like going into Aladdin's Den.
In addition to the software, there were some of the most striking & richly toned 10x8 prints I'd ever seen.

"Don't get too depressed said the owner. They're contact prints from a 10 x 8 negative"
(it's possible they were from plates - I was too awestruck to ask)

sometimes existing cameras can perform tricks you did not expect they could.

I have been using 8x pixel shift on a Z8 for  measurements on a static object lately.
......
I find this more appealing than using  32x pixel shift.

Fascinating Bernard.
I may have missed them but can you share any examples?

December 19

Viburnum × bodnantense 'Dawn'

Zf  Voigtländer 65mm f/2

sometimes existing cameras can perform tricks you did not expect they could.

I have been using 8x pixel shift on a Z8 for  measurements on a static object lately.
That yields tricolor data on every pixel site. In the green channel it sums up to 16bit data on every one of the 45.4 Mpixels.
For red and blue it sums up to 15bit data on every pixel. Within the limits of the 3 color Bayer filter limitations, you can adjust to your preferred monochrome response in post-
processing.
I find this more appealing than using  32x pixel shift. Which yields again 15 and 16bit values on 4 times as many pixels at half pixel pitch. Mosaic composite images have the potential for better resolution. A 2x2 mosaic would provide better resolution due use of a longer lens and due to less reduction of sharpness by (sequentially) filling a 4x sized sensor.

NX Studio 1.70 & 1.80 are very slow fetching files across a network, and on Win11 just useless for anything not on the local computer.

I'll do a test install of 1.90 on Win11 to learn whether Nikon (or Microsoft) have got their act together, such that remote storage can be use. My hopes are not very high, though. Win11 is very buggy under its slick surface. Perhaps Win12 will clean up all the bugs?

NX Studio not only constantly scans all files in the current working folder, but also folders previously accessed by other applications. I caught NX Studio reading my accounting folder on the NAS even though I was opening a picture folder on the SSD.

Microsoft Sysinternals' ProcMon (to be found on microsoft.com) can be used to log NX Studio's activity. Then you understand why it's so slow. With only a few files on a fast SSD, this isn't noticeable. But when a folder containing several hundred images on a NAS is constantly being scanned, NX Studio can't do anything else.

To increase the speed of NAS access, Nikon wouldn't have to do anything—on the contrary, they would have to do less. It's sufficient to generate thumbnails of the images currently displayed in the browser window. Loading an entire 45MB NEF file into RAM takes less than a second over a gigabit network. Therefore, it can take a maximum of one second longer than from an SSD. The problem arises when the program attempts to generate previews of thousands of images. A thousand seconds is an incredibly long wait for someone who only wants to edit a single image...

Also posted in Daily December: Prominent Red

Nikon Z9   Angenieux 35-70/2.5-3.3  DX mode at 85mm