Nikon ZR Disassembly and Teardown
Written by Phillip Andrew Iglesias
Last year, Nikon bought out RED cinema cameras, leaving photographers and videographers eagerly waiting to see what would come out of the acquisition. Lo and behold, Nikon|RED took the cinematography world by storm on September 10, 2025 with its unassuming and unexpected launch of their first cinema camera, the Nikon ZR mirrorless cinema camera. Their announcement came right after Canon launched their latest cinema camera, the C50, the day before.
The Nikon ZR is an entirely new camera that utilizes advancements from both Nikon and RED to create a truly groundbreaking cinema camera in terms of features and affordability, starting at $2,199.95 USD at the time of this article. Some of its features include utilizing RED’s file codec REDCODE RAW (R3D NE), 32-bit float audio, and a sizeable 4″ DCI-P3 monitor. The camera competes with the Canon EOS C50 and the esteemed Sony FX3.
Fortunately, the Nikon ZR allows for full lens compatibility with our Magnetic Clip-in Filters for Nikon Z-mount cameras. Our filters sit above the camera’s sensor and behind the lens, making for convenient filtration between multiple different lenses. These are currently compatible with Nikon’s full-frame Z-mount lineup.
With that out of the way, let’s get into this teardown and see what makes up the Nikon ZR!
As is standard with most camera teardowns, we start with removing the baseplate. Several screws surrounded the perimeter of the bottom, with several located underneath the battery compartment door and within the compartment itself. Altogether, there were twelve screws that fastened the baseplate to the camera frame.
Interestingly, Nikon opted to use CFExpress in tandem with MicroSD slots for the camera’s storage needs, located in the battery compartment. We’re curious about the decision, since it seems that there is enough space to use two CFExpress slots, as we will see throughout this teardown.
Here is the baseplate detached from the camera.
Three screws hold down the camera tripod mount.
There are two exposed screws on the backplate. Oftentimes on other cameras, the screws are located behind a tape cover that spans the entire backplate.
Three screws on port side of camera. These are easily accessible beneath the removable port covers.
Two screws on handle side of camera.
Removing the all of the aforementioned screws allowed us to lift the backplate. A single ribbon cable connects it to the circuitboard of the camera.
With the backplate off, we can begin to remove other sections of the camera. The top plate, which completes the camera’s frame, is the next part to remove. There are two screws on the top plate.
Four screws hold heatsink bracket to the frame. One of the screws was fastened to the top plate, so it was necessary to remove this part prior to finishing the extraction of the top plate.
Here is the bracket removed.
Four ribbon cables connect the top plate and circuitboard.
Lastly, we found one screw hidden on the side of the camera.
Removing the aforementioned parts in that order allowed us to remove the top plate.
Because we removed the bracket earlier, it was easy for us to access the circuitboard for removal. Several things to remove here. There were three screws and three cable connections to detach.
Here is the extracted circuitboard.
Circuitboard front and back.
Sometimes a camera’s design lends to a difficult removal process, but the Nikon ZR conveniently had each important part layered one after the other. Now that we finally reached the camera sensor, we were able to remove it by removing four screws and one ribbon cable.
Here is the sensor removed.
Something we’ve noticed about most cinema cameras is that they typically have a bit more streamlined designs compared to other consumer mirrorless cameras, which leads to a rather simple disassembly process. The Nikon ZR is no exception, as this was among one of our shorter teardowns.
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Nikon ZR Teardown and Disassembly
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