D500 First impressions

[MissionMan]

Attended the new product release for the D500 and D5. Can’t comment much on the D5, didn’t play with it much largely because it’s not something I would consider buying right now but I thought I would give my thoughts on the D500.

Lets give you a little info on the venue. It was tough choice of location. Dark indoor race track. Not ideal for AF and not ideal for lighting so Nikon picked a location that was essentially as bad as it was going to get because you have go carts moving fast on a small track with low light. I’m not sure whether this was to force high ISO or to give the people an idea of what the AF system was like.

They allow you to bring your own SD cards, shoot away and take the results home. Obviously I didn't really test the buffer with the XQD because I don't have any.

Along with the cameras, they had heaps of nice expensive lenses like the 300 f/2.8, 200 f/2 etc, in short, a photographers idea of a mass orgy.

Overall, I really like it. I mean REALLY. As in there were fleeting moments, I wondered whether I should just sell my body (human not camera) to buy one but sadly, I saw my own reflection and quickly realised that selling my body was not a viable option to acquire anything.

On the body front, I prefer the layout to my D750 largely because I prefer the pro layout with the rear AF button and it dispenses of some of the features I just don't use. Grip seems similar to my D750, deeper than my old D700 but it's smaller and lighter than the D700 although it feels larger and heavier than my D750. Not sure whether that's just me. It's gone the direction of the D750 and D810 with more use of plastic, but it's still very robust so it looks like they have done some weight savings without compromising on the construction. I don't have an issue with the plastic side to be honest, metal adds weight and plastics these days are just as strong. They also bounce back instead of bending so provided the quality is good, I don't see it as a bad thing. It's missing the built in flash which I never use but others may miss this.

First off, the 10fps...wow. It feels like a machine gun going off in your hand. I missed the high frame rates going from the D700 to D750 but this is madness. AF system on it is incredible, the width of the focus points is amazing. AF seems to be pretty good. I had no real issues with it picking up the focus although I had some initial issues because the idiots who had the camera before had messed up a lot of the settings so trying to get it to a point of being usable cost me about 5 minutes of play time.

I don't think I personally would have picked the venue they picked. It was great to shoot in low light, but the challenge with low light is it also doesn't give you clean photos to check how good the focus is. Most of the shots were going to be upwards of ISO12800 if you had your shutter over 1/500, if you went up as high as 1/1000. I personally would have picked somewhere late in the day where you could have had increasing ISO's as the day went on.

Here a couple of pics. The higher ISO ones were before I had the focus system setup (didn't think to check whether it was AFC at the time because it was a mad rush on the gear) whereas the later ones I setup the machine gun and that was working better.

CAMERA Nikon NIKON D500
LENS AF-S Nikkor 200mm f/2G ED VR II
ISO 22800
FOCAL LENGTH 200.0 mm (300.0 mm in 35mm)
APERTURE f/2
EXPOSURE TIME 0.00156s (1/640)




CAMERA Nikon NIKON D500
LENS AF-S Nikkor 200mm f/2G ED VR II
ISO 11400
FOCAL LENGTH 200.0 mm (300.0 mm in 35mm)
APERTURE f/2
EXPOSURE TIME 0.00156s (1/640)



CAMERA Nikon NIKON D500
LENS AF-S Nikkor 200mm f/2G ED VR II
ISO 10000
FOCAL LENGTH 200.0 mm (300.0 mm in 35mm)
APERTURE f/2
EXPOSURE TIME 0.00156s (1/640)



CAMERA Nikon NIKON D500
LENS AF-S Nikkor 200mm f/2G ED VR II
ISO 16000
FOCAL LENGTH 200.0 mm (300.0 mm in 35mm)
APERTURE f/2
EXPOSURE TIME 0.00156s (1/640)



CAMERA Nikon NIKON D500
LENS AF-S Nikkor 200mm f/2G ED VR II
ISO 22800
FOCAL LENGTH 200.0 mm (300.0 mm in 35mm)
APERTURE f/2
EXPOSURE TIME 0.001s (1/1000)

[ricktas]

Very nice review MM... and re selling your body to raise the money...please use the PM system for that. especially if you are sending photos to prospective clients We don't want them on the forums.

[MissionMan]

If people started receiving photos like that from me, you'd probably see a sharp decline in your member numbers.