Nikon D500 DX-Format Digital SLR (Body Only), Base

Nikon D500 DX-Format Digital SLR (Body Only), Base

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• 20.9MP DX format CMOS sensor. Viewfinder: Eye level pentaprism single lens reflex viewfinder
• Expeed 5 image processor; Monitor size: 3.2 inches diagonal
• 3.2 inches 2,539k dot tilting touchscreen LCD
• 4k UHD video recording at 30 fps
• Multi cam 20k 153 point AF system
• Native ISO 51200, extend to ISO 1640000
• 10 fps shooting for up to 200 frames

Buy Now : Nikon D500 DX-Format Digital SLR (Body Only), Base

Brand : Nikon
Category : Electronics,Camera & Photo,Digital Cameras,DSLR Cameras
Rating : 4.7
Review Count : 463

Nikon D500 DX-Format Digital SLR (Body Only), Base

• I can\'t write a comprehensive review to do this justice here (though even without trying, this has ended up being the longest Amazon product review I\'ve ever made). Of course, there are many detailed reviews of the D500 out on the web, so I\'ll leave that to them and instead just focus on the highlights, lowlights, and things of particular interest to me. Thus, in no particular order:Low light performance: good, fine, not exceptional. The pseudo-ISO range of up to 1.6 million is, as one might expect, mostly a gimmick. That said, images are surprisingly free of truly horrendous noise modes until you get above ~200k or so, which is pretty impressive and a significant improvement on prior DX models. Nonetheless, the quantity of noise is similar to prior bodies - I estimate only a third to half a stop\'s improvement over the D7100 this replaced for me. That\'s with RAWs. It\'s entirely possible the built-in JPEG processing has advanced and offers a more significant advantage vs JPEGs in older DX models. I haven\'t compared. Bottom line is I still rarely share photos from ISOs above 10k, and those I do require plenty of careful post-process noise reduction first.Autofocus system: improved vs the D7100/D7200, but not as dramatically as many reviewers make out. Yes, having more focus points is nice, though in practice it doesn\'t seem to make much difference to key focusing modes like 3D tracking… *maybe* it\'s a little more capable of tracking smaller subjects, that would in prior models slip between the cracks in the focus points grid, but it hasn\'t blown my socks off. And more holistically, autofocus is *not* as awe-inspiring as many reviewers say. 3D tracking is marginally better, but still easily confused in baffling ways. Autofocus speed is as always dominated by the lens. It does seem less prone to racking focus back and forth, though, which I do appreciate. But the biggest disappointment, as such, is that it doesn\'t seem to work noticeably better in low light conditions. I still find it struggles to focus accurately in ISO 6400+ conditions, just like the D7x00 line before it, even with f/1.4 lenses. And it\'s general accuracy with large aperture lenses is still poor by my standards (i.e. many photos miss focus, especially when not using the centre focus point).Shooting speed: 10 FPS is definitely appealing. You get used to it pretty quickly though, and then only consciously appreciate it when you go back to using any other Nikon DX camera and they feel like slugs in comparison. It\'s gratuitous for most people\'s photography needs (I focus on wildlife myself, and it\'s only occasionally necessary). But, the big story here is actually the buffer size, and support for fast SD & XQD cards. With good cards loaded (e.g. Lexar 2000x SDCs, or Lexar 2933x XQDs) the shutter button becomes infallible - you press it, you take a photo. Nikon\'s prior DX cameras drove me nuts in this respect, and I\'ve missed countless photos of the years with them. This improvement, with the D500, is actually one of the biggest draws of this camera, for me.Size: entirely subjective. It\'s still tiny compared to a D5, and it\'s still a bit smaller even than a D810. It\'s quite a bit bigger than any the the other Nikon DX line, at least post-D300s. Personally I like the larger size in most cases - it leads to a larger hand grip which makes it significantly nicer to use for long durations, vs smaller DSLRs. It\'s also not particularly heavy, despite its size, which is nice.4K video: I\'m not a frequent videographer, so in theory I shouldn\'t care much about this… but, the difference in quality between the video on the D500 and all of Nikon\'s prior cameras - DX or FX - is huge. I can\'t handle low-resolution 1080p video anymore - it just looks horrible once you start recording 4K. While there are some wishlist items for the video support - e.g. higher bitrates, lossless recording formats, etc - the only real limitation it has right now is that 4K video is taken from a significantly smaller crop of the sensor than other video modes (not to mention photos). Sometimes this is convenient (e.g. for telephoto reach), but it does reduce low-light performance, and, most notably, really limits how wide an angle you can record at - even with a 10mm lens you\'re actually only achieving ~22mm in 35mm terms, which is a fairly pedestrian wide angle, and definitely not the super-wide-angle that you want from a 10mm lens.Controls: as always with Nikon\'s cameras, most things are in sensible places, but some are not, and on the D500 some are downright baffling. Overall I actually prefer the button & dial layout of the D7x00 family more. For example, having a dedicated button for \"QUAL\", which as a RAW shooter can only offer me the opportunity to accidentally switch to JPEG Small (a.k.a. JPEG why are you even bothering taking photos?), is just stupid, and I\'ve fallen prey to its accidental use, and lost photos as a result. Likewise a dedicated white-balance button is a very dubious choice for a higher-end camera like this, where the majority of users will be shooting RAW, and those that aren\'t are likely to set the white-balance once for an entire session (e.g. sports photographers). Lastly, the addition of the dedicated AF joystick seems fantastic in principle, but is in my experience slightly crippled by not being easy to reliably push in vs push sideways. There is a dedicated AF-ON button next to it, but I wish I could not need it, using the joystick instead, in order to save crucial time when adjusting focus points, and autofocusing.Flash: not having a built-in flash is a bit annoying, as it means putting a relatively heavy & bulk speedlight or wireless controller in the hotshoe instead, which makes the whole camera less usable in general, but especially for macro photography (where previously I could use the built-in flash to trigger detachable SB-R200 macro speedlights).GPS: not having built-in GPS is particularly frustrating, and I don\'t buy Nikon\'s excuses as to why it purportedly can\'t be done, given other magnesium-alloy-framed cameras offer it. Nikon claim you can get the same end result using the SnapBridge app on your mobile phone, but the app doesn\'t reliably nor regularly sync your GPS position to the camera, so you can end up with GPS time & location stamps that are tens of minutes out of date, on any given photo. Essentially useless even if you\'re only moving on foot. And the app doesn\'t sync at all if the app crashes or is even just *not* frontmost (e.g. you pull your phone out to do something else, and forget to bring SnapBridge back to the front afterwards). As a wildlife & nature photographer I ultimately still need a dedicated GPS dongle attached at all times, in order for geotagging to actually work reliably. The only good thing I can say about SnapBridge is that while it\'s active in GPS sync mode it barely makes a difference to the D500\'s battery life, though it shouldn\'t given it hardly ever syncs anyway. It does drain your mobile phone battery at noticeable rate, though.Viewfinder: it\'s a significant step up from most of Nikon\'s other DX cameras, though won\'t impress anyone used to recent / higher-end FX models. It\'s certainly very nice to have, no doubt, and other DX cameras\' viewfinders seem quaint and difficult to use in comparison.Memory cards: while I noted previously that it\'s great to have high-performing storage, that lets you shoot at 10 FPS for essentially as long as you want, XQD cards remain very expensive compared to equivalent SD cards (despite the bigger number, the Lexar 2933x XQD isn\'t perceptibly faster in real-world use than the Lexar 2000x SDC, but costs twice as much). If you\'re a simultaneous-dual-card wielder, this is a problem because you essentially have a 50+% premium now in order to save photos to two cards simultaneously. Plus the XQD cards are *way* bigger, which you might think doesn\'t matter so much, but get a few of them together and suddenly they\'re taking up a noticeable amount of space in your bag, whereas the same number of SD cards wouldn\'t even register. And that\'s without even factoring in the XQD USB card reader(s) you\'ll need to carry around with you…SnapBridge: oh yes, one other thing… the oft-touted photo syncing feature of SnapBridge? Completely unusable. Its use of Bluetooth fatally cripples it (among many other flaws). Forget about it entirely. Get a CamRanger [or similar], or just an extra memory card & rotate periodically - one in the camera shooting, the other in a card reader uploading.
• Lets start off this review by taking a look at the build quality of the Nikon D500.The first thing you feel when you pick up the D500 is just how big it is. But to me that’s not a bad thing at all.It feels incredibly solid and moulds to your hand really quite well. It’s not actually as heavy as you’d think and is on par to something like the 7d mark ii.To me the D500 has some of the best button placement that I’ve seen on on a Nikon body. Everything is where you’d expect to find it, with your record, iso and exposed compensation buttons up the top here near the shutter button.On the side we’ve got a number of different ports, but we’ll talk more about them later on.There isn’t an inbuilt flash on the d500 and a few poepl might miss it, but for me on a pro body like this, it’s not a big deal.As you’d expect for a camera of this calibre, the d500 is weather sealed so you’re going to have no problems taking this out in the rain.So overall in terms of build quality, the d500 is one of the best I’ve seen in a long time.-Let’s turn the camera around now and take a look at the lcd screen on the back.And something new and probably unexpected is that nikon have included an articulating screen on the d500.Now to be fair, it’s not a full articulating screen like you find on cameras such as the canon 80d, but it is pretty useful still.You can flip it up and down which has been really useful for composing my shots.It does feel pretty solid, but i do worry a little bit about the hinge its on. It doesn’t seem pretty thin so it’ll be interesting to see just how well it holds up.Photos from the the 20 megapixel sensor look really great on the back of the screen even in bright daylight.Other than that though the screen is very bright and sharp. I’ve been seeing this trend lately with Nikon producing some really good screens and the d500 continues with it as well.-One feature I love on the Nikon D500 and one that’s a bit of a life saver is not eh side here, that’s it dual card slots.This might not seem like a big feature, but having the ability to back up your photos is huge, especially if you’re shooting important one time events like weddings.To me this should be a given in any pro level body, but it is still nice to see.-The viewfinder on the D500 has 100% coverage as you’d expect as was nice to use.If you’re coming from a lower end nikon body, the shipe of it is a little different, but with it’s 1x magnification, it works very quite well.-Let’s talk quickly about the menus on the D500.If you’ve ever used a Nikon DSLR, you’ll feel right at home using the D500. The menus are pretty feature packed with a lot of different options, especially once you move into full manual mode.Performance was quick though and there was no lag which is good.-So i just wanted to touch on the battery life of the d500.I’ve been incredibly impressed with the battery life of this camera, although I would recommend using a battery grip if you are going to shooting photos all day or shooting 4k video.I got through about 1200 shots before the battery ran out on me.But overall, the battery life was very good on the nikon d500.-So let’s talk about the burst rate of the nikon d500.Now Nikon are touting this camera as being a real winner for sports and i’ve got to say it lives up to the hype.The d500 can shoot at an impressive 10 frames per second, which should be fast enough for most sports and wildlife.Just for reference sake, this is what 10 frames per second sounds like.This puts it on par with it’s biggest rival the Canon 7d mark ii which can also shoot at around 10 frames per second.I also found that the D500’s autofocus was incredible. Nikon have really upped their game and to me, the autofocus on the d500 is some of the best i’ve ever tested.You’ve also got a 200 raw shot buffer which is very nice.I’m going to be making a more in depth video on the autofocus of the d500 so check back soon for that, but overall it’s blisteringly fast.-Now I briefly touch on the ports on the camera earlier on, but i just wanted to show you what you get. Of course you’re getting a usb and an cdmi cable, but also in the middle hear you getting a mic and headphone jack.This to me, shows that nikon are really trying to convince more video shooters over to their side and it’s good to see.Havin gate ability to record good sound and monitor as well is really important, and makes this a pretty impressive little video camera, which we’ll talk about a little bit more now.-So let’s talk more about the Nikon D500 for video.As you probably know if you’re watching this video, the D500 can shoot 4k video. And i’ve got to say it’s incredibly impressive.The colours it reproduces are very nice and the detail is definitely there.Compred to something like the Canon 7d mark ii, the sharpness of the 4k to the 1080p really is night and day.Now one few drawback of the nikon d500 though is that it does crop the video quite a lot when shooting 4k. So if you do know you’re going to be wanting to shoot in 4k, you’ll want to make sure you have a wide enough lens.One other nice thing is that the d500 can shoot a full 30 minutes of video, cpmapred to just 3 minutes on the more expensive nikon d5. To me that’s a pretty big deal and something to consider if you are choosing between the two.One other nice feature is that you can create timelapses in the camera which is a lot of fun, and something that again emphasizes that Nikon is really trying to gain a bit more marketshare in the video market.SO overall, the Nikon d500 is actually a pretty capable video shooting machine, so good job nikon.-So i just quickly wanted to talk about wifi.The d500 comes with wifi and nfc included, which is great if you want to be able to quickly transfer your photos to your phone.This is something that the 7d mark ii misses out on, so again is something to consider.

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