Nikon D500 - first impressions

[simsurace]

Simone, thanks for this chart, I guess I'll buy the D750 then
Similar thoughts that Frank has with a D600, you can get a D750 for half the price of a D500...

The D750 is quite nice, pretty clean at high ISOs with high resolution, and a wider AF coverage than the D600. But of course not as wide as D500, and speed and buffer capacity are also not in the same league. Horses for courses.

[Frank Fremerey]

The D750 is quite nice, pretty clean at high ISOs with high resolution, and a wider AF coverage than the D600. But of course not as wide as D500, and speed and buffer capacity are also not in the same league. Horses for courses.

The D500 for me is "my first tele" machine. I want to learn to take fast action with fast AF. I want to learn to track. I want to learn to see and compose sports and wildlife shots. I will start that endeavour in Scotland. Just for the fun of it. I do not plan to use that knowledge for work ... but I may ... someday.

What I really want is a D850, so a camera that shall deliver clean high res for tripod work and clean high ISO (I hope for the Sony A7R2 chip in there) and superb AF with a coverage comparable to the D5 with XQD & big buffer and ruggetized body.

The D600 will stay my MF machine as it is now. I love the tonal response too. Great digital back for my Sinar too. The D600 will stay man panorama machine because I have a custom built head from 360precision for the D600 + 1.4/24G, delivering 800 Megapixels in 30° x 180°.

Only question is what I will do with the D3. She is still by far the best machine for quick & dirty portrait jobs and the best in the discipline of ergonomics. Hmm. Just keep her for such jobs.

[Frank Fremerey]

Unfortunately, they don't have the D500 test shots yet, but you can take the D7200 as a proxy for the time being.
The D500 will likely be a bit better than that, but you should not expect it to be one stop better since the D7200 is already so good (compared to an ideal sensor).
http://goo.gl/jrNIrH

Thank you for sharing:

This charts compares full sensor sizes and it compares the sensors from different perspectives, esp. distances here, meaning the geometry is slightly different and lens performance possibly too.

I am really surprised how small the visual difference is between a D5@FX/12.800 and a D7200@DX/12.800

A fair comparsion would be more like D5@DX and D7200@DX though. Then the difference would be even smaller.

[simsurace]

Thank you for sharing:

This charts compares full sensor sizes and it compares the sensors from different perspectives, esp. distances here, meaning the geometry is slightly different and lens performance possibly too.

I am really surprised how small the visual difference is between a D5@FX/12.800 and a D7200@DX/12.800

A fair comparsion would be more like D5@DX and D7200@DX though. Then the difference would be even smaller.

The lens on the DX sensor is different from the lens on the FX sensor, see the "i" icon for information.
The distances should be roughly the same. There are some minor differences in on-screen magnification, I don't know why exactly.
I think that a comparison should be done at the same output size. However, I think the differences in output size in those images are small and almost negligible.

I don't know what you could learn from a comparison of the D5@DX vs the D7200. The difference will be small as you say. Since you are equalizing the sensor area the only difference would be the number of pixels covering a given portion of the scene.

As for the actual comparison of the D5 vs. D7200: Whether that difference is small depends on your definition of 'small'. It is roughly 1 stop, crank the D5 to ISO 25600 and the noise looks almost identical to the D7200's noise at ISO 12800 (maybe still slightly better). I would not say a 1 stop difference is necessarily "small". It is almost as small as it will get, we used to have more like 2 stop difference between FX and DX at high ISOs a few generations ago.

[Frank Fremerey]

You double the magnification with the DX chip if you look at both pictures at the same output size.

You would need four times the pixels to compensate for that and these pixels should collect the same
amount of photons per unit area which becomes more or less the case with with wiring banned into the lower parts
of the recording chip. .... a7r2 ...

DX to DX the difference is very small but the comparsion is apples to apples.

[simsurace]

You double the magnification with the DX chip if you look at both pictures at the same output size.

This is another way to put it. But the factor is more like 1.5.

[Andrea B.]

All the recent Nikon sensors (made by whomever) are excellent and Good Enough. Sure there are some minor differences, but how relevant is it to most photographers whether their ISO maximum is 1640000 versus 102400?? Or whether dynamic range has improved by half a stop? Those things are nice but do not make for any kind of upgrade necessity.

I think it is the D500 features which are a huge improvement over D750 or D7200 and will be the reason for many photographers to upgrade. Here are a few - mostly speed & AF based because that was why I got the D500.

• 10 frames per second
• XQD card for speed
• buffering of 200 lossless compressed 14-bit raws (79 if uncompressed)

• new AF engine "multi-CAM 20K AF"
• fast live view AF
• 99 cross-type AF points
• 153 AF points stretching from right to left. (Amazing performance with this. Do focus-and-recompose with this.)
• auto auto-focus fine tuning

• new metering engine "180K RGB"
• new image engine EXPEED 5 (really really nice color)

• electronic 1st curtain
• button illumination
• (a huge amount of cool video stuff which I know nothing about)

[bjornthun]

We need to start writing ISO numbers with the zeroes in groups of three like this:
ISO 1,640,000
and
ISO 102,400
They've become that big!   

Andrea B. wrote:
"All the recent Nikon sensors (made by whomever) are excellent and Good Enough. Sure there are some minor differences, but how relevant is it to most photographers whether their ISO maximum is 1640000 versus 102400?? Or whether dynamic range has improved by half a stop? Those things are nice but do not make for any kind of upgrade necessity."

[simsurace]

All the recent Nikon sensors (made by whomever) are excellent and Good Enough. Sure there are some minor differences, but how relevant is it to most photographers whether their ISO maximum is 1640000 versus 102400?? Or whether dynamic range has improved by half a stop? Those things are nice but do not make for any kind of upgrade necessity.

I think it is the D500 features which are a huge improvement over D750 or D7200 and will be the reason for many photographers to upgrade. Here are a few - mostly speed & AF based because that was why I got the D500.

• 10 frames per second
• XQD card for speed
• buffering of 200 lossless compressed 14-bit raws (79 if uncompressed)

• new AF engine "multi-CAM 20K AF"
• fast live view AF
• 99 cross-type AF points
• 153 AF points stretching from right to left. (Amazing performance with this. Do focus-and-recompose with this.)
• auto auto-focus fine tuning

• new metering engine "180K RGB"
• new image engine EXPEED 5 (really really nice color)

• electronic 1st curtain
• button illumination
• (a huge amount of cool video stuff which I know nothing about)

I think it is an interesting phenomenon that people start looking for improvements in areas which have seen an improvement in the past. As the limits of what can be achieved are reached, people are facing an unexpected outcome in that the improvements are getting smaller. Sensor resolutions are still increasing (although we have seen a segmentation here and arguably the advantages of higher-res sensors are only noticable with top-notch large and heavy glass), but with dynamic range the physical limits will soon be reached and manufacturers will be looking for different improvements to stay competitive. As you are saying, we should be looking at the new features of the D500 instead of sensor performance. As I said earlier, sensor performance will not be hugely different from previous cameras because those were already close to what is physically achievable.

I just wanted to clarify this point because I saw some people who expected the D500 to beat the sensor performance of current FX cameras, or indeed have multiple stops better noise performance than the last DX cams etc. Those expectations are now becoming completely unrealistic, we won't ever see them fulfilled (it would be cool to have sensors that do not clip, but these will require longer exposures to provide any advantage).

[Jan Anne]

DPReview did some tests with the D500 and found the DR class leading:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/4939144988/nikon-d500-studio-and-dynamic-range-tests-published

[Erik Lund]

I agree Simone ,,, 

[Andrea B.]

I didn't know whether I should write 1,640,000 or 1.640.000.
So I just wrote 1640000. 

[Roland Vink]

Try 1640K


As for sensor performance, I'm don't know how efficient modern sensors are at converting photons into an image signal, but I believe it's in the region of 50% or so. Improving that to 100% gains only one stop ... any improvements in this area will be small, perhaps more will be gained from dynamic range as the signal:noise ratio improves etc

[simsurace]

DPReview did some tests with the D500 and found the DR class leading:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/4939144988/nikon-d500-studio-and-dynamic-range-tests-published

Great, now the comparison I posted earlier can be run with the D500. It looks almost identical, as expected. I get dizzy looking at too many noise patterns

[Andy]

As for sensor performance, I'm don't know how efficient modern sensors are at converting photons into an image signal, but I believe it's in the region of 50% or so. Improving that to 100% gains only one stop ... any improvements in this area will be small, perhaps more will be gained from dynamic range as the signal:noise ratio improves etc

Roland,
you are correct with your 1 stop improvement, but ...
... the CFA takes about 2 stops away.

Replacing the CFA with a non-filtering approach (like with a prisma) provides additional potential headroom in the future.
rgds, Andy