Nikon D500 - first impressions

[Bjørn Rørslett]

In an emergency, getting any SD card will be far easier than locating another XQD ... I think this is a sensible compromise for a semi-professional camera.

I always put a few extra SD cards in the door pockets of my little red car and forget about them. This practice has saved my day on several occasions. SD cards have a short longevity any ways as they are so easily lost or deformed. In that respect, XQD is far superior but at their current price level and limited availability I prefer having a cheap alternative.

[Frank Fremerey]

Yes. You are right. The ubiquity of SD on this planet makes it a good backup.

Plus you get 95MB/s real measured speed for 50€/64GB in the new Pro+ Samsung.

So bursts are shorter. Even with birds I very rarely do longer bursts than10. Usually 3 or 4 shots only.

[peroo]

Of course I'm not returning the D500. It is an incredible picture conveyor machine. But I am a bit disappointed Nikon won't open its gates a bit more. Well, I may/should get a QXD card. What's the best deal out there?

Watch out for BH photo campaigns.
I got a Lexar 128GB 2933x XQD for 180 USD inc shipping (+ norwegian vat)

But I agree with Bjørn that a smaller card is ok.

[schwett]

Yes. You are right. The ubiquity of SD on this planet makes it a good backup.

Plus you get 95MB/s real measured speed for 50€/64GB in the new Pro+ Samsung.

So bursts are shorter. Even with birds I very rarely do longer bursts than10. Usually 3 or 4 shots only.

even higher speeds are possible with relatively inexpensive cards - the D500 appears to take advantage of the new UHS-II cards (the ones with extra contacts.) in a quick test, a burst sequence of 1.8GB cleared the buffer in a shade under 15 seconds, or 115 MB/s write. the same batch took a bit under 10 seconds to copy to my computer, with a reported speed in windows explorer of 185MB/s read.

this kind of performance is very impressive for such inexpensive hardware, and quite a bit in excess of what the D810 can do. combine that with that camera's much larger files, and media/buffer performance is not much an issue on the D500 with SD.

[Akira]

Impress-watch posted a review comparing XQD (2933x, 440MB/s), UHS-II SD (2000x, 300MB/s) and the currently fastest UHS-I (633x, 95MB/s) in D500.

http://dc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/review/lexarxqd/1003928.html?utm_campaign=top_article&utm_medium=content-text&utm_source=dc.watch.impress.co.jp

They set D500 in the fast continuous shooting mode (10 frames/sec.).  The result is:

Maximum amount of frames until the continuous shooting stops (frames, 14bit losslessly compressed RAW/RAW+JPEG fine):
XQD        200 (limited only by the camera spec)/108
UHS-II    102/38
UHS-I     37/26

Writing speed of 35 RAW/RAW+JPEG files:
XQD: too fast to measure/1.3 sec.
XQD (100 RAW/RAW+JPEG): too fast to measure/2.8 sec.
UHS-II: 2.0 sec./4.7 sec.
UHS-I: 12.2 sec./unable to shoot continuously

"Too fast to measure" means that they could only see the writing LED on D500 to light for several hundred "milliseconds" and they could start shooting immediately after, as if nothing had happened.  It was so fast that they had no time to press the start button on the stop watch they used.

On the other hand, when they tested the mirroring mode using XQD and SD cards, the writing speed dropped drastically, as expected.
Frames they could shoot until the continuous shooting stops (RAW+JPEG):
XQD + UHS-II: 28
XQD+UHS-I: 25

RAW into XQD and JPEG fine into SD:
XQD + UHS-II: 58
XQD+UHS-I: 32

Hope this would be of any help.

[Andy]

A german user has sent Nikon a declaration to cease and desist about the crippled WLAN implementation in the D500, which requires Bluetooth connection as well.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Kunde-vs-Nikon-Abmahnung-wegen-proprietaerem-WLAN-mit-Bluetooth-Zwang-3238593.html

Nikon hasn't responded yet officially.

rgds,
Andy

[MFloyd]

DxO issued their D500 sensor review ...... http://www.dxomark.com/Reviews/Nikon-D500-sensor-review-Performance-redefined

[Jakov Minić]

The D7200 has a better sensor???

[Bjørn Rørslett]

One-dimensional measures may lead to one-dimensional minds ... Using a single number to describe a sensor's  or camera's performance isn't particularly helpful. The D500 is head and shoulders above what Nikon has delivered in the DX field before. It is not the equivalent of a down-scaled D5. That puts the camera into a more appropriate perspective.

[Jakov Minić]

Bjørn, could you then provide us then with a two-dimensional review and broaden my one-dimensional mind?

[Bjørn Rørslett]

Already have - and who said you were "one-dimensional" ??

The D500 is a very good camera. If you need a DX-format Nikon, this is the best the company has to offer. Never mind the numbers in particular Dx0.

[Ilkka Nissilä]

The D7200 has a better sensor???

Some loss of signal quality is expected since the D500 can do 10fps continuous shooting. To achieve this, the sensor needs to be read faster than in a slower camera such as the D7200, and these fast reads may be slightly noisier. There may also be other factors such as priorities in the sensor design, the implementation of the EFCS feature etc.

I would not consider these small differences in image quality parameters to be of much practical significance.

[Frank Fremerey]

The D500 ist a great camera. I own her now for roughly 6 weeks and she is a wonderful high tech monster combined with high tech "G" or "E" type glass.

As soon as you attach decent old MF glass she is a slow cat like any other camera AND she has a finder that is of the same quality as the D600 finder. Very good for focussing manually. Huge and bright.

Now the File Quality in Real life:

Given that the D600 (together with D810, 750, 610 and some Sony offerings) ist still the reference when it comes to shooting below 3200 ISO I compare the D500 and D600 in practical terms.

The D600 files need some editing most of the time but they are VERY RESILIENT. So you can torture them quite a lot and they still deliver smooth gradients, no artefacts and clean edges.

The D500 files are something else. If I get it right in camera the Expspeed5 delivers some magic info to the NX-D that makes editing D500 files: "open in NX-D" ==> "save as TIFF" ==> watch in Awe. This can be done as a batch. BEWARE of touching some harder measures (LCH, Curves, Sharpening) in either NX-D or Photoshop or NIK-Collection. The files will fall apart. There is no headroom, esp. not for files above 1000 ISO. Files in base ISO and up to rougly 800 ISO can be tortured quite a lot, but if you pixel peep you will see artefacts looking like JPEG artefacts and if I keep pushing like JPEG artifacts of consecutive JPEG compressions on the same file.

The D500 does something that has not been thought of as a huge problem before: She can deliver a very decent WB even in very bad mixed light. I can show you in a 1:1 D500:D600 what huge difference that can make, I have nice examples ...

[Bjørn Rørslett]

What you describe can be mostly ascribed to the difference between DX and FX fomats. The latter always have been the more relaxed (or 'resilient' as you put it) to processing.

I agree about the w/b performance of the D500, it is really good. All the more important as Photo Ninja (PN) so far only has rudimentary support for D500 NEFs, but apparently is able to catch the in-camera w/b setting. Over at Picturecode they told me D500 for now uses D5000 profiles, which could explain some of the roughness one encounters with the NEFs in PN. They hoped next upgrade would remedy the situation though.

[Frank Fremerey]

So the following is the truth and nothing but the truth about a REVOLUTION:

1) D600 & 1.4/35 AI-S
2) D500 & 1.4/35 Ai-S

IIRC all settings "M" and all setting same, same very bad mixed light, same perspective ... S T U N N I N G