Nikon D4 16.2 MP CMOS FX Digital SLR with Full 1080p HD Video (Body Only) best buy

Nikon D4 16.2 MP CMOS FX Digital SLR with Full 1080p HD Video (Body Only)

Nikon D4 16.2 MP CMOS FX Digital SLR with Full 1080p HD Video (Body Only) Reviews

I pre-ordered this camera, and have now had it for about two months and taken over 10,000 shots with it. I'm upgrading from a Nikon D700. I'm not a pro, but I do occasional commercial jobs. I've updated this review several times, and will continue to do so as needed. Vertical orientation: Nice. The vertical grip isn't nearly as contoured as the main horizontal grip -- there's just not as much stuff to grab your hands onto (no deep pockets for your fingertips). Too bad. But when holding it for any length of time, it's sure a lot easier than holding twisting my arm above my head and rotating the camera. Note that the vertical grip has a programmable button on it, which I use for Mode (A/S/M/P). I understand the D3s didn't have this, which seems crazy -- I use it all the time. I wish the vertical grip had all the buttons as the main grip does -- e.g., there's only one programmable button, so if you want to use it for Mode, then there's no way to change EV +- while vertical, or start taking a movie. Also, I wish the two function buttons (DoF preview, and the one above it) were replicated in vertical mode. They're not, which is silly -- there's room right there for them. I shoot one-handed a lot, at events where I have a flash in one hand an a camera in the other (using a set of PocketWizards). I thought the weight of the D4 would make this harder. But no: when holding it vertically, the D4 is a lot easier to manage than the vertical D700. (I never had a vertical grip for the D700, so I can't compare.) Even holding it horizontally, the larger grip makes it easier to manage the D4 than the D700 one-handedly -- it makes the camera honestly feel substantially lighter. One gripe: the vertical joystick for adjusting the focus point is still a bit too much of a stretch to use with one hand. Shutter: yep, it's 10 fps. Let it rip! Great for capturing faces of both kids and adults at just the right moment. General ergonomics and build quality: Great. Totally solid. Weight: Having never had a pro-sized body before, I feared it'd be too heavy. But no: once you throw a 70-200 2.8 on there, the difference between this and a D700 is pretty small, certainly not a big deal. I carry it around on an Op Tech slider strap bolted into the tripod port, plenty stable and strong. Battery: 2000+ shots (including lots of live view and some movies), and it's down to half. That's plenty of capacity for me. The charger is a real monster to carry around, about 4x the size of a D700 charger, too big to just slip in a pocket. One BIG PROBLEM: after charging it the second time, I had the camera turned on and sitting out overnight. The next morning, the battery was completely dead. I have no idea what happened -- the D700 never ever did this to me. Was the camera turned so the AF was being pushed all night? Or is there a bug in the auto-off? No idea, but I'll post if it happens again. (Update: This has now happened to me three times, where the battery has gone from 100% to 0% overnight. Very frustrating. The first time I thought it was because the camera was in my bag and the AF-On button was being pressed, so it was trying to focus all night long. But that's not it, since it was on a shelf the other two times. Since I don't see others who have had this problem, I'm sending it back to Nikon for service.) Lit up controls: Nikon won't point this out, but they don't *all* light up! Most do, but not the trash, or playback, or EV+-, or Mode, or Live View. Huh? All the buttons on my cell phone lit up 10 years ago. It's not that hard. XQD card: Fast to write, fast to transfer. I love it. Being able to shoot off dozens of RAWs without stopping is great. Nice of Nikon to include the card and reader (but really, I'm not sure they had any other option here -- the market isn't exactly flooded with these cards). Live View: Works a million times better than it did on the D700. It's kind of funny though: it now makes the pro-DSLR able to shoot as easily as a $200 point-and-shoot. But whatever: Live View is nice to have. It's fast and intuitive. One advantage that isn't obvious: you can use it to set the focus point to the far corners of the frame, well outside the small area of the sensor covered by the 51-point AF grid. How I wish Nikon would allow the main AF system to focus in the far corners too: those 51 points still only cover about 20% of the camera's full frame! More in DX mode, but come on, Nikon. This is probably my single biggest complaint about the camera (or any DSLR) -- bigger focus area please! Focus modes: I was initially bummed to see that the three-position focus-mode switches from the D700 had been removed, replaced by 'software' settings using the main control wheels. But after using them I'm fine with the change, even in favor of it. The number of focus modes has increased (because you can change between 9-, 21-, and 51-point tracking easily now, which were hidden in a menu before), and the design works pretty fast. Disadvantage is that it requires two hands to change modes, where you used to do it with one. The built-in AF motor is noticeably faster than on the D700. Live View mode uses contrast-detection focusing which was ultra-slow on the D700 (especially using motor-driven lenses like the AF-D's), but pretty usable now. Face Detection (in Live View) works great. It's super easy to get low-angle shots holding the camera away from your body. If the subject moves you'll see a green box on the LCD follow the face around -- it's pretty cool to watch it track. Believe it or not, Face Detection also works through the pentaprism viewfinder. It took me awhile to believe this, but it really does. I proved it to myself by displaying a photo of a face on my laptop's screen, and focusing the camera on it. And like magic, no matter where it was, the focus indicators would lock on to the eyes. If I panned so that one eye left the FOV, then the focus would jump to the other eye. This is really cool. However, in reality it only works moderately well... I mean, if you're shooting at 24 mm in a busy room, and there's a few people in front of you, the camera is likely to focus on the wall instead of the people. Switch to Live View and it'll lock right on to the faces. Switch back and it jumps to the wall. My thought is that when using the viewfinder, the camera is dong face-detection on the smaller 91,000-pixel metering array. When using Live View, it can use millions of pixels from the main chip. Small faces can get hidden in 91,000 pixels (that's sub-VGA resolution!), but are seen in the big chip. I'm not knocking it, since it's clearly state-of-the art... it's just not perfect. One cool thing about face detection is that it also finds faces on playback (even if face detection wasn't used on that shot). Scroll the front control wheel and it'll zoom in to just the face on every image, so you can easily check focus on the parts you care about. Super. Metering modes: Too bad that the three-position metering switch is now an electronic controller, set in the viewfinder. But it turns out to be no big deal, because the metering on the D4 is really an improvement from the D700. I used to have to go to spot metering a lot for faces in the shade, and the auto face-detection now catches that so much better than it used to, that I haven't been using spot metering very much. Really, the new metering is very, very good. It has its quirks though: like, let's say you're taking 10 shots in a row of someone's face. If on one shot they turn or are blocked and the face-recognition doesn't work right, then that shot is likely to be underexposed by a stop relative to the rest in the series (see my example photo of this posted on Amazon). In the end under- or over-exposure by a stop or two is no big deal on this camera if you're shooting RAW, because the files give you tons of leeway to work with to fix the exposure in post. But it's always best to get the exposure right the first time, and the D4 does a better job of that than the D700. 'Quiet' and 'Silent' modes. Quiet mode is indeed a lot quieter than the regular shutter. It seems to move all the mechanical parts slower -- so you hear it for longer, but it's definitely quieter. Limited to 1 fps or so, and it doesn't work in Continuous mode (except if you're in Live View, in which case it does). Silent mode takes 2 MP shots in Live View mode (essentially movie stills - shutter must be between 1/30 and 1/125 sec, and JPEG-only, no RAW). I could see using it occasionally, though I wish the resolution were higher. Also, in order to *enter* Silent mode, you have to be in Live View, and you have to pull up the mirror to do that, which makes the normal 'chunking' sound one time. An interesting note: in Silent mode, the exposure counter increments like normal (DSC_0101, 0102, etc.), but the EXIF value for 'Shutter Count' stays unchanged, just like it should. ** Silent mode is exclusive to the D4, and isn't on the D800. Image quality: Beautiful... really crisp and sharp and smooth. The D700 was great too. For some reason this looks better. The number of pixels and the ISO are only slightly improved from the D700... the improvement to my image quality is dramatically better, more than the one or two stop improvement would suggest. Maybe Nikon's color processing software's improved, who knows what. But I didn't expect much improvement in image quality, and I got it. ISO: It's a stop or two better than the D700. The ultra-high ISO's (like 200,000+ = H4.0) are there, but pretty silly. Even in bright sun, they're so full of noise so as to be useless. In low light they're even worse. (I guess you could use H4.0 if you were trying to monitor license plates of speeding vehicles under moonlight, or something crazy like that... Read more ›. this is my Nikon D4 16.2 MP CMOS FX Digital SLR with Full 1080p HD Video (Body Only) reviews

Nikon D4 16.2 MP CMOS FX Digital SLR with Full 1080p HD Video (Body Only) Specs

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• Price for all three: $6,300.90
• These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers. Buy the selected items together
• This item: Nikon D4 16.2 MP CMOS FX Digital SLR with Full 1080p HD Video (Body Only) $5,996.95
• Nikon EN-EL18 Rechargeable Li-ion Battery for D4 Digital SLR $136.95
• Sony 32GB XQD Memory Card H Series (QDH32/T) by Sony $167.00

. Nikon D4 16.2 MP CMOS FX Digital SLR with Full 1080p HD Video (Body Only)

Nikon D4 16.2 MP CMOS FX Digital SLR with Full 1080p HD Video (Body Only) Best buy

Nikon D4 16.2 MP CMOS FX Digital SLR with Full 1080p HD Video (Body Only)
. Nikon D4 16.2 MP CMOS FX Digital SLR with Full 1080p HD Video (Body Only) will.. (Read More)