Nikon D5200 frame grab - versus Panasonic GH3 - I'm surprised

[Andrew Reid]

Bought a Nikon D5200 yesterday - This thing is really surprising me... appears the new Toshiba sensor in the Nikon D5200 fixes moire. There's nothing like the problems here that plague the D600 and D800 full frame sensors. There's still a tiny bit of aliasing but no more than on the GH2. It is giving really nice Canon C300 approaching detail in 1080p, all on a $800 DSLR. You can dial it down really flat in-camera too, though I prefer to shoot graded in camera with a standard picture profile.

 

In producing footage for the review I have found it to be in the same league as the mighty GH3 for video so far. Here's a 100% crop of a 1080p frame grab shot in 25p mode. The picture profile on the GH3 was slightly flatter in-camera so ignore the contrast difference, just look at the detail. Really nice!

 

[QuickHitRecord]

To my eye, the image from the D5200 doesn't look as crisp. I'll be curious to see some comparisons between 400% blow ups. 

 

Does it enable magnified focus assist when plugged into an external monitor? Coming from the GH2, that's a big one for me.

[A2T2]

I was thinking the d5200 looks far sharper?

[milandirector]

This is really impressive Andrew! Does the camera have clean HDMI out as it's big brothers? If it could work with Atomos Ninja 2 than this could be very interesting piece of equipment.

Does it only work with Nikon lenses though? My lense mounts range from Contax Yashica FF to Nikon FF, EOS FF, Pentax K FF and LOMO OCT 18

[Andrew Reid]

This is really impressive Andrew! Does the camera have clean HDMI out as it's big brothers? If it could work with Atomos Ninja 2 than this could be very interesting piece of equipment.

Does it only work with Nikon lenses though? My lense mounts range from Contax Yashica FF to Nikon FF, EOS FF, Pentax K FF and LOMO OCT 18

 

Yes clean HDMI.

 

I'm still not convinced about the merits of HDMI on DSLRs yet though - it never seems to look any different to internal codec! Even though D800 was uncompressed the noise grain still looked blotchy and 4-2-2 didn't seem to make much difference either - not as if it is making full use of 10bit ProRes is it? I thought the hacked GH2 looked better!

 

I've recorded to Blackmagic HyperDeck Shuttle on the D5200 but only a couple of clips. It looks pretty good but again the internal codec seems to give similar results.

[milandirector]

Thanks. You mentioned similar thing with GH3.

How about lens compatibility and D5200? Would the cam work with wide range of mounts (with proper adaptors) or is it limited to Nikon glass?

[QuickHitRecord]

Thanks. You mentioned similar thing with GH3.

How about lens compatibility and D5200? Would the cam work with wide range of mounts (with proper adaptors) or is it limited to Nikon glass?

 

I'm pretty sure it would just be Nikon-mount glass. I have a set of Nikkor AI-S lenses that would probably work with it, but for most non-Nikon collectors this would probably not be a great fit. 

[Andrew Reid]

It is limited to Nikon and Leica R glass, maybe some medium format stuff.

 

No Canon FD, M42, EF, Leica M, Pentax, Minolta, Olympus OM. None of it can focus to infinity on the Nikon mount. You're in a similar boat to Sony Alpha owners I'm afraid.

 

Happily though there's a lot of goos Nikon glass around and you can buy the old AI/S stuff with manual aperture rings.

[sandro]

The D5200 looks less real to me, the typical DSRL-look even though details seem on pair.

[Julian]

What profile/settings did you use on the D5200? It looks like there's some sharpening going on. I tested a D5200 as well and dialed everything down as far as possible, didn't look very detailed to me, but it might benefit from sharpening. Still, the D5200 looks like a good deal. I'm really curious what the next generation Sony aps-c sensors will do.

[hmcindie]

Details are not on par. The GH3 image looks way more detailed. The D5200 has more contrast in that image which increases apparent resolution but it is not as sharp. You can see way more detail on the ground and on the tree from the GH3. D5200 also has wayyy more sharpening artifacts, for example haloing on the left of the tire.

 

If we could dial that sharpening completely out, this could be good.