nikon d7500 released

[M Carter]

4 hours ago, Kisaha said:

Video is the future, and the present. Even small kids are sending video messages through social media. Words are something of the 19th century, photos 20th, 21 century is the video century and we are moving to 360 and VR.

Staying behind in video capabilities is not a clever marketing, they just can't compete.

I think you need to think about how you're defining "video" for this discussion. Kids are sending video messages with vertical framing, they don't care about bitrate, color rendering, how far the footage can be pushed, frame rate, color depth, or what the actual resolution is. "Staying behind" for a phone is a completely different thing than "staying behind for a semi-pro stills product you also want professionals to be able to shoot video with". Both phones and prosumer stills cameras have added video on, but beyond that your comparison doesn't seem to have a thing to do with this discussion.

If the D7500's video sensor and specs appeared in a phone with HDMI and headhone and mic jacks and zebras and audio controls and so on, we'd all be freaking out about how amazing and forward-thinking it was. And 99% of kids would't even know what all that stuff means.

[ND64]

GH4 was/is king of video oriented cameras of the world, and what happened to the group who made it? Top managers send them to the same division that is responsible for refrigerators!

The ILC market is facing existential questions. I doubt focus peaking and log profile can change this miserable situation. 

[mat33]

I hear that video is the future all the time but are there any statistics that support this and show increasing numbers of amateurs buying gear for primarily creative video use?  

I suspect many people that may initially be interested are quickly put off when they realise the time commitment thats often needed to get good quality video with support gear, filters, lighting etc and thats not even taking into account getting good audio and the time needed in post.  

It seems to me there are a lot more DoP's shooting stills for pleasure in their spare time rather than personal video with dSLR/mirrorless cameras, which probably reflects something...

[Hanriverprod]

5 hours ago, mat33 said:

I hear that video is the future all the time but are there any statistics that support this and show increasing numbers of amateurs buying gear for primarily creative video use?  

I suspect many people that may initially be interested are quickly put off when they realise the time commitment thats often needed to get good quality video with support gear, filters, lighting etc and thats not even taking into account getting good audio and the time needed in post.  

It seems to me there are a lot more DoP's shooting stills for pleasure in their spare time rather than personal video with dSLR/mirrorless cameras, which probably reflects something...

Youtube is a cottage industry of promoting and marketing amateur videography. It's inundated with reviews, tutorials and vlogs. I don't think most people buying these hybrids are already professionals. They are just shooting stuff without lighting, rigs or filters and just uploading it to the cloud for kicks.

[Mattias Burling]

Latest figures Ive found says youtube gets 300, 000 new videos every day from its 1 billion users. 

They also say that they get 300h of video uploaded every hour. The average length of a youtube video is 30-120s. So if we use 1.5m for the example I get the number 17.28 million videos per day.

Instagram which is a much younger platform and only has 400 million users (grew from 90m in two years). They receive 80 000 000 photos every day.

Does this mean that video isn't the future? No. But these numbers alone tells me that a company that focuses on stills in their camera. And priorities for example wifi over log isnt dumb and going backwards at all. I would say that they are adapting to current times just fine.

Because from those uploaded youtube videos I would be very interested to see how many are log, graded, filtered, monitored through hdmi, etc. My guess is not many.

[Hanriverprod]

But most of the younger demo is using smart phones to upload pics to share. I guess for video too. Damn, both are up a creek without a paddle. What these cameras need are better UI's then these menu screens with tabs and a laundry list of features. They need to fire the people designing this crap in every company, not just Sony. My iphone 5 can take great pictures and video, edit those pictures and video! and then share it on any messaging app plus upload it to youtube, vimeos, instagram, flckr, etc... Meanwhile, I'm here fiddling with my latest mirrorless trying to figure out how to take a 5s self-timer...

[Mattias Burling]

My smartphone does all that as well. But many of us that are more than a little active on Instagram use our still cameras. They can also shoot raw, be edited in camera or phone after wifi transfer and then published.

It used to be on youtube but now days its way more common for me to be asked on Instagram what camera and settings I use.

[leeys]

On 4/12/2017 at 5:55 PM, Inazuma said:

This new camera seems to cannibalise the d500?? What are the advantages of the d500 now?

10 FPS vs 8 and the 153 point AF module. Dual card slots with UHS-II slot vs single UHS-I slot. Pro level UI. Bigger VF. 10 pin legacy remote terminal (positioning far better for use in stills when using an L-bracket). Likely more durable shutter.

[Hanriverprod]

As using software to capture and process becomes more intuitive and creative, more and more people will go between stills and video on a whim. Smartphones and their apps are leading the charge in blurring this line and fostering this immediate urge to share across all demographics. While the camera companies drip out specs to outsize marketing and hype because really the optical tech is reaching a point where there is little qualitative difference in what our eyes can perceive, the smartphone, software and new media distribution platforms are smartly not only taking advantage of these hardware advancements but figuring out how to get it out of the way so we can use it persistently. This Nikon release is just another example of a race to the bottom. They understand what it takes to make a good image, but they lost the thread in the why and how these days. It's not about putting both video and photo in the camera, or the specs, it's about how to integrate this technology into the fabric of our lives.

[BTM_Pix]

2 hours ago, Hanriverprod said:

But most of the younger demo is using smart phones to upload pics to share. I guess for video too. Damn, both are up a creek without a paddle. What these cameras need are better UI's then these menu screens with tabs and a laundry list of features. They need to fire the people designing this crap in every company, not just Sony. My iphone 5 can take great pictures and video, edit those pictures and video! and then share it on any messaging app plus upload it to youtube, vimeos, instagram, flckr, etc... Meanwhile, I'm here fiddling with my latest mirrorless trying to figure out how to take a 5s self-timer...

I agree with this, wholeheartedly.

For most people, cameras are beginning to get in the way.

This is the journey of an image that I take for work from it happening to a member of the public seeing it

 

CLICK

>Pick the best image from the burst 

>Lock the image to initiate the wireless transfer into the laptop

>Ingest the image into the editor automatically adding basic caption data about event.

>Edit the image

>Complete caption data listing the names of everyone that is in the picture and what is happening.

>Export the image

>FTP it to the agency server

>Agency server distributes to publications based on embedded caption data (i.e. different territories, sports etc)

>Publication picture desk receives images, picks the ones for usage, scales and re-captions and pushes to website or print

>Consumer then has to actively seek out that content (visit the newspaper website or newsagents)

 

Now, all of that happens at the fastest speed that all of the parties involved can manage (me, the agency and the media outlet) and compared to the days of film and even five years ago it is like science fiction magic but consider the journey of a picture that a kid sat behind me in the stand has to take to reach his audience.

 

CLICK

>Write ‘Goal!!!’

>Hit send.

>His consumers get it instantly and automatically because its straight in their feeds.

 

It’s a strange contradiction that a professional workflow is so much more cumbersome, slow and - as modern as it is compared to relatively recent times - feels so much more antiquated than the consumer one.

Is this kid’s image ‘better’ than mine? Of course not (well, hopefully anyway!) but in terms of how people now consume media then it is arguably far more fit for purpose. 

Its a very transient world now for content. Very, very few images have any sort of longevity now so unless an image is unique (difficult these days when everyone has a camera of sorts in their pocket) or destined to be utterly iconic it is going to be swimming in such a sea of other content then just getting it out there faster trumps most other considerations sadly. This is why newspapers are sending out junior reporters with iPhones to cover stories. It means they can keep costs down, the quality is adequate based on the criteria above and it feels like the most natural thing in the world to the reporter because they’ve grown up with instant publishing. 

For video, all of the factors above are multiplied a hundred fold and the end to end process of getting a moving image from the lens to your audience using a professional workflow are almost laughable to a generation that need to get their content out while its still warm. Even just capturing video and then pushing it onto a social media site is too slow a lot of the time and they’re now broadcasting it on there live. 

If you are in a tourist heavy area like London for example, and you see a party of teenagers on a school trip or whatever, you’ll see maybe one in ten of them have a small dslr. You might also notice that it is generally girls that have the dslrs rather than boys oddly enough. The ones with the dslrs will be studiously taking the odd shot that you just know will be ‘arty’ but it is of objects and general scenery but not of people . Meanwhile the rest of them are snapping away taking pics of themselves, their friends and the general stuff too but you can see that they look at the back of the phone, make a quick few taps and boom its on its way and already published before the dslr girl has took her lens cap off. And the story will be the same for her as it is for the professional photographer in that her stuff will have more value in one currency which is creative and technical but nowhere near the same value in the most valuable currency of the day which is speed. With people measuring themselves and what they do based on the number of likes something gets then if the dslr girl is getting fewer of those because the ’news cycle’ of these kids trip has moved on by the time she gets her images processed and out there then she’ll end up ditching the dslr as its getting in the way of that. 

The old adage of the only technique you needed to master for documentary photography was ‘f8 and be there’ has now been replaced with ‘4G and be there’.

Nikon and the other manufacturers needed to rethink the interface to get the camera out of the way and they had the opportunity to do that a few years ago when photography began a real resurgence but I think that ship has sailed and the smartphone is now too ubiquitous. The iPhone etc can and have improved their photographic offering to the point where the extra quality difference is utterly trumped by the convenience and ‘real’ cameras will be back to where they were pre-DSLR as an enthusiast product. Its difficult to think now with the boom in photography all around us that even 10 or 15 years ago it was largely a dying hobby kept alive by gentlemen and ladies of a certain age. I think its heading back there too.

As for the D7500 itself….

I use the D500 professionally on a daily basis. Its a fine camera and if you can get that performance for £600 less or whatever it is then you’ll be getting a bargain. 

I wouldn’t be too sure about people not using this professionally either. 8fps is more than adequate and the dual card slot thing is a bit of a red herring as speed dictates in what I do at least that whilst RAW on one card and JPEG on another might be a way of working, its JPEG all the way anyway. Dual slots were useful as overflow when card capacity was measured in meg rather than gig but we're way beyond that now. And the cards themselves are plenty fast enough to be writing RAW+JPEG if you have that need. The buffer is more than adequate as well to be honest and wouldn’t put me off. At 8fps, it amounts to a 12 second burst or something. If you need more than that to get the shot then its probably a video camera you need rather than a stills one. It does seem to have weather sealing as well and in terms of its robustness, my experience with Nikon over many years now is that its the lens mount that is the achilles heel rather than the rest of the body and that problem goes from the flagships down so it wouldn’t worry me too much. Would you use it as your A camera as a pro sports or journalistic photographer? No because you’ll already have one of the flagships if you’re working at that level. Could you use it as your A camera if you needed to? Based on the IQ of the D500 then absolutely yes. And as a lightweight supplementary or backup camera, its ideal. I still see a lot of D7xxx cameras being used by pros which were bought in that post D300 period when Nikon didn’t have a new pro APS-C body. For those that haven’t subsequently moved on to the D500 (and with shrinking budgets not everyone could), I can see them buying these. It’ll do OK.

 

[Mattias Burling]

7 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

The ones with the dslrs will be studiously taking the odd shot that you just know will be ‘arty’ but it is of objects and general scenery but not of people . 

I have observed the opposite when out shooting. People with cameras shoot other people and images with thought. All photogra I know focus on people. The smartphones are more for collecting an evidence that they where there or a selfie/groupee. 

The point being that a quick observation isnt worth more than the millions of dollars spent in market research.

[IronFilm]

On 4/13/2017 at 10:21 AM, wolf33d said:

anyone spending more money to get less than D7200 is out of his mind. 

You gain 4K!! (& a bunch of other features over the D7200 that you also didn't list)

With time the D7500 will drop down in price to closer to where the D7200 is currently. I'll be very tempted to buy one them myself. 
However the D500 will also keep on dropping in price.... and the D5700 with eventually show up too (hopefully with 4K?). So I could easily be tempted by the D500 above or the D5700 below instead.

On 4/13/2017 at 1:20 PM, M Carter said:

I had no idea how useful 120fps would be for b-roll, manufacturing, emotional stuff, and shooting plates for effects and so on.

Is a bummer the D5/D750/D500/D7500/etc can not do anything more than 60fps!! :-/ :-( 

[BTM_Pix]

Just now, Mattias Burling said:

I have observed the opposite when out shooting. People with cameras shoot other people and images with thought. All photogra I know focus on people. The smartphones are more for collecting an evidence that they where there or a selfie/groupee. 

The point being that a quick observation isnt worth more than the millions of dollars spent in market research.

I did say 'studiously' to be fair.

I was acknowledging that the kids with the dslrs are being a lot more thoughtful but I'm doubting over the longer term (which is a very short term in modern terms) whether the way in which the images are consumed and how those images are now so closely aligned with people's 'brand' and often sense of worth will see ordinary cameras largely disappear if it can't hit that functionality.

Consumer's photographic workflows with smartphones mimic a live editorial press photographer's workflow (and actually surpass it in both speed of delivery and distribution) and I think that speaks volumes about where photography is in people's lives. Its a bit of a chicken and egg as to which one drove the other but whichever way round it was, its the new reality and its tough to fit 'normal' cameras into that.

And thats not necessarily a bad thing of course but it does mean that photography is heading back to the tinkering in the shed and borderline trainspotting hobby it had become before the digital boom

Within their market - and they do know their market - it will do well because it will be a fine camera. 

How long that market is there and how big it is compared to what it was and what the potential is to bring new people in to it is another matter I think.

How many dollars of market research Nikon need to spend on incremental upgrades that are largely preaching to the choir is an interesting issue I suppose. It might well be that that market research has told them to stick with what they know, reduce costs and increase margins on a shrinking sector. 

I dunno, I use their stuff and have for nearly 40 years. We've grown old together. And thats probably a problem for both of us.

 

[gethin]

A minor segway for people who wonder why the hell anyone would shoot on nikon still: I was editing stuff from my last shoot yesterday. Interior shot exposed for the exterior sky (so there was just a tiny bit of data in the blue channel).  Flat profile on nikon d5500, as flat as possible on the gx85.  Blue skies recoverable from both shots, interior on the gx85 absolutely unrecoverable, no problems on the d5500 (and if only they had a decent codec it could be pushed much further).  I dont know how the gh5 and log will compare, but the *usable* dynamic range on the nikons is still better than I've seen in this segment.  

I love my nikon gear, I also want them to be around in 10 years time :/

[IronFilm]

A new low price for the D7500, US$850:

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&pub=5574663212&toolid=10001&campid=5335893884&customid=&icep_item=392017211472&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=229466&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=lg

[Mark Romero 2]

8 hours ago, IronFilm said:

A new low price for the D7500, US$850:

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&pub=5574663212&toolid=10001&campid=5335893884&customid=&icep_item=392017211472&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=229466&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=lg

Thanks for the link.

[IronFilm]

My brother just purchased a Nikon D7500 (based on my recommendations, he wanted to buy a camera now today, for his business. Somewhat overkill probably for his needs... but the price increase over say a D7200/D5500 was small enough he was fine with it. The D7500 has some legit benefits over the D7200/D5600. The D7500 is a much higher end camera than the D5600, and the D7500 has the 4K and flip out touch screen over the D7200, and of course he doesn't care about losing the 2nd SD card slot).

Anyway, looking forward to getting some hands on time myself with the D7500!

 

Am certainly not a big fan of kit lenses in general, but the 18-140 VR was only an extra NZ$260 so I said go for it. 

I reckon he needs to at a minimum purchase one more lens, a Tokina 11-20mm f2.8 (think he'll mostly be shooting with a wide angle, so the extra cost of the newer 11-20mm is worth it over the cheaper 11-16mm f2.8). 

Might recommend a Tokina 16-50mm f2.8 and Nikon 35mm f1.8G DX as well, as they're super cheap on ebay and would round out his general purpose kit nicely. 

 

[hansel]

Yeah the 35mm dx is ? And for next to nothing a nobrainer.

[IronFilm]

Hell yeah, is one of the reasons I recommend Nikon over Canon for someone starting out (as well as you know.... Nikon has better cameras!). Because Canon simply lacks that important part: a standard focal length (35mm ish on APS-C / DX) fast prime at a bargain price for a beginner. For all the sh*t Thom Hogan gives Nikon (buzz buzz buzz) for not doing their DX lens line up right, at least Nikon did that one lens! I recommended it to my brother even though he won't need it for his main uses (photographing cars for his business), because it is so cheap and handy to have around for other purposes (like say to take pics at a party). 

Although the one lens from the Canon side I miss is the  Canon 24mm f/2.8 pancake. As that is a lot slower than the f1.8 prime, and I feel 35mm is a better general purpose focal length on DX, but I wish I had a lens as compact as that for Nikon DSLRs! I'd probably use my Nikon D5200 more often (and imagine how compact it would be on the even smaller/lighter D3500!) with a pancake lens on it. 
 

[IronFilm]

Came across this music video shot with a D7500:

 

 

https://***URL removed***/forums/post/61824179

Also this one: