Nikon D4 ...

[InTheSky]

Well it is a very good beautiful machine ... but I'm wondering if a A77 can be valuable replacement if it is not for High ISO use ...

: http://www.dpreview.com/articles/779991 ... -overview/

Frank

[alphaomega]

Mifsuds here in UK has just offered me one (body only) for £4,799.00. Was wondering if I should go for Canon's EOS 1D MKIV at 3449.00 only. Quite a saving. carc/off.
I would have to do arm muscle training in the local gym. to carry such a devise around for any length of time. Add lenses and dig deep for £10,000+.
I will stay with my A and E mount equipment.

[cosmonaut1959]

Is this a Nikon sensor? Or farmed out to Sony? I think I would wait to see if the IQ is an improvement. D3s prices for used ones should drop now.

[agorabasta]

The official Nikon samples are already out. There's no improvement over the D3/700, there's rather some small degradation of IQ in the regard of noise. But that's all really down to noise filtering in raw, as the older 12Mp FF sensor was already at the theoretical limits of low-light noise performance.

But the camera seems to have a very good feature set. And if it all was guessed right to the target buyers, that's a success. If not - then not.

[David Kilpatrick]

The most interesting feature of the sensor (which is Nikon not Sony as far as Richard was able to find out at the press conference) is the video crop factor and the subsampled frame rate. Subsampled down to 2.5 megapixels, a higher than HD 1080p resolution, it can either shoot FX 25fps video or save the same as a sequence of 25fps JPEGs.

It can also crop to 1.5X factor to do the same, shooting what amounts to Super-35mm. But it goes beyond this and will do a true one for one pixel crop to 1920 x 1080 in the centre of the sensor. This is a sort of 2.25X HD crop factor, like Sony's digital zoom if that could be used for HD filming. It makes complete sense and provides Nikon with a very powerful 'tele' HD camera for sport.

Relative to Canon, they now have a real advantage for stop-frame, time lapse, motion analysis, tele 'factor' etc.

I hope it means that Sony will try to execute cropped sensor readout and subsampled readout the same way. These are not firmware options, the sensor must be wired from the start to get it. Imaging a 36 megapixel sensor sensor with a true 1080p video crop - like turning on a 3.5X tele converter for video.The Nikon has to use a separate monitor (it can feed full res live video to an external drive and monitor) to compose and use its crop because it has an optical finder. But Sony's A99 could feed stabilised 1:1 cropped HD to the EVF...

David

[InTheSky]

My friend just under one ... So I'm looking to be able to play with it once it arrived . Is main job is to cover Official music event in Montreal and TV Show. This is the kind of camera of its league.

I wish he will not get it before my NEX 7 GRRR ...

Frank

[InTheSky]

My friend invited me yesterday to a D4 Demo in Montreal.

The demo was very interesting.

At first impression :

-> The video function is very good and expendable.
-> the speed feel like the D3s, and the 1fps more vs the auto focus and none is for me a kind of stupid ... , this is probably because the mechanical limitation of the mirror defacement is already at his limit since the first D3.

-> The most interesting thing, is that the D4, is a complete Web server, where you can connect directly with you IPAD, IPOD, or any browser (but the interface is mostly adjust for phone view and IPAD resolution 1024x768)

---> You can stream what you see in live view without any need of special software. (from the tiny WIFI adapter that now powered by the camera itself, it is almost a shame that it is not include in the camera for the size ...)

---> you can use is a monitor for filming and controling.

The guy in charge of the presentation didn't really answered me why they put only a 10/100 ethernet (max 10mb/s) connection instead of a Gigabit (100mb/s). This means that with the new WIFI adapter N you will get theoretically better speed to transfer your files.

The USB is 2.0 because they wanted to be sure for proper compatibility.

They put a new custom butter in front of the shutter, but this is not very configurable for (only three or four possibility I think ... firmware fix ?).

The interesting thing , is that you can configure the shutter to activate the movie instead of the dedicated button.

Image quality , I had to leave the presentation where it was to start, but they inform us that the camera should have gain of around 1-2 stop better performance (ISO, Dynamic range ...).

The silence (not the quiet) function on the camera where there is absolutely no sound was kind of joke ... it is only picture taken a 1920x1080 (HD movie) and store in JPEG ... , It can go (try to answer ... ). up to 24 frame / second ...

Having the budget, this will probably be a very good buy ... , because I don't see really something missing on this beauty. On the video side, this is a huge improvement (I forgot to mention the high configuration in the input sound also ).

Regards,

Frank

[Greg Beetham]

It sounds too me like Nikon was thinking about the poor old newshound or the hard working paparazzi more than anything, but I’m not sure all those mod-cons will make their life any easier, probably worse if anything, it’ll make getting that image or that footage out first even more hectic and time compressed I think.
Greg