Monday, April 4, 2011
Notes from my Nikon D5100 Pre-Release Briefing
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 09:05 PM
In lieu of a full report, which is no longer interesting to me at this point, I decided to write up, point form, some of the interesting things I learned about the Nikon D5100 DLSR and ME-1 microphone - the things that aren't necessarily in the press release. Enjoy, and let me know if you have any questions - I'll do my best to answer.
- The D5100 and ME-1 Stereo Microphone should be in-market by the end of April. The earthquake/tsunami in Japan didn't have an impact on the production of these products.
- The D5100 is compatible with UHS SD Cards, along with the usual SD, SDHC, SDXC
- Based on some of the impressive new in-camera creative features, I asked Nikon if there were any plans to roll out similar features to other EXSPEED 2-powered cameras such as the D7000 or D3100 via firmware updates. The answer was no. I think this is unfortunate - it makes little sense to have a new and powerful camera such as the D7000 lacking features that the D5100 has. And, certainly, the D3100-using crowd would love some of the new features.
- I asked about the in-camera HDR; it only uses two images, and typically for HDR you want three or more. Two images is the optimal number of images for non-tripod users according to Nikon. As in, three would be hard to do hand-held and too much ghosting would occur with more than two. There's no "tripod mode" for the HDR however, and worse, you can't use it with raw files. This is a simplistic, JPEG-only, two shot tool. You can, however, set it to +1/+2/+3 stops on the exposure - so your first photo is at +0 EV, and your next one is between +1 and +3. You also can't convert previously captured JPEGs. Lots of unfortunate limitations here, but let's face it, if you want high-quality HDR images, you're going to want to shoot three to nine images in raw format on a tripod and use dedicated software such as the ultra-awesome NIK HDR EFEX PRO (seriously, it rocks).
