Why d4 nikon

When Pv button is pressed, lens aperture is stopped down to value selected by user A and M modes or by camera P and S modes.

Programmed auto with flexible program P ; shutter-priority auto S ; aperture-priority auto A ; manual M. Focus can be locked by pressing shutter-release button halfway single-servo autofocus or by pressing the center of the sub-selector.

Front-curtain sync, slow sync, rear-curtain sync, red-eye reduction, red-eye reduction with slow sync, slow rear-curtain sync; auto FP high-speed sync supported. On-screen audio level indicators and a headphone jack help you monitor and adjust audio in 20 incremental steps. D4 takes you from inspiring stills to amazing videos with ease. Quickly select AF points with a new joystick style sub-selector—positioned for both horizontal and vertical shooting. In low-light, all operation buttons and dials are beautifully backlit.

Two media card slots offer flexibility and control. Simply put, D4 was built to meet professional demands. Bring studio quality lighting to assignments with Nikon Speedlights. Only Nikon offers i-TTL Intelligent Through The Lens flash control, which allows Nikon Speedlights to access extensive exposure and metering data from D4 to provide unprecedented levels of flash precision and performance.

When the world is waiting, being the first to publish makes all the difference. Quickly enlarge images and videos up to 46x for spot focus confirmation—crucial for high-resolution shooting.

Thorough measures are taken to seal and protect against invasive moisture, dust and electromagnetic interference. You can even designate one slot for data-heavy HD video recording. When the highest possible image quality is required, you can bypass memory cards and record uncompressed footage directly from the image sensor onto an external recording device.

DX-format offers a 1. Time lapse shooting Set intervals and frame rates in order to dramatically relay slow-moving activity at dramatic speeds. D4 lets you shoot time-lapse photography with replay rates from 24 to 36, times faster than normal and save them as movie files. Two Live View shooting modes Photography Live View and Movie Live View modes add flexibility; exposure, white balance, monitor hue, histogram, focus mode, AF area mode and focusing accuracy are easily confirmed.

Built-in HDR Combine two exposures at up to 3EV to create a single image revealing an extremely wide dynamic range but with less noise and richer color gradation than ever before. Dedicated Nikon Picture Control button Quickly access six preset picture control options—Standard, Neutral, Vivid, Monochrome, Landscape and Portrait—and up to nine customizable settings with a single button.

Something about maximum capacity of small Lion batteries now allowed; the EN-EL4a is over the limit for its size, apparently. Nikon also makes claims about the D4 being more efficient in power usage than the D3s, so everything should basically be a wash, maybe even an advantage in certain types of shooting.

Okay, I'll buy all that. What I don't buy, and what pros everywhere didn't like, is that Nikon engineered a new battery shape and door that looks an awful lot like the old one, but is just enough different than the older battery so that there's no interchangeability between D3 and D4 bodies.

As in, throw out all your old EN-EL4a batteries as they do you no good once you've switched to the D4 series. Frankly, that was a dead wrong decision on Nikon's part. They could have engineered a solution battery compartment door and new battery that allowed use of older batteries, if you had them. Instead, here in the transition period where some of us have a D4 and a D3x, we're now in a two battery set situation. This is so customer unfriendly to Nikon's best customers, it's difficult to explain.

Certainly Nikon hasn't explained it well enough. That's a big ugly start towards trying to convince pros to switch. There had better be compelling points elsewhere that offset it. Turns out, Nikon did think of one way to address the possible battery issue. Strangely, they forgot to mention it to almost anyone, even themselves. Only a couple of problems.

Just to charge your D3 batteries on a D4 charger. Oh, and where do you get this marvelous device? I'm not sure. The Nikon part number is Let's look at some other aspects that are new.

For example, the backlit buttons. Not all of the buttons are backlit, either. The playback, Delete, and AF-On buttons aren't, for example. As Nikon has configured it, you're faced with either an all-or-nothing choice LCD illumination On or an extra-step process Power switch illumination.

Certainly the latter can be learned, and you can argue that having backlit buttons that you can enable is better than not having them. Yet as implemented, it feels incomplete and not fully thought out there's nothing that any of the backlit buttons relate to that is in the top LCD, for example, so having the buttons always linked to the top LCD illumination seems like a power waste in most situations. That's one of the problems of adding features to a pro camera: we pros want lots of flexibility and control; this addition gives us little, though it does give us a potentially useful thing.

I'll continue my discussion of new things in a more disciplined manner. Let's step around the camera side by side while examining the changes. From the front, you'll notice some "curve" and slight size differences which I'll talk about more in Handling , but probably not any quickly identifiable changes.

Up top, we have a new red Record Video button between the Mode and Exposure Compensation buttons that have been moved slightly. There's no longer a locking Metering Method selector on the side of the prism, but instead the L button Lock on the top button cluster has been changed to a Metering Method button.

What happened to Lock? There's also a dedicated lock function CSM F8. On the back things change a fair amount, as we now have a six-button stack to the left of the color LCD instead of a five. Besides the slightly larger main LCD, the most obvious differences are the loss of the Focus Area selector now done with the Focus Mode button on the front of the camera , and the addition of two miniature thumb joysticks.

I'll have more to say about the latter in Handling. On the left side of the camera viewed while holding it we have four discrete doors to the connectors instead of two. For certain uses, this minimizes door flaps sticking out and potentially interfering with your left hand position, for other uses you'll have more flaps open to contend with.

Not sure there's a gain here. But we did gain dedicated WT-5 and Ethernet connectors for communications, while we lost the DC Power In socket now you use a dedicated replacement for the battery when connected to DC. Plus, of course, we have a new battery compartment door which doesn't have a name etched on it, which makes it difficult to figure out which door you have in your hand when you've got both D3 and D4 doors sitting around; do Nikon engineers actually use the cameras they design?

All told, the observable external changes are again minimal between pro generations, though not as minimal as the D2x to D3 changeover. Inside the camera we find the more substantive changes. You all want to know about the sensor first, I suppose, so let's deal with it.

What you get from the combo is 16mp images x max that can be rattled off at 10 fps for what seems like forever 13 seconds with JPEG Fine, even 10 seconds saving bit raw files to an XQD card; more on that in a bit.

That's one heck of a lot of data being captured and moved around with aplomb. By comparison, the D3s hit the limit at 9 seconds with JPEG Fine and 4 seconds with bit raw files, which seemed perfectly acceptable at the time. Video has been completely reworked from the D3s's limited P. If that weren't enough, the D4 can output clean, uncompressed 8-bit video on the HDMI port for display or recording by an external device. With something like the Atomos Ninja or other external recorder , you can get broadcast quality video out of the D4.

But wait, there's more! If you order now you can also shoot 2mp stills while recording video, plus you can get a very useful and clean sensor output mode that doesn't have any video subsampling artifacts 2. If it's starting to sound a bit like a lot of the substantive changes are video related, they are.

It's clear that Nikon spent some time thinking through and engineering pro-level video options on this camera, right down to the fact that you can output Broadcast range-limited video on the HDMI port correctly set Black and White levels and change the aperture continuously rather than in stops.

Some of us probably wish that the same level of effort had been applied on the stills side, but some of you are probably happy to have a much more versatile pro body that can output both quality stills and video as needed. We have many more internal features to hit on. One that engenders as much controversy as the battery change is the dual card slot. On the D3 series, we had dual CompactFlash slots.

The good news is that CompactFlash is about topped out in speed, but XQD can take us much, much faster. Even on the D4 there is a difference: you can buffer about 16 more bit images on the XQD slot than the CompactFlash one because the cards are just clearing data that much faster.

If you're shooting at 10 fps, you'd notice the difference. If you're just shooting more casually, you're probably not going to notice much difference from the D3s other than the buffer seems bigger the few times you do press it. Aside : it seems that some folk reading the review aren't aware of the history of XQD.

Prior to the D4 appearing, SanDisk withdrew support for some reason, and has not indicated any interest in producing XQD cards, leaving Nikon and Sony as the only companies making products with it at the time of the D4's introduction. Since then, after a long on-again, off-again delay, Lexar introduced XQD cards, which is strange, because they weren't part of the original development team and their main competitor was.

Thus, Nikon wasn't sucked into or convinced by anyone else to go with XQD. They were in the development consortium from the beginning, likely because of the reason I note in performance: CompactFlash cards can't keep up with a D4 for long. It's the mix of slots and the non-acceptance of XQD by others that is grating on most Nikon pro minds.

We'd all prefer to have two matched slots. For a lot of reasons. First, when you have both slots active, the slower card is what determines the performance of the camera, and that will always be the CompactFlash slot. Yes, I know this means you can still use some older cards in the D4, but you will suffer a performance hit in doing so. Most of us pros I think would rather have matching slots, as it means only carrying one type of card with us.

Consider if you're shooting with a D3s or D3x and a D4: different batteries, different cards, different DC dongles, different WiFi adapters. That's just enough to make it a logistical nightmare for someone carrying along both bodies and needing all the options. Yes, progress in technology does lead to obsolescence, but Nikon picked some strange form of overlap-but-not-quite-overlap and made things a little more difficult than it had to be, I think. Then there's the stunning bit: either Nikon was way ahead of the pack in adopting XQD, or they took a wrong turn.

Here we are over a year later, and we've not had one other significant product embrace XQD. Not one. Co-developer Sony touted these cards as being great for video use, but the only products Sony makes that can use the cards are high-end XDCAM models, and then only via an adapter; essentially they're a secondary option on these pro video cameras as are SD cards and Memory sticks.

So at present we have two card makers Sony and Lexar , one still camera that uses them D4 , and a small handful of high-end video cameras that can use them via adapters. Doesn't seem like the world is moving to XQD, does it? Aside : yes, it's time for another near rant. Bigger sizes are very expensive. Okay, so a D4 user has to make an investment in cards. How much of an investment? At the moment, it looks like that investment will only be used in the D4.

This is where Nikon's complete silence about general future plans causes grief. Contact Nikon Tech Support. Software Downloads. Nikon School. Discover Nikon. Pro Photo Gallery. Say No to Grey. Product News. Corporate News. Corporate Social Responsibility. Contact Us. NPS Global. Nikon Asia. Nikon Global. Capture With Nikon. DSLR D4. Store Locator. Superior quick response with approx. High-speed continuous shooting at approx.

White balance that enables finer setting in kelvin steps. High-performance, glass pentaprism viewfinder with approx. Button illumination that ensures better visibility of the operational system in dark situations. Newly developed shutter unit tested for approx. Highly efficient energy-saving design that achieves approx.

Live view not used. Features Explained. Nikon's original key technology 2. Still image shooting functions 3. D-Movie shooting functions 4. Defining strength for exceptional stills and videos 6. Nikon Speedlights 7.

System chart 8. Compatible CPU lenses 9. Parts and controls 1. Nikon's original key technology. ISO Still image shooting functions. Nikon's classic 11 focus points. Single-point AF mode. Auto-area AF mode. Viewfinder display All indications shown for demonstration purposes. Glass prism. FX format. DX format. D-Movie shooting functions. Wired and wireless for faster, easier and more efficient, workflow For some professionals, there are assignments that the whole world is waiting to see.

Note: The Wireless Transmitter Utility must be installed on computers connecting to the camera in image transfer or camera control mode. Conventional models Air space between glass and panel causes reflections at the surfaces of each part, resulting in some light loss. D4 Surface reflection is reduced and light loss greatly decreased by the integrated structure of glass and panel.

Viewfinder display. LCD monitor display. More information. Defining strength for exceptional stills and videos. The defining strength for exceptional stills and videos To bring out the full potential of the D4, look no further than the vast array of NIKKOR lenses designed and tested to match the D4's resolution and image integrity with sharpness, accuracy, and field-proven reliability.

Nikon Speedlights. Nikon Speedlights: studio-quality lighting, virtually anywhere The Nikon Creative Lighting System is a well-respected answer to the needs of the industry, offering accuracy, flexibility and lighting possibilities that are unavailable with other equipment. System chart. Compatible CPU lenses. Parts and controls. Tech Specs. Modes Live view photography quiet or silent , movie live view Lens servo Autofocus AF : Single-servo autofocus AF-S ; full-time servo autofocus AF-F Manual focus M AF-area mode Face-priority AF, wide-area AF, normal-area AF, subject-tracking AF Autofocus Contrast-detect AF anywhere in frame camera selects focus point automatically when face-priority AF or subject-tracking AF is selected Metering TTL exposure metering using main image sensor Frame size pixels and frame rate 1, x 1,; 30 p progressive , 25 p, 24 p 1, x 1, crop; 30 p, 25 p, 24 p 1, x ; 60 p, 50 p, 30 p, 25 p x ; 30p, 25p Actual frame rates for 60 p, 50 p, 30 p, 25 p, and 24 p are Weight Approx.

Included Accessories. Antifog finder Eyepiece DK Accessory Shoe Cap BS USB Cable Clip. Battery Chamber Cover BL Body Cap BF-1B. ViewNX 2. Battery Charger MH Strap AN-DC7. Optional Accessories. Wireless Transmitter WT AC Adapter EH-6b. Camera Control Pro 2.

Remote Cord MCA. Stereo Microphone ME Speedlight SB Register this product Get support. Store Locator Find your nearest Nikon dealer.

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