First look at the D4 and D800

Earlier this week I was part of a group of professional photographers invited to Nikon UK's Kingston-upon-Thames headquarters for an advance look at the new D4 and D800 series cameras.

As you'd expect, there was a presentation covering the headline features of all three cameras together with an exclusive film shot for Nikon UK with the D800 at the end of which we were asked an interesting question given Nikon's marketing thrust of late: "How many of you are interested in the video features of the new cameras?" Around one third of the audience raised their hands. Bear in mind this was an audience of serious professionals, nevertheless I was slightly surprised. When asked how many people were undecided, the video camp expanded to around half of those present.

The decision to move away from the popular configuration of dual compact flash card slots on the D3 series came under some scrutiny from the audience. With the D4 accepting one CF card and one of the new XQD cards and the D800 one CF and one SDXC card, photographers with mixed bags of both new cameras may find themselves hitting the road with a minimum of three card readers in their laptop cases. The XQD card in the D4 is touted as the high speed future, although at the time of writing the latest 1000X CF cards from Lexar outpace XQD when it comes to card to computer transfer speeds. Furthermore, Sony is currently the monopoly manufacturer of XQD cards with Sandisk and Lexar reportedly having no plans to manufacture cards in that format. Doubtless both companies can quickly reverse that decision if the new card becomes widely adopted but the cutting edge of new formats is not always the best seat to occupy and it's a position familiar to Apple users, with Firewire 800 ports never attracting much attention from manufacturers and Thunderbolt peripherals yet to become popular. Sony has apparently promised a Thunderbolt XQD card reader will be produced, but for the time being photographers equipped with anything other than Apple's 17" MacBook Pro will be left using slower USB 2.0 XQD card readers.

The excellent EN-EL4a battery, introduced with the D2XS and used by the D3, D3S and D3X will continue to be manufactured, although as we know, it will not fit the D4 or its charger. In my view, Nikon should have worked harder to bring at least some degree of compatibility between the old and new batteries, at the very least as far as the charger is concerned. Add a second, or possibly third charger to life on the road.

The WT5 transmitter on the side of the demo D4s caught many people's imagination, in fact it's small enough to make me wonder if room couldn't have been made for it inside the body of the camera?

In the hand, the D4 feels comfortable with only the repositioning of the vertical AF on button feeling strange. The new monitor delivers a crisp and contrasty image reminiscent of the iPad's screen. In other words, superb. The old way of zooming in and out of an image has been replaced by zoom + and - buttons used together with the thumb sticks or joypad. On the subject of which the right rear controls are now becoming cramped with two thumb sticks plus the joypad. It probably would have been better to drop the joypad altogether, the thumb sticks are that good. Otherwise, everything felt fine and familiar. Focusing appeared to be very quick and accurate on static subjects. Shooting my D3S later that afternoon, AF actually felt slow by comparison with the D4

Predictably there was huge interest in the D800, so much so that by the time I had to leave I hadn't managed any hands-on time with the camera. There's very little doubt that the D800 will be a huge success for Nikon. For those of us looking over the D4, many came with the question I've previously asked here: Is the D4 a significant upgrade over the D3S? To a large extent that question remains unanswered, mainly because Nikon still doesn't appear to get photography. To be sure, they understand cameras, but the full size files or prints made from the D4 were nowhere to be seen. In fairness, globally they have made an infinitely better fist of the D800 launch with a feature type film and full size files available from the announcement date. Of the D4 we have so far seen little, at least as far as stills are concerned.