Making a splash: Nikon D500 real-world sample gallery

Anything beyond 3600 ISO is for the trashcan. The 12000 ISO out of camera is Sony style washed detail processed. I am disappointed from what I see, i expected much better.

Fuji is soft? Maybe in this comparison, but no, it´s not my experience.
What lenses do they use for the comparison? It´s not the same using a for example a Nikon 70-200 compared to a Fuji 50-140 on a fuji. Using the Nikon 70-200 on a D750 or maybe even on a more demanding D810 is quite another story.
When i look at the pics of the house at 12800 ISO or other high-iso Sample Pice i try to look at the RAWs, jpegs don´t make sense for comparison.
And, of course, for my Fuji RAWs i use Irident Developer. Does DPReview use Irident also? Or maybe Capture One? Adobe Lightroom is plain and simple not the appropriate converter, so a comparison is meaningless. You cannot fault Fuji (or maybe not Fuji´s only fault) if Adobe cannot deal with it´s files. Other Converters do a much better job. And no, Nikon doesn't share it´s RAW-file-code also.
Maybe you can compare the D500 to the D750 where the former looks a little less sharp to me.

"I think that this is a camera that will keep many from stepping up to FX. Unless, of course, Nikon releases a full frame with the features of the D500 and at only slightly higher price."

...or...you know...they'd like wide primes.

(For the record, I'm a Nikon DX shooter.)

@hydrospanner - Everyone wants something, but it's the market as a whole that dictates what is made and sold.

Great notes. So few have tried to expand the sensor array (Fuji, Foveon). Reminds of film days, the mixed size grains of conventional films and the "every grain is exactly alike" T-Max films.

Define "continuous tonality" please.

Sometimes the undefinable is still understandable, as some posters have.

Agreed. But aren't we delving into the "subjective" universe? I think we are on the same page. Your comment that "I can only go by what I see on screen" seems to confirm this. Not a criticism, just an observation.

Nowadays most DSLRs deliver great IQ. This camera can be used for portraits, though that's not its obvious purpose. Pair it with Sigma 30 f/1.4 or 85 f/1.4 or 135 f/2 and you get a durable pro body with pro focusing/metering ability and a pro level quality at practically any ISO. Not to mention Auto FP ability which only D7200 and D500 have and the 1/8000 shutter speed... The IQ is similar if not better than my 5D MkII, which doesn't really matter - I still keep my old D2X which produces amazing results with fast lenses and strobes even printed large poster size and which gained a stop or more with the modern RAW converters.

@Thematic You're complaining about a photo taken in awful conditions. When did you last shoot live music using only available light?

Just don't compare it to a full frame camera and it will look fine :)

Until ISO 400, the D7200 has a slight edge. Above that, the D500 has a slight edge. But then the D500 extends from ISO 50 to 100, which the D7200 cannot touch, and also above ISO 25600, which the D7200 knows nothing about.
And the D500 has qualities other than ISO, which the D7200 cannot touch either.

That's just business. Launch at $2k and soak all the early adopters, then drop the price to pick up the wait-and-see-ers. Nikon isn't exactly grotesquely profitable so they need every bit of it.

Dam' right, Sony's A6300 makes a better shot for much less money.

Probably better to look at the 'now' released D500 shots from people that have them. No idea what the lenses that are used in the gallery or post above, but looking at a spitfire and hurricane that appeared with 24-105 attached that I shot off guard, more than happy. Cropping scope much better. But it depends what glass you shoot I suppose.

Hi, if you open the gallery and scroll down a bit you'll see a scene with greenery and wooden fencing with a square wooden arch, thats the one.

I guess I mostly agree with you on that Jostian.

When you use the Loupe, I can see detail; but the 100% sized image doesn't do much for the grass and flowers. My guess is that it's just not focused on what's important, or that it could've benefitted from focus-bracketing or a better lens or f/11 to f/14 as that particular shot has a lot of z-axis depth. Still, I mostly agree with you on that one.

It is totally unrelated to sensor. It is more of profile problem. Canon sensor I found are very similar to Sony in DxOMark in graph of RGB. So there is hardly any difference. When you take picture with RAW image, it is totally RAW which mean nothing edit in it, all softwares have to work to render the colour to get the result using colour profile. Without any render to the RAW image, it is just all green almost.

Thanks, I didn´t know that. So a different raw developer might look better?

Different RAW developer, or you can just change your default profile settings for that camera, I do this in lightroom for my cameras so every raw file I bring into lighroom is adjusted to my preference at import. Make your own profile and set it as the default for your camera, adjust the base colours to your liking and job done.
With my D800 I always found that I had to adjust the WB +15 in magenta to get what I like. I saved this as part of the defaults for that body. Never looked back.
Just remember I am only referring to RAW files here.

I'm going to disagree with you Panos.

I've had a lot of variance in detail recovery over the years. Can you please elaborate or point me in the direction of a website you know about that can better explain this?

http://www.libraw.org/articles/zone-v-in-digital.html
The variance you see its because the cameras you are using have their light meters calibrated differently (to underexpose). Camera makers do this in order to protect highlights. The amount of underexposure is different between camera brand and camera models and the result is that the user believes that camera A can recover more HL than camera B.

That's not the way I understand the over-brightness of light.

As people, we see over-brightness. But we have tonality away from that brightness which is a useful representation of gradients we can understand. We still see the world as blown out sometimes, but our recovery from that place to the rest of our vision is much better than a frame in photography.

I think it's okay to have blow-outs. It really doesn't bother me. What bothers me is having artificial colors that look artificial surrounding the blown out areas.

However, given that most cameras are not very good at this I can see that underexposing everything will prevent or reduce the blown-out look that many cameras have in how they interpret loss of contrast at 255x3 or beyond the pure white, or even in per color 255 and beyond.

I think camera makers try to measure exposure well and match eachother as well as they can. There is an ISO standard which manufacturers try to adhere to.

I'm still interested in this discussion and I think that it's possible that you have more to add in why you believe the way you do. And I am willing to reconsider my perspective.

For me, it's not such a problem as it is a minor obstacle. I'm fine with blown out colors or full blow out over-white 255s. I would just like to see a better recovery to the visible light spectrum in an image without false colors or banding, etc.

Maybe not many cameras do well here at all; but my D7200 is pretty good. I can photograph the sun setting and I get very nice tonality away from the event. The sun's surface is just a color-mass of detail-less nothing, but it recovers well unlike many other cameras. The trees in front of the sun have a color halo over them, but it's not distasteful.

I'm okay with it. Unless you can prove to me that my shadows aren't worth more detail, I kind of like nailing exposure most of the time.

I did compare cameras and I was able to pull more from some and less from others... I wish dpreview would start doing these tests again like they did in a past.

More neutral, less saturated.

I see, gallery is adjusted to taste of photog.
Good thing about a flat colour profile.

This article by Thom Hogan explains dx and fx very well.
http://www.dslrbodies.com/newsviews/the-full-frame-debate.html

I'd say actual pixels. The only way I compared it was using the low light studio samples comparing the D500 and D7000 RAW at ISO 6400. It looks like the sensor of the D500 is not really that far ahead.

I agree with the assessment at 6400iso, but the differences do grow with higher isos, which I need for shooting in challenging conditions during concerts and ballet performances. The harder question for me is justifying the difference between the D500 and D7200...especially when the 7200 is just a bit higher-res. I've missed the premium build quality of my old D2x while I've been a D7000 shooter, and I think the D500 could satisfy that.

D7000 was good in its time but it wouldn't compare well today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxrpKgzNZpw Try that video for shutter noise