Nikon Df vs. Canon 5D Mark III vs. Fuji X100S

Recent retro camera fashion has, refreshingly, brought back “real” camera functionality. But covering a camera with knobs and dials isn’t automatically a win.

Nikon has announced the Df, a 16.2 megapixel, full-frame, retro-styled DSLR. And oops, no, that’s not a picture of it above. That’s my trusty Nikkormat that my dad gave me as a high school graduation gift. I have lots of Nikon lenses left over from those days, along with an abiding affection for the company, burned into my muscle memory by the wonderful heft and feel of a solid, manual camera with satisfyingly clickable buttons and dials.

So I, along with the rest of the photography world, watched with interest as Nikon expertly teased the Df with a series of videos. The brief glimpses—and the satisfying clicks in the soundtrack—seemed to promise a return to this tactile, manual photographic experience.

The camera is announced now, and available for preorder at about $3,000 with the matching (fashion!) 50mm lens.

Here’s the actual Df

I like that retro styling is becoming a way for camera makers to demonstrate their commitment to serious photography, because pretty cameras are pretty, but mostly because physical knobs and dials are often better than menus for common camera functions.

But as great as these physical UI elements look, what really matters is how they feel. As I wrote back in 2008, we should not lust after specs or superficial qualities of a camera, but instead seek the most transparent possible liaison between our artistic intent and the images we want to make.

No one who hasn’t touched a Df knows how it fares on that front. So I turned, as I often do, to my buddy Gordon Laing and his amazing Camera Labs site. He spent some time with the Df at a recent Nikon press event.

Retro styling is all about nostalgia, but industries move on for a reason. So in order to be successful with a retro concept, I believe you have to serve it with a generous dollop of the modern too. Trouble is, this is not always an easy balance to get right.

Gordon seems to conclude that Nikon didn’t quite get it right. For myself, I’ve concluded that I already own an expensive, hefty, full-frame DSLR—and while it might not look hipster-retro, it feels great, and using it is second nature to me. Upon closer inspection today, I was reminded that it is, in fact, covered with knobs and dials.

Oh, and it shoots video too, which the Df does not. And it has more megapixels, and a faster shutter, and a dial that adjusts shutter speed in 1/3 stop increments (instead of full-stop), because it’s designed to work well, not just look cool.

The same can be said for Nikon’s D800, which beats out the 5D Mark III in many comparisons.

I love my big old 5D Mark III, but I am not immune to the allure of a retro body. For me, the right choice there is something very different from my interchangeable lens photography experience. Earlier this year, I bought a Fujifilm X100S. It’s a 16MP APC-C camera with a fixed 23mm ƒ2.0 lens that sells for “only” $1,300. It’s small enough that I take it places I wouldn’t take my DSLR (such as a wedding at which I’m the best man), it makes nice pictures, and while it’s nice that it looks great, it’s even better that it feels great. And to me, it nails that retro/innovation balance that Gordon so eloquently described. It has focus peaking for manual focus assist (a feature that requires stills camera makers to step outside their comfort zone and adopt something every video shooter knows is great), and a clever hybrid viewfinder that’s always the first thing I show off when folks are curious about the camera.

I’m not accusing Nikon of stepping over the fashion/functionality line with the Df. That’s a decision that every photographer should make for themselves, preferably by feel. I’m honestly thrilled that companies like Nikon, Fuji, and Sony are competing for turf that used to be owned expensively and complacently by Leica. There are now numerous ways to bring a physical, retro feel to your photography experience, and much to consider before you spend your modern dollars.

I won’t be buying the Df, but if you do, consider using this link to support the site.

Nikon D4

Looks like Nikon is starting to take video seriously with their new D4 flagship DSLR, announced yesterday.

I watched this very nice sample film by Corey Rich at 1080p and it looks great to my eye—no aliasing, no rolling shutter issues, plenty of detail, luscious “Top Gear” grading.

• 1080p 24, 25, 30
• 720p 60 (and presumably 50)
• 30 minutes record time
• H.264 B-frame, 24Mbps
• Two different movie crop modes, DX and 1:1 (2.7x)
• Smooth exposure adjustment while recording
• Tracking autofocus while recording
• External mic input with manual levels
• Headphone jack for audio monitoring
• Clean HDMI out (it seems)
• Remote control via iPad/iPhone
• MSRP $6,000, available in February

Great to have you back at the table after starting the party with the D90 Nikon.

UPDATE: The Nikon D4 is now avaiable for pre-order at B&H.

DSLR Movies, Pros and Cons

In my new tradition of rambling on about a subject only to post again a few days later with a more succinct summary of my thoughts, here’s a quick rundown of why you should be excited about shooting video with your DSLR, and why you should reserve some modicum of wait-and-see caution.

First, the reasons to get excited, ranging from the obvious to the more obvious: 

• In the case of the D90, what a sweet deal. $1,000 for the body. I paid nearly that for my HV20. The real win here is that a resolution that is low to medium for a DSLR is positively overkill for HD. Nikon’s “bargain” SLR is overqualified by a mile for 720p video.
• Use your DSLR lenses. If the 5D MkII (or whatever) shoots video too, then both Nikon and Canon peeps can rejoice about this one. A big drawback of the RED One is the expense of the lenses (which need to be top-notch), and a perceived drawback of next year’s Scarlet is the fixed lens.
• A big-ass sensor. The D90’s sensor is roughly the size of the RED One’s. The rumored 5D MarkII’s is way bigger. That means more control of depth-of-field and more predictable results from your stable of lenses. It also means that a $1,000 camera is now making images that, at web resolutions, look an awful lot like those from much more expensive kit.
• 24p. I’m still reeling from this one, but somehow the D90’s video wound up being 24 fps. Hallelujah. It so easily could have been anything else.

And now the reasons to reserve judgement:

• 720p only, at least in the case of the D90. Personally I love 720p, but it’s quite a subset of what your DSLR can do.
• 24p. And that’s all, on the D90 anyway. No overcranking or undercranking. And who knows what frame rates other DSLRs will offer. A camera on which video is an afterthought is not likely to offer a wealth of options here.
• CMOS. CMOS roll. Roll MOS roll. Are DSLR chips, which have never had to fear shearing, skewing and wobbling from rolling shutters (mechanical shutters negate this), going to fare well when recording video? Or will they be jello-cams?
• Limited running time. Aparently there’s some red-tape reason why the D90 is restructed to five minutes of video. Those five minutes will still cost you about 600MB.
• No external audio input. But the D90 does have a mic. You’ll be dual-systeming it. Fortunately there’s cool software out there for syncing audio based on waveform matching.
• Manual control. Although things look good for the D90, the thing about shooting video is that you need the same kind of quick access to key manual exposure controls that SLR stills shooters require. But will the video options be ghettoized in a deep menu?
• Manual focus. Not in and of itself a problem, since that’s how pro video and film gets shot, but that LCD screen won’t be reliable for critical focus at HD res. HD cameras have handy focus-assist features like edge enhancement and LCD zoom.
• You’ll be at the mercy of a codec. The D90 scores well here on paper, but you are still dealing with heavy (and inefficient) compression of a baked-in color palette that may not respond well to agressive grading, as tends to be the case with perceptual compression. This is a tough thing to swallow when you’re holding in your hands a camera that lives and breaths raw formats for stills. Maybe someday someone will make a DSLR that lays down CinemaDNG sequences. Maybe? How about Please God Yes.
• But maybe worse than baked-in color and codecs, you’re at the mercy of whatever the camera can muster in realtime debayering. Most video from compact cameras looks bad not because of compression but because of the hasty techniques used to rapidly build an image from a tiny subset of the sensor’s photosites. I offer up my beloved LX2 as an example—its videos may be 848x480 on disk, but what’s actually present in the images is far less resolution than that. This hard-to-quantify factor could be the real pitfall, although none of the (heavily recompresed) D90 sample vids I’ve seen have exhibited egregious demosaicing artifacts.

I said I’d stop hypothesizing, but this is an interesting enough subject that I felt it was worth clearing the air about both why this thrilling new trend in DSLRs is so great, and why it’s not as great as one might hope.

UPDATE: Mike commented below with a link to dpreview’s sample D-Movies. If you download the original AVI files you can see some sizzle and color sparkle that is symptomatic of the expedient debayering I describe above.

More D90

From robgalbraith.com:

The D90 allows you to select the aperture (from wide open to f/8) prior to commencing, then it handles the adjusting of ISO and shutter speed automatically as needed to maintain video brightness as lighting conditions change during recording. To disable automatic exposure adjustment, it’s possible to lock exposure prior to beginning the recording.

Sounds a bit like the HV20/30 dance to me, where you’re always aiming the thing at a light trying to lock it into 1/48th shutter. Stock up on ND if you want that filmic shutter and shallow DOF at the same time in daylight! Still, if this is true, you can lock down your auto settings and, perhaps somewhat clunkily, explicitly set a shutter speed. 

Of course, unlike Rob, I view the lack of automatic white balance and as a good thing. I’m also baffled by his desire for a digital zoom. I guess what stills folks want from a video camera is different than what film folks want from a stills camera that, uhm, shoots video.

The boards are positively buzzing about this (dvxuser, scarletuser, dvinfo, hv20.com, Rebel Café). There’s some clarification, some idolizing, some bashing, and enough hypothetical confusion that I’m happy to refrain from any further speculation of my own. We’ll see real sample movies and detailed hands-on reviews soon enough.

Still more on this.