D7000 the Conclusion

I was able to pick up a D7000 kit at Best Buy on Thursday.

I have mixed feelings towards this camera. It has a lot going for it on paper but in the end it falls short of my needs.

Pro's:

My camera produced sharp images.

The camera has a nice compact solid feel. It doesn't feel overly plasticky. It is a bit of a step up from a D90 in this regard but far short of a D300 feel.

To get sharp pictures with this camera you need good technique, there are a lot of densely packed pixels on this sensor and it will show flaws much easier than a D700 for instance.

Cons:

Movie mode.... I'm not a professional videographer by any means but lets say I bought this camera for a trip and wanted to take some casual video with it and use autofocus. Well this is going to be a disaster. The autofocus comes through obnoxiously loud in the playback. You would have to buy a directional mic or manual focus. There is nothing casual about taking video with a honking directional mic on your camera

Autofocus: I'm used to D300 and D3 performance. I took this camera and paired it with a 400mm 2.8 and shot eagles in flight this morning. It was D90ish performance in my opinion. Lets just say I didn't get one acceptable image today with the D7000. The following link are the acceptable images I got with the D3 this morning after putting the D7000 back in the bag. http://www.lemmophoto.com/p145268366

Sensor: My camera had one really apparent dead pixel near the center. This is not acceptable especially when you are shooting video. It is pretty easy to get a dead pixel out of an image, but on a 5 minute video not so much. Someone else pointed out earlier that they found a couple other dead pixels in my images as well.

Shutter: As someone else said it is very mushy, I don't like the feel or the sound or any of it. It just doesn't feel right.

Buffer: Again I am a D300 D3 user. I was shooting Jpeg-Raw and getting about 10 images buffer. That doesn't cut the mustard for my needs.

AF-On button: This doesn't have a dedicated AF-ON button but you can use the AE-L button instead. This is what I use. This button is too close to the viewfinder. I am a left eye shooting and it makes for a very uncomfortable experience with my knuckle and eye fighting for space.

Noise: I shot some images early in the morning at 1600 ISO and got very noticeable noise in the feathers of the birds. This was a bit surprising to me. It may have been partially my fault due to exposure issues though.

Conclusion: I returned it as a defective item due to the dead pixels to Best Buy for a full refund about an hour ago. I do not plan on buying another one. I was hopeful it would be able to replace a D300 for wildlife and bird photography. In my view it falls short. It is a very nice D90 upgrade though.