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Shannow

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Hello ,

I have a 5 year old Nikon D50 with the standard 18-55 which I used at one time but since forgot almost about it because last year I bought a Samsung Ex1 which I love very much but it does have it's limits .

I've looked at many many solutions (lens + body equation ) and at the moment I keep going back to the D5100 even though it has some serious flaws for me ... no dof preview , no double command for the speed + f stop , the liveview mode in Manual mode doesn't simulate exposition nor does it give the meter for it ... the viewfinder is as big as my D50 so basically it's good enough to frame and choose the focus point anything else it's plain useless (manual focusing for example or giving the dof preview even if it had the option).

Anyway I wanted to know if the D5100 less user friendly than the D50 ? It seems to be pretty user unfriendly from the manual I downloaded .

The big question I have as well is if somebody knows if the awb much better on the D5100 ?

On the D50 it's horrible , completely useless most the time I have to go in some other light-type mode or even PRE when even that can't get it right .

Thank you very much in advance

Jonathan
 
You're going to have more options on the D5100, so it might appear to be "less user friendly". If you know how to get out of AUTO or P, then it might be a small learning curve until you know where the buttons/menus are to do what you want. Watch some Youtube videos on the camera. Just search youtube for D5100 menu setup tutorial or something.

The Auto WB is great.
 
Thanks :)

Well I use the Ex1 in full Manual mode although not very efficient because of the very wide dof no matter the f numberwith such a small sensor .

On the d5100 although I said that I won't have double control for the f stop and the shutter speed I think I can get away in A mode and juggling with + - some ev as I think many people do here . And this also cures the problem of the exposure preview in the live view mode . It is pretty rare I have to go widely out of the ev meter for a shot anyway .

By the way if I get the D5100 I will go for a 35mm 1.8g prime and the samyang 85mm 1.4 AE . I do many shots of objects within 1-2meter range and that don't exceed 1.5meter long .

The D7000 cures the last problems but basically all to do with a better viewfinder . So 400euros extra for more viewfinder comfort is a too big stretch for me . AF motor don't need it I don't think it's compatible with the samyang .

I'd really like some info on the auto white balance on the D5100 as the D50 is crappy to say the least . On my samsung Ex1 it rarely misses the proper color rendering .

Just to be sure , a raw does keep somewhere the camera white balance information for post processing on LR or Dxo ? The samsung does so I would be surprised that the lastest nikon wouldn't.

Thanks again

PS: oops just read you said awb is great . Glad to hear that thanks :)
 
Shannow said:
Hello ,

I have a 5 year old Nikon D50 with the standard 18-55 which I used at one time but since forgot almost about it because last year I bought a Samsung Ex1 which I love very much but it does have it's limits .
Click to expand...
The D50 is a very capable camera and the D5100 in terms of raw image capability is just a step up. If the Samsung Ex1 easily caused you to give up on the D50...I don't see you reversing the trend with the D5100. Better to simply wait until a much better Ex1 comes along as that should fit your style better.
 
Thanks you , well to be honest I've seriously looked at the nx200 but got a bit put off with the 50mo raw files and it has the same kind of blueish contrast when you go beyond 1600iso ... the nx200 is also pretty expensive for what you actually get in term of "gadget" . The 30mm f2 will give me a fantastic pocket size camera but at this total price it still won't go everywhere I go by fear of getting it stolen ...

At the moment I'm thinking of the EX1 , "future EX2" ... to go with me everywhere (truly pocketable) and get a D5100 for some serious IQ at home and shows where I will be more confident to not get it lost . If I loose the ex1 I'll be upset but not as upset as a nx200+30mm f2 which is well over twice the price .

PS : Most my shots are done at home for the simple reason that I love to photograph what I'm building in my home workshop . I build steam locomotives on 5 inch gauge track with my lathes and miller .
 
It sounds as though you are not very familiar with your D50. It is a terrific camera. I suggest you get much more comfortable with the D50 before deciding to get a D5100. The auto WB is quite good, and the custom WB shouldn't be giving you any problems as long as you are using a white card or an 18% gray card, even the back of a white business card will do.
 
Shannow said:
PS : Most my shots are done at home for the simple reason that I love to photograph what I'm building in my home workshop . I build steam locomotives on 5 inch gauge track with my lathes and miller .

By the way if I get the D5100 I will go for a 35mm 1.8g prime and the samyang 85mm 1.4 AE . I do many shots of objects within 1-2meter range and that don't exceed 1.5meter long .
Click to expand...
In that case I would simply stay with the D50 and upgrade the glass. The only problem you have is with Auto WB so simply shoot Raw and correct in ViewNX2 (it's free and WB correction from Raw is fast and easy and accurate) I suspect simply upgrading to better class and investing a tad more effort in PP will give a far greater increase in IQ than simply upgrading body from D50 to D5100. Just keeping it real :)
 
Thanks for all the inputs :)

True that the new 35mm 1.8 nikkor and the samyang 85mm are really a huge help to any camera kit lens .

But I'm pretty confident the D5100 is a huge improvement to the d50 even for my usage .
The problems I have with the d50 :
  • Really reaaaaally bad skin like tones rendering . Anything a bit orange red goes to max red :( tested everything . Color space , raw , playing with saturation ,tint , tone etc ... my brother canon 350d just blasted it away in this section when I used it for my pastel portraits painting (which is the second main use of the camera). By the way in this case I always shoot in PRE wb mode with a bristol 65x50cm sized sheet (a lot of clay in it) . Reds always get saturated very fast with this body no matter what .
  • At the shop today only one sd card was compatible with the D50 ... maximum 2gb otherwise not recognized ...
  • The screen at the back is basically good enough to give a good idea of the framing and the focus when you zoom . It's a very early lcd screen no where near as good as the much wider and recent 7x more pixel d5100 screen (and no liveview)
  • 6MP is not a lot and the 35mm 1.8 or samyang 85mm 1.4 can do so much better with a 16MP sensor .
  • 1600 iso is not much for polyvalent stuff . My Ex1 goes to 3200 iso even with f1.8 I don't go there often especially with the IQ going down fast but I do occasionally go there .
Well I guess after that it goes beyond my science but I guess 2.7f stop more dynamic range and 23.5 vs 20.9 bits color surely does improve something to the final IQ . And it does video , more AF points (I have 5 against 11).

The D5100 is much smaller too wich is very nice :)

Thanks again for all these replies .
 
Shannow said:
Thanks for all the inputs :)

True that the new 35mm 1.8 nikkor and the samyang 85mm are really a huge help to any camera kit lens .

But I'm pretty confident the D5100 is a huge improvement to the d50 even for my usage .
The problems I have with the d50 :
  • Really reaaaaally bad skin like tones rendering . Anything a bit orange red goes to max red :( tested everything . Color space , raw , playing with saturation ,tint , tone etc ... my brother canon 350d just blasted it away in this section when I used it for my pastel portraits painting (which is the second main use of the camera). By the way in this case I always shoot in PRE wb mode with a bristol 65x50cm sized sheet (a lot of clay in it) . Reds always get saturated very fast with this body no matter what .
Click to expand...
With all due respect...That is not a camera problem as any search of flicker and d50 will show. Skin tones have more to do with camera settings selected by the photographer and chosen PP/workflow. You can easily run into the same problem with the D5100 if you let it :)
Shannow said:
  • At the shop today only one sd card was compatible with the D50 ... maximum 2gb otherwise not recognized ...
Click to expand...
That can be a problem
Shannow said:
  • The screen at the back is basically good enough to give a good idea of the framing and the focus when you zoom . It's a very early lcd screen no where near as good as the much wider and recent 7x more pixel d5100 screen (and no liveview)
Click to expand...
True, but has almost no correlation with final IQ
Shannow said:
  • 6MP is not a lot and the 35mm 1.8 or samyang 85mm 1.4 can do so much better with a 16MP sensor .
Click to expand...
In terms of cropping yes. But what is your final output format (how big do you print) and do you plan on publishing 16mp images for the web?
Shannow said:
  • 1600 iso is not much for polyvalent stuff . My Ex1 goes to 3200 iso even with f1.8 I don't go there often especially with the IQ going down fast but I do occasionally go there .
Click to expand...
true
Shannow said:
Well I guess after that it goes beyond my science but I guess 2.7f stop more dynamic range and 23.5 vs 20.9 bits color surely does improve something to the final IQ . And it does video , more AF points (I have 5 against 11).

The D5100 is much smaller too wich is very nice :)

Thanks again for all these replies .
Click to expand...
I went from a D70 to a D7000. The jump in image quality is amazing. The difference is 10% new body, 10% better glass, and 80% commitment to improve and self educate. I recently went back to the D70 and was shocked at how much the IQ of the D70 has improved....all I did was dust it off and apply new skills :) If you upgrade to the D5100 without upgrading your skills and commitment....then you can expect only a small increase in the quality of your pics...IMO. Good Luck.
 
thanks a lot :)

Don't worry , I did tweaked every setting possible imaginable on the D50 without success ... At the time I posted all this problem on a french forum (I'm french) and I took hundreds of shots with different parameters of the same painting without success ( literally one step per setting at a time) .

I'm sure skill (I personally would call it knowledge rather than skill) is important but if I have to spend 2hours on LR (which incidently I did) to put things right (which was unsuccessful because when I got the red tone more or less ok the rest wasn't ...)

I'm sorry not to be prepared to use something like masks etc. on Photoshop and spend hours on it .

At the time when I really wanted to get the max of the 50D with this problem after all this I gave up and tiled scanned the painting carefully and I got an extremely good color reproduction .

Pastel gives colors are way way brighter than many things in real life because it's almost pure pigments . It's very difficult to get it right . Here's a scanned sample I did :



here a sample of the problem at the time :



I made a little sample to show the scanned (very close to reality) versus the D50 at the best .
The little rectangular box is the proper color .

I'm very suspicious of LR when people tweak the picture so much without the reference (the actual object you are shooting) . You can't memories true colors like this IMO. It is very much more to do with tastes than anything and that is very personal . I don't want personal pictures , I want fidelity picture this is one of the reason I love my Ex1 oled rear screen I can actually match the exposure / white balance etc on the spot looking at both my reference and my screen so that they match . The rear screen quality to me is vital for this purpose .

For printing I use a selphy 6"x4" CP800 which give nice colors as it is thermal sublimation . I only print the ones I really like most of the rest stays on the computer where I like to zoom in details for things like screws positions on an assembly etc so yes I like details :) .

I don't do posters if that's your point but I wouldn't think you need to print posters to justify the buy of any recent entry level DSLR that has more than 12mpixels .

I'm very sorry to sound skeptical sometimes but I really don't see the setting I don't understand in the D50 . It is a very simple camera . Not much you can do with it or go wrong .

There's 5 settings on the camera and that's it : sharpness , tone composition , color space , saturation and hue adjustment . Apart from the standard iso , raw , white balance , exposure , NR (always off) and the camera physical settings , aperture , focal length and shutter speed . I don't really see what I'm missing :( .

Thanks again it is very interesting :)
 
Shannow said:
thanks a lot :)

Don't worry , I did tweaked every setting possible imaginable on the D50 without success ... At the time I posted all this problem on a french forum (I'm french) and I took hundreds of shots with different parameters of the same painting without success ( literally one step per setting at a time) .

I'm sure skill (I personally would call it knowledge rather than skill) is important but if I have to spend 2hours on LR (which incidently I did) to put things right (which was unsuccessful because when I got the red tone more or less ok the rest wasn't ...)
Click to expand...
I see now....not skin tone but color accuracy....for that simply use custom WB as I did here (perfect but done using a WB card)...not sure the D50 can do that but the D5100 certainly can and it is a very quick and a fast thing. You can even store for later under same light.




Shannow said:
Pastel gives colors are way way brighter than many things in real life because it's almost pure pigments . It's very difficult to get it right . Here's a scanned sample I did :



here a sample of the problem at the time :



I made a little sample to show the scanned (very close to reality) versus the D50 at the best .
The little rectangular box is the proper color .

I'm very suspicious of LR when people tweak the picture so much without the reference (the actual object you are shooting) . You can't memories true colors like this IMO. It is very much more to do with tastes than anything and that is very personal . I don't want personal pictures , I want fidelity picture this is one of the reason I love my Ex1 oled rear screen I can actually match the exposure / white balance etc on the spot looking at both my reference and my screen so that they match . The rear screen quality to me is vital for this purpose .
Click to expand...
Custom ("pre") WB solves all that...I actually keep a small WB card with me now...only takes a sec to set
Shannow said:
There's 5 settings on the camera and that's it : sharpness , tone composition , color space , saturation and hue adjustment . Apart from the standard iso , raw , white balance , exposure , NR (always off) and the camera physical settings , aperture , focal length and shutter speed . I don't really see what I'm missing :( .
Click to expand...
For color accuracy you have to have perfect WB. With the D50 you would shoot raw and set it with a card in one scene then batch process that setting to the others. In any case, I get perfect color accuracy with the D7000 (D5100 same I presume) but not with default settings and not without getting WB perfect. Good Luck, the D5100 is certainly capable of meeting your needs.
 
Thanks again for all the help .

I went to the shop yesterday and they had the D5100 which I asked to hold to have a feel with the 50mm 1.8g which is very close in term of size/weight/quality to the 35mm 1.8 and the whole felt incredibly good , light ,compact and really felt quality ! The battery wasn't in unfortunaly so it will be a bit heavier than that but still felt very good . I like the feel of quality of the unit I was astonished how pro it made it look , it certainly changes from the first standard 18-55 kit I have :) .

I think what I'll do is first order this week end the 35mm 1.8g + 85mm 1.4 Samyang play with the D50 and next month perhaps the D5100 depending on how it goes on ;) ...

For the 85mm Samyang the liveview "focusing zoom help " thingy is going to be a great help as it hasn't got AF .

For the white balance , I did make a lot of shots in raw and still got that over saturated red . Normaly the raw shouldn't take the white balance nor any picture settings of the camera but still that red is too intense to distinguish any subtility .
 
Probably of topic a little ... but it's to do with colors on the D50 ...

I tried a few shots which I printed on my new CP800 Selphy printer and they have this reddish color to them all as if you had put the wrong white balance in a tungsten light condition ...

When I print my samsung ex1 files there's no problem at all .

For the D50 I tried everything ...
All pictures were RAW and the proper white balance put in LR 3 .
My attempts :
  • I tried exporting the file . I exported it in Jpeg 100% sRGB . When the jpeg is open I looks good on screen no problem . Gray's and colors are respected . When I print it is dark and reddish (both on a sd-> printer and Computer-> printer) .
  • I tried the same thing with adobe RGB no luck either
  • I tried to print from LR 3.6 No luck .
  • I tried with the canon printer wizard thingy .No luck
then Dowloaded a better ICC :
  • I tried to export the jpeg with the proper ICC . Color looked dull and yellowish but could be the correction it needs to print properly . I tried sd-> printer and Computer-> printer . No luck . The same result but duller .
  • I tried printing from LR 3.6 using the ICC and not the managed by the printer . No luck . The same result as the jpeg .
  • I tried through the picture viewer with and without the ICC set in the color management of Windows 7 . No luck in either case .
  • Tried to put the exposure higher in LR as the picture was dark anyway , perhaps the printer has a tough job in darker shades ... but no . No luck either .
I don't have any problem with the EX1 but it doesn't make any sense that the D50 does especialy as I have set everything up manually .

When I check both jpeg files (the ex1 come from the camera the D50 come from .nef export in LR) they both have a 24bit color but the D50 color representation is empty whereas the Ex1 is marked as sRGB .

But still scratching my head as the D50 output file is sRGB to from th setting I gave it and both look okay on two of my screens .

Any idea what's wrong with the D50 jpeg ? Something is not understanding the color somewhere it's obvious but what is it :(

Many thanks again
 
I just tested it with proper white balance on the D50 instead of relying on the raw and then work with LR . Basically just using LR as a export tool nef-> jpeg and guess what ... No luck still red . Even the blue glow of the screen light on the couch I took a shot of to test is definitively red and not even remotely close to a blue .

Double check to properties of both file from the D50 and the EX1 and they are identical .

I'm really baffled with this problem ... the jpeg looks great on irfan and other programs but ,no matter what, when I print it has incorrect colors . At the moment the D50 files a unprintable :( .
 
Shannow said:
... the jpeg looks great on irfan and other programs but ,no matter what, when I print it has incorrect colors .
Click to expand...
This can only mean that either your monitor is not properly calibrated, or your printers are not properly calibrated, or both.
 
Thank you . Well I tried converting the raw in DxO , then print it and I had still this problem although I've made it look better with DxO settings . I must say I really like DxO more than LR . It is much more userfriendly to me . I like it it's logical .

Anyway took shots of my lathe crudely making a shot without much red in it for the D50 . Printed it and no problem . Very good colors , a little vivid perhaps compared with to the screen .

True that my screens aren't calibrated but both my TV and my laptop screen (led) show the same color perception there about , and I always set my color to warm if I can so it should increase the problem of the reds on screen .

I think what I'm hitting is just the printer that has it's limit especially in the brown/orange/grayish tones because when I shoot anything else with my D50 it's great .

thank you again
 
toomanycanons said:
Just buy a D5100 and learn how to use it. It's a great camera. At least, I think so.
Click to expand...
Agreed. I love mine, I take it out more than my D700.

--
Rens

There are optimists and there are realists
 
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